Chapter 30 Dante
I’m at the gate at the Miami airport, watching the board, and the board watches me back — DELAYED, then DELAYED again, while a line of thunderstorms parks itself over the eastern Gulf and refuses to move.
Dante: Delayed again! The storm is parked on the Gulf.
Levi: sky’s black here too. house is fine. Want me to check the humidity?
Dante: Please.
Levi: 61.
Dante: 61 is high.
Levi: Not shutting the door.
Dante: Won’t ask you to.
I know how to work a delay. Four hours on the concourse with Jonathan’s packet open on my knees, texting Levi between pages. We board mid-afternoon, sit on the tarmac another hour, and I land in Panama City Beach with the day spent and nothing to show for it but a stiff neck.
I’d had a plan in mind for this evening. Swing by the house on the way to the apartment. Spend ten minutes on the house, the rest of it not about the house at all. The storm ate the evening.
Dante: Landed. Too late to come by. Tomorrow is wall to wall.
Levi: Go sleep. You need to look like a million bucks tomorrow. Or 20 million.
Thursday pays Wednesday’s bill. Every appointment the storm knocked down gets back up at once. The Birmingham couple, back for the three listings I promised them, still litigating the bunk room. Two listing calls I couldn’t push twice. The notary, who can take me at four or not at all this week.
I run the coast end to end and I’m still returning calls at nine from the apartment. It’s the kind of day I usually thrive in, and it doesn’t leave one minute standing.
Dante: Day never stopped. Eating pernil cold off the foil.
Levi’s reply takes two hours.
Levi: sounds right.
Two words, two hours. I tell myself it’s late and he’s tired, and I mostly believe it.
Friday, Jonathan calls before eight. His client’s stalling on the second look, and Jonathan and I both know what the stall is, because we’ve both run it.
It isn’t cold feet. He’s walked that house twice himself, and she came off her first tour saying “very close,” which from a woman who views nothing that needs explaining is practically a ring on it.
She’s already hung her clothes in those closets.
The delay is the play — hold the walkthrough hostage, let the seller sweat a silent weekend, then come in under ask while everybody’s relieved she came back at all.
Jonathan would never say the word negotiation out loud; his people don’t.
He says “she’s in no hurry, son,” in a drawl that means bring your seller a number conversation, and we understand each other completely.
So there’s no showing this weekend. There’s a price dance, and the first rule of the dance is you don’t look eager.
I can do that better than anyone on this coast.
Which changes the errand. The house still needs its ten minutes of my time — the air handlers, the humidity meter — but now there’s news worth carrying, and the news is for Levi. Don’t worry about anyone walking through this weekend.
I’ve got a window between a noon client and calls I need to make later, and I point it at the beach.
At the light on 30A I pull up his text thread — call first if you head this way, I need to straighten up the place — and my thumb hovers over it, and I put the phone back in the cup holder, because the only reason he gave me for the warning is the one I’m driving out there to cancel.
There’s nothing to straighten up for. Ten minutes, the good news, gone.
The other reason I don’t text, the one I don’t let finish before the light turns green, is that it’s been five days, and news that fits in one line is a poor excuse to knock on a man’s door.
It’s also the only excuse I’ve got, and I’m not risking a don’t bother by sending it ahead of me.
I hit the gate code and park in the empty drive, same as all week. I’m already running the rest of the day in my head.
Side door, lockbox. I let myself in.
And I walk straight into it.
There’s a man I’ve never seen standing in the middle of the house. Suit, no tie, fifties maybe, soft in the middle. The kind of soft that spent its career behind a desk making other people do the lifting. He’s leaning over the couch.
No, he’s leaning over Levi, who sits on the edge of it with his shoulders gone in, hands flat on his knees, head down. Taking it. Small. The exact size I’ve watched him shrink into all week without once seeing what causes it.
And here’s the cause. A man standing over him, screaming into the top of his bowed head.
For half a breath the picture won’t focus. Levi’s face is wrong. The beard gone, the jaw bare, the hair cut to someone else’s idea of him. A stranger wearing his eyes. Then the man’s screaming rolls over the thought and drowns it.
