Chapter 37 Levi
The apartment’s a relief after the teenage mob and the car. Dante hands me a bottle of water when we step inside.
My breathing’s mine again. Wrung out, but mine.
I drink half the bottle standing in his little kitchen and my legs tell me they need a minute, so I head down the hall to splash some water on my face and put myself back together.
Every door in the apartment stands open, same as always. He’s never once made me ask for that. I’m passing the second bedroom when I see it, through the open doorway, in the light spilling down the hall.
The corner’s bare. The sleeping bags are gone. Folded up and put away, or thrown out. I don’t know which, and I stand there in the hall telling myself it could mean nothing. He was gone a few days. Out of town. Maybe he straightened up.
Except Dante doesn’t do things for no reason. And the burner’s been dark for two days. I’ve been telling myself a story about that too. He’s busy, he hates country music, he doesn’t live on the internet, maybe the flyers never made it to whatever corner of this coast he’s been working.
I’ve been telling it to myself the way you whistle past a graveyard. The bare corner finishes the story off. You don’t take up a man’s bed unless you’ve decided he’s not coming back to it. Or unless you found out he never needed it in the first place.
I go on to the bathroom, run the cold water and splash my face. The man in the mirror over the sink is Lee Streeter, bare-jawed, famous, dripping on Dante’s clean counter. I dry my face on my shirt instead of his towel. It feels like the least I can do.
When I come out, Dante’s leaning back against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, waiting on me. There’s nothing hot in his face. That’s what I notice first. Whatever’s in him tonight has been sitting long enough to go still, and still is worse with Dante.
“Why did you think those kids were there for you, Levi?” he asks. “Why would they be?”
And that’s it.
His tone tells me everything the burner phone didn’t.
“You know,” I say. It’s not what I meant to say. It’s just what comes out.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
No anger behind his words, and they land harder than shouting would’ve. He’s gone cold on me. Heat would mean he might still be feeling an emotion of some kind. Cold means it’s all gone.
I stand in his kitchen and I give him the answer. The one I’ve wanted to give since I sent that text to him. I finally got the room I wanted, him right in front of me, and it doesn’t feel like anything I asked for.
“My name’s Levi. That’s true. It’s the name I was born with, the one my mother gave me.
Lee Streeter’s the stage name. That’s the one they sell.
” He doesn’t move. “I was going to tell you. I’d decided to do it.
This weekend, in person, once your buyer was through and you had an hour that wasn’t spoken for.
I didn’t want to mess up your sale and cause you more trouble than I already have.
I wanted to say it to your face and stand there and take whatever came back.
Then that girl’s video went up from the bonfire, and Freddie came through the door screaming.
You walked into the middle of it, and the world got to you before I did. ”
“You threw me out,” he says. “You told me to leave. You stood there and told me I didn’t have any part in it.”
“I know what that looked like.” This is the one I’ve been carrying around since it happened.
“You had Freddie against a wall. Another minute of that and he starts asking who you are. Freddie runs down everybody who gets near me. If he’d found out you were the agent selling the house out from under his rental, he’d have had you managed by Monday.
The listing, your name, all of it. The only way to get him off you was to make you nothing in his eyes.
A property guy. Nobody. I told him that’s what you are.
I said it on purpose and I’d say it again to keep his hands out of your life.
He has power and he doesn’t hesitate to use it to hurt people. ”
He takes that in without his face changing. I can’t tell if it lands or slides off.
“I never lied to you about the money,” I say, because I’m done leaving things out.
Somewhere between the back seat and his kitchen I decided the not-telling is the only crime I’ll cop to, and I’m not committing it twice.
“I told you the credit cards were tracked. I told you I couldn’t touch a dime without it pinging somebody in another state.
True, all of it. The only thing I ever asked you to pay for was my supper and drinks, that one night, and I told you why. Everything else you did on your own.”
“You let me do those things.”
There’s no give in him, none, and I understand I’m facing the exact scenario I dreaded. An honest hand doesn’t stand a chance here. I knew this would happen. It’s terrible to be right. All I can do is just keep telling the truth.
“I should’ve told you. That’s what I did wrong.
The not-telling. Every day I didn’t say it, I told myself I was buying one more day of being somebody you might like.
I’ve never had that in my life, and I couldn’t make myself give it up.
It was selfish and I’m paying for it. I was holding on to time as long as I could.
That’s the confession. It’s not pretty, but it’s honest.”
He doesn’t say anything. Then he turns to the sink, sets his hands on the edge of it, and says it with his back to me.
“You know what the worst part is, for me? It’s not your name.
” He stays level. “I took you to the Roadhouse. I sat you down with Tex. With Sheila. With Stormy. I walked you into the one place here that’s mine, and I put you at a table with my people.
And I told them, just by bringing you, that you were good.
