Chapter Thirty
Teague
Saturday night. The bar is half-full and the playlist is doing its job and I'm behind the counter in the rhythm I've built over three years of Saturdays: pour, wipe, pour, check the room, pour.
The neon is cycling blue-pink-blue. Jeff is on his stool with his Pbr.
The pool table has two college kids working through a game of eight-ball that's going to take them another hour because neither of them can bank a shot.
Normal Saturday. Anthem doing what Anthem does.
The contract is still in the office drawer.
Carl hasn't called in two months. He's in Tampa with his sister and the last I heard she was doing better and he was "thinking about next steps," which could mean anything from selling to coming back to staying in Tampa forever.
The number I need is in the savings account, has been for weeks.
I haven't told Carl because Carl hasn't asked and because the conversation that turns Anthem from his bar to my bar is a conversation I've been circling for months, getting closer each lap, and I'm almost there.
Almost. Not yet. There's a difference between almost and not yet and I've been living in it since February, since Carl stopped pouring drinks and left me the keys and the playlist and the contract and the faith that I'd take care of the thing he built.
I've taken care of it. I've done more than take care of it.
I've made it mine in every way except the one that's on paper.
The door opens. Zoe.
She's got her jacket on and her bag over her shoulder and she's moving through the room with purpose, not her usual full-broadcast entrance where she greets every surface and person between the door and her stool.
Tonight she's aimed. Walking toward me with her hand in her jacket pocket holding something and her face carrying an expression I recognize from the morning she told Cap she wanted a chance: certain. Decided. Done deliberating.
She sits on her stool. Puts her bag on the hook. Keeps her hand in her pocket.
"Hey," I say.
"Missed you today."
Smiling, I nod back to her. "Missed you too." I start making her mule. Ginger beer, vodka, lime, copper mug. The recipe is automatic now, muscle memory, and I set it in front of her and she wraps one hand around it and keeps the other in her pocket.
"How was the rally?"
"Amazing. Three hundred people. Speeches, a march, empanadas." She takes a sip. Then she takes her hand out of her pocket.
She's holding a patch.
It's small. Rectangular. Royal blue with white embroidery, the stitching tight and clean. She holds it flat on her palm and extends it across the bar toward me and I look at it and read the words.
NO BORDERS ON COMPASSION.
"I got this for you," she says. "At the rally. A woman was selling them. Handmade. All the money goes to an immigrant families fund."
I look at the patch. I don't pick it up yet. I look at it sitting on Zoe's palm, blue and white, small enough to fit between two others on the jacket, and the words are right in a way that I feel in my sternum, in the place where the things I care about live but don't always get named.
No borders on compassion. That's the bar. That's Anthem. Whoever walks through the door gets a drink and a stool and music and I don't ask where they came from or where they're going because the bar is a place and the place is enough.
"Zoe."
"You don't have to put it on right now. Or ever. It's yours. Do what you want with it."
I pick it up. The embroidery is raised under my fingertips, the thread tight against the fabric, handmade by a woman Zoe talked to at a rally I wasn't at. Someone Zoe met today made this with her hands and Zoe held it and thought of me and bought it and carried it here and now it's in my hands.
"It's good," I say.
"Yeah?"
"It's going on the jacket."
Her face. I've seen Zoe Kimball's face do a hundred things in the weeks I've known her.
I've seen it go fast and bright and loud and proud and scared and sleepy and pressed into my pillow at three AM.
But this face, the one she makes when I accept something she's offering without deflection or delay, is my favorite.
It's the face she made when I said "girlfriend" in the locker room.
When I said "I love you" in the bar. When I handed her my key without ceremony.
It's the face of a person who keeps reaching for me and keeps finding me there.
"I also started a collection," she says.
I'm proud of her. "Did you really?"
"Patches. My own. I bought four today." She reaches into her bag and pulls out her pencil case. She unzips it and spreads it open on the bar.
Four patches inside. A rainbow flag. A fist holding a flower. A small square that says PROTECT EACH OTHER. A round one with a flame, red and orange.