“— everywhere, do you understand me, it is everywhere, every phone in this country, do you have the first idea what you’ve done —” The suit has a phone in his fist, shaking it at Levi’s lowered head.
“Years. Years of work and you hand it away for — what, a bonfire? You think I can put this back in the —”
One second I’m in the doorway. The next I’m across the room with no floor in between. What comes out of me isn’t words at first. It’s a roar, a sound I didn’t know I kept anywhere.
“Get the fuck off him!” I’ve got a fist in his shirt and I haul him away from Levi. He comes off weightless. I run him backward into the wall by the window, hard enough that a lamp goes over somewhere and the phone jumps out of his fist. My face is in his face.
“Don’t you touch him. You don’t — who the hell do you think you are?
” None of it sounds like me. The rage gets to the end of the English before I do, and what comes out the far side isn’t English at all.
“Hijo de puta.” It comes out in my father’s voice.
Thirty years of Coral Gables gone in one sentence, and Hialeah standing there in its place.
He’s pinned and I’m shaking with fury, with how much of me wants to hit him. My arm has gone tight with it.
Then the other part of me catches up. There’s a wall under this man’s spine and my hand twisted in his collar, and there’s a problem with that.
A legal charge.
A charge takes my real estate license. It takes the listing, the name on the sign, every clean thing I ever built.
It doesn’t take my mother’s table — nothing takes that — but it takes the businessman I’ve been bringing to it.
If I do what I want to do, I don’t get to keep being the man I’ve worked so hard to become.
My father worked two jobs for decades to carry us out of Hialeah and into Coral Gables, and nobody swings that away in one afternoon. The kid from Hialeah wants to swing. The man I made knows exactly what swinging costs me.
The two of them lock up against each other with the suit hanging between us, and I hold there, breathing like a bull.
Not hitting him. Not letting him go.
The guy in the suit isn’t scared. That nearly tips it. He’s outraged. Gone red, sputtering. He can’t compute this is happening to him.
“Get your hands — do you have any idea —” He twists, gets a look at me, head to foot, and his lip curls at what he finds. “What are you? A fanboy?”
I don’t know what he means. Fanboy of what? A soft, rich prick who thinks the world should know his face, sneering at the local who dared put a hand on him. My arm presses a half-inch harder into his chest.
“Freddie, stop it!”
Levi’s voice, off the couch, up and cracking. The name goes through me.
Freddie.
This is fucking Freddie. The name on the screen at ten o’clock. I stood on a terrace and texted him “good,” twice, from Levi’s phone.
Now here is his face. Red and sputtering under my arm. I helped him. I ran his leash for an afternoon and called it a favor to Levi.
“Get off him.” Levi’s between us now, both hands up. He’s not looking at Freddie. He’s looking at me, with a face I’ve never seen on him. Close to terror, and it’s pointed at me. “Dante. Let go. You need to leave.”
I don’t move. My arm’s still across the suit.
“Dante. Leave.” Harder this time. Cold. He has never once been cold with me. “Now. This isn’t — you don’t have any part in this. Go.”
It hits the two halves of me where they’re still deadlocked, and it tips the scale. Not toward the swing. Toward the door. Without meaning to, he reaches into the worst version of me and pulls me back from it.
I don’t feel saved. I feel sided against.
And he’s standing here white-faced telling me to get out. Choosing Freddie over me. Telling me to get out of my own listing again.
I let go of Freddie. He straightens his jacket with shaking hands and says words I don’t hear over the blood in my ears.
I look at Levi one more time. The bare jaw, the stranger’s haircut, the terror aimed the wrong way. I turn and I go without a word. Out the door. Down the white drive, into the car, and my hands are shaking on the wheel.
I sit there, breathing hard. I have never in my adult life done what I just did. It half-scared me how little of me was left to stop it.
My phone’s going off in the cup holder. Has been for a while, I realize. Buzzing and buzzing. Benji’s name, then a number, then Benji again. I don’t touch it. Whatever it is, it’s not bigger than this.
I back out hard and point toward the Roadhouse. I need a beer and my best friend who’ll tell me I’m not crazy.
If I keep sitting in this driveway, I’ll go back in there and finish what I can’t afford to finish.