8. Levi
LEVI
Saturday afternoon I have two beers before I’ve showered, standing in my own kitchen at four o’clock, and I tell myself it’s party nerves. Normal. Guy’s allowed a beer before a hundred people show up to look at him.
It’s got nothing to do with who’s setting up lighting rigs in the clubhouse right now. Nothing at all.
The first beer goes down while I’m ironing the black shirt, which is a thing I apparently do now—iron.
Josie’s got opinions about the black shirt, and today of all days her opinions run the house, so I’m a man standing at an ironing board at four o’clock drinking a beer and pressing a collar like my mother used to, and the second beer happens somewhere in there without me exactly authorizing it, and when I catch myself opening the fridge for a third I stand there in the cold air a second and shut the door instead. Pace it. Long night ahead. Longest.
Josie’s at Dot’s getting her hair done—women’s whole afternoon, apparently, Casey and Dot and half the old ladies making a thing of it.
She left at one, kissed me at the door, already vibrating.
She’s been vibrating for days about this party, some current running under her I can’t source, checking her phone, rehearsing something in the bathroom mirror—I heard her twice, caught the murmur through the door, couldn’t make words out.
Probably a toast. Probably she’s cooked up some toast for me in front of everybody and I’ll have to stand there and take it and not cry in front of the club like a man whose whole chest has been a stripped bolt for three weeks.
Whatever it is, she’s lit up about it. So I iron the shirt.
I head over early to help with tables like I said I would.
Tucker’s truck’s not there yet. Reyes is out back messing with the smoker—I can smell it from the lot, twelve hours of brisket, and any other Saturday that smell is happiness itself—and I stop out there first, because Reyes at a smoker is the closest thing this club has to a chapel and you pay your respects.
“Big night.” He doesn’t look up from the firebox. “Three years. You nervous?”
“It’s a party, not a court date.”
“Mm.” He shifts a coal with the poker, takes his time, the way Reyes takes his time when he’s deciding how much to say.
“My old man was married forty-two years. You know what he told me once? He said the good ones make you nervous the whole time. Little bit. Like weather you’re respectful of.
” He looks up at me then, dark eyes steady under the smoke. “You look respectful today, hermano.”
“It’s the brisket. I’m moved.”
He snorts and waves me off with the poker, and I head inside with my chest doing something I don’t examine.
And the main room, when I walk into it, is empty except for exactly one person, up on a stepladder under the beams, hanging string lights.
Marley.
Three weeks and two days, and this is the first time I’ve been in a room with her.
She looks the same as she did in the motel parking lot.
That’s the worst part—some part of me expected her to look different, marked somehow, the way I feel marked.
She just looks like Marley. Sneakers and a camera strap and eighteen feet of string lights looped over one arm.
“Oh good, someone tall,” she says, not even turning around all the way. Like it’s nothing. Like we’re nothing, which—we are, that’s exactly what we’re supposed to be. “Hold the ladder?”
I don’t hold the ladder. I stand about ten feet away and I say, “Where you want the tables?” and it comes out flat and hard, and she looks at me for a second and comes down the ladder.
“They’re stacked by the wall,” she says. “I don’t know, ask Dot. That’s not my department.”
“Right.”
I get a table. Carry it to roughly the middle of the room like an idiot, no idea where it goes, just needing forty pounds of something in my hands.
Behind me I hear her come off the last ladder rung, and the room is very, very quiet, and it’s just us, and there is no version of this minute I ever wanted to happen.
“Levi.”
“Don’t.” I set the table down. Don’t turn around.
“I’m not—Jesus. Relax. I’m not doing anything.” Sneakers on the concrete behind me, coming down off the ladder, coming closer—not close, ten feet, a nothing distance, a deniable distance, everything about her is deniable distances. “I’m hanging lights. I was hired. This is what hired looks like.”
“Then hang ’em.”
“You could say hi, you know. Like a person. We’re gonna be in the same room for six hours tonight, you planning to route around me like furniture the whole time?
People notice that. That’s the thing you don’t seem to get—normal is invisible.
You acting like I’m a downed power line, that’s what gets noticed. ”
She’s not wrong, which is its own kind of infuriating, coming from her, today. I stare at the far wall where the dartboard’s hung crooked since New Year’s.
A beat. And then, quieter, in a voice that isn’t the light professional one she gave the ladder: “You look happy. Good. I mean that.”
And there’s a warmth in it that isn’t quite friendly and isn’t quite anything else either—nothing I could repeat to anybody and have it sound like what it felt like. That’s her thing, I’m learning. Everything deniable. Everything sized to pass through a door labeled harmless.
I turn around. She’s just looking at me. And I open my mouth with no plan for what’s coming out of it—something, anything, a door slamming, three weeks late?—
—and the front doors bang open and Tucker comes through walking backward, hauling the first of about forty folding chairs, hollering, “Little help? Chairs ain’t gonna carry themselves, this ain’t a union shop?—“
I have never in my life been so glad to see Tucker’s ugly face.
“On it,” I say, already moving, and I grab the other end of the chair rack like it’s a rope somebody threw me in deep water.
We haul chairs for twenty minutes, then tables, then the keg—Tucker narrating the whole time, some saga about the chair rental guy in Livingston shorting him ten chairs and the negotiation that followed, “so I says to him, buddy, you can count or you can’t”—and I grunt in the right places and keep my back to the back wall the whole time, every trip. Don’t look at her once. Not once.
“You good?” Tucker asks me, somewhere around the second table run. Not looking at me, both of us walking a folding table like a stretcher.
“Yeah. Why.”
“Nothing. You’re quiet.”
“Saving up. Gotta be charming later.”
“Huge ask for you,” he says, and lets it go, because that’s the deal we’ve all got with each other, the whole club, the whole gender: you ask once, you take the answer, you let it go.
And the whole time I can feel it anyway—her back there with her light meters and her tripod, watching me not look. You can feel a thing like that between your shoulder blades, same as you can feel weather coming.
You look happy. Good. I mean that. I keep taking it out and turning it over while I haul furniture, looking for the thread in it, because there’s a thread in it.
Happy like she’s glad. Happy like an accusation.
Happy like an appraisal—like a woman walking a property she used to own, noting what the new people did with the yard.
I set up forty chairs deciding it meant nothing and un-deciding it, and somewhere around chair thirty I land on the only thing I know for sure: whatever it meant, I couldn’t ask.
That’s the cell I built myself three weeks ago.
Any man in this club could’ve walked over there and said what’s that supposed to mean—any man but me.
It sits wrong in my chest the rest of the afternoon and doesn’t move. Not fear exactly. More like the shop, right before something lets go—that half-second where the jack groans, and the car hasn’t slipped yet, and you’re already moving before you know why.