"This is my jacket," she says. "My version. I'm going to add to it. Every rally, every show, every place I stand for something. And I'm going to carry it with me."
I look at the pencil case. Pink. Fabric. Zipper. Four patches that weigh almost nothing and mean everything.
"A pink pencil case," I say.
"It works." She doesn't sound defensive, she sounds happy.
"Not a jacket."
Zoe shrugs. "I don't need a jacket. I need something that's mine."
I pick up the flame patch. Red and orange, round, the size of a silver dollar. It looks like it belongs on turnout gear. It looks like it belongs on Zoe.
"This one's good," I say.
"That one's my favorite."
I put it back. She zips the case and puts it in her bag and it disappears, her collection, her record, her portable history of the person she's becoming. Different container. Same function. My jacket, Zoe's pencil case.
She's not becoming me. She's becoming herself with the parts of me she wants to keep.
"Okay," I say. "Stay here. Watch the bar."
"What?"
"Watch the bar. Pour Jeff another Pbr if he finishes. Don't touch the playlist."
She slowly blinks at me like I'm speaking another language and she's trying to keep up. "Where are you going?"
"To sew."
I take the patch and go to the office. The office is small: a desk, a chair, Carl's filing cabinet, the safe, the contract in the top drawer.
There's a sewing kit in the bottom drawer that I keep there for jacket repairs because patches fray and leather pulls and the jacket needs maintenance the way anything that matters needs maintenance.
I sit at the desk. Thread the needle. Black thread, because the jacket is black and the stitches should disappear into the leather, holding the patch in place without calling attention to the mechanics. The mechanics aren't the point. The position is.
I lay the jacket flat on the desk. The patches face up: BLM on the left chest. Trans rights below it.
Kids over guns on the right shoulder. Eat the rich on the back, center.
No more billionaires below it, slightly left.
Each one placed years ago, stitched in whatever apartment I was living in at the time with whatever thread I had, and they've stayed because I made them stay.
The new patch. Blue. White embroidery. NO BORDERS ON COMPASSION.
I place it on the right chest, below the shoulder seam, across from BLM.
It sits there and I look at it and adjust it a quarter inch down and look again and the placement is right.
It's right because it's new, the only patch on this jacket that I didn't buy myself, the only one that came from someone else's hands, and it belongs where I can see it.
I sew. Small stitches, tight, pulling the thread through the leather with the steady pressure that keeps the patch flat against the surface. The needle is thin and the leather is thick and each stitch takes effort, which is how it should be. Things that stay require effort.
It takes ten minutes. I finish, knot the thread, cut it, check the edges. The patch is secure. It's not going anywhere.
I put the jacket on. The new patch settles into place against my chest, and I can feel it there, the slight raised edge of the embroidery, a new weight in a familiar landscape.
The jacket has changed. It's still mine but it has Zoe in it now, a piece of a Saturday rally carried through a door and handed across a bar and sewn into leather with black thread.
I walk back out. Zoe is behind the bar. She's not pouring anything.
She's leaning on the counter talking to Jeff, who is telling her about Patton, the golden retriever, and she's listening with her whole face the way she listens to everything, like Jeff's golden retriever is the most important topic in the world.
She sees me. Her eyes go to the jacket. To the right chest. To the blue patch, new and bright against the old leather.
"You sewed it on."
"I said I was going to."
"Right now. You sewed it on right now."
I smirk. "The sewing kit is in the office. It took ten minutes."
She comes around the bar. She stands in front of me and she reaches out and touches the patch with her fingertips, tracing the embroidery, reading the words through her skin.
"It looks right," she says.
"That's because it is."
She looks up at me. I look at her. The bar is half-full and the neon is going and Jeff is watching and the college kids have finally sunk a shot and somewhere in Zoe's bag is a pink pencil case with four patches in it, and on my jacket is a fifth, blue and white, and the distance between her collection and mine is the distance between a pencil case and a leather jacket, which is nothing.
Which is everything. Which is the exact amount of space between two people who are different in all the ways that don't matter and the same in the one way that does.