That you could be one of us. And they took you in right away.
Tex liked you. I could tell. Stormy spent a day writing up a special menu for you.
Sheila planned out an entire fourteen-course event.
And you let them—” it cracks off the word and comes back quieter “—you let them sit there liking a man who doesn’t exist.”
I stand there and take it. Underneath taking it, some part of me that’s gotten sharper is trying to work out a question.
Because this is too big. I know betrayal and I know embarrassment, and I’ve watched men get angry for a hundred reasons since I was old enough to duck.
The size of this though, the crack in his voice over somebody he could’ve just been done with.
This is bigger than me embarrassing him at the bar.
Another emotion is under the hurt, driving it, and he isn’t saying it and maybe can’t.
“I do exist,” I say. “The guy who slept on your floor, that’s not a costume, Dante. I’m that guy. Me. Levi. Standing right here. The costume’s the other one. Lee Streeter is a performance. He’s not me. You know me.”
He doesn’t answer that. He asks another question instead, still at the sink, not even able to look at me.
“How long have you been with this Freddie? What is he to you?”
“He’s my manager. That’s all.” And then, because I’m done leaving things out, I give him the rest of it. “My dad signed me over to him when I was seventeen.”
That turns him around. “Seventeen?”
“Yes.”
I can see him fighting to keep hold of the mad and not managing it, his jaw working. The fact I was seventeen. A kid signed over by his own father. Owned for eight years. You can’t keep your grievance pure against that. It leaks.
“How does a father—” He stops. Starts over, harder, like he’s mad at the question for softening him. “You’re a grown man now, Levi. You’re not seventeen anymore. You let him control your own money, your own phone, and you just — why? Why would you let that happen?”
“I know.” It’s all I’ve got and it’s true. “You’re right. It’s all I knew.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m not doing anything. You’re right. I should’ve told you. And I should’ve stood up to him. You’re right about every part of it.”
I’ve got no argument. He hasn’t said one wrong thing.
And I watch the fight go out of him. There’s nothing to push against. He’s swinging and I’m not blocking.
I’m just standing here agreeing, owning all of it, and you can’t fight somebody who keeps telling you you’re right.
It takes the wood out from under the flame.
“Stop saying that I’m right.”
“It’s true, though. What should I say?”
He’s close to me now. I don’t know when that happened. Somewhere in the swinging-and-not-blocking we ended up a foot apart in his little kitchen. Whatever he’s been holding down all night is right here in the eighteen inches between us, and so is whatever is underneath, and they’re both crackling.
His breath’s gone. Mine’s gone. An hour ago, he held my head in his lap in a parking lot and ran his fingers through my hair while I came apart.
The memory of it is in the room with us.
I reach for him, for his waist, to close the foot of air, to put my hand on the one solid part of him I can reach.
“No. I can’t.” He steps back, fast, before my fingers reach him, and my hand closes on nothing. Hand up, half between us, like he’s stopping himself more than me. “I can’t do this. I can’t — no.”
He turns and goes down the little hall to his room and shuts the door.
He shut the fucking door.
That one’s on purpose, or near enough. He knows I can’t be in a closed-up room. Knows I need the door open, the sightline, a way out. He breathed me through the floor once, knowing it.
And he turned it against me.
In his hurt he reached for the one thing he knows I need and he shut it. For Dante to do that says a lot. He used the thing he learned about me to get a hit in below the belt.
Damn, that stings.
I stand in the hall and feel it. I don’t blame him. He’s hurt, and he used what he had to gut me back. I deserve it. He tried to be good to me and I lied to him.
I go to the little room with boxes and I lie down on the floor. No double sleeping bags this time. No, sir. Just the thin carpet and the shut door down the hall.
This is the way it goes. Back to the floor. Which is worse than the floor I started on, because back then I didn’t know any better. Now I know what the bed he made for me felt like and exactly whose fault it is that it’s gone.
I lie there and I take it.
I’ve taken much worse.
And then, maybe ten minutes later, I hear his door. Footsteps in the hall. I don’t move. And something drops to the carpet next to my head. He stands over me and then goes back down the hall. I hear the door again. But not the latch this time. It doesn’t click. He’s left it open.
I reach for whatever he dropped. It’s his pillow.
His, the one off his own bed, the one that smells like him, like his soap and the back of his neck.
He didn’t say a word. He just put it down next to my head and left the door open behind him, headed back to a bed he’s now sleeping on without a pillow.
I lie there and I try to figure out what it means, if anything.
He was hurt enough to shut the door, and he couldn’t hold it ten minutes.
The same hands that took the sleeping bags up gave me the pillow off his own bed, and the same arm that shut that door came back and opened it.
He gave me back the way out, without a word.
Because there’s still some part of him that can’t be as mad as the rest of him has every right to be.
Dante hasn’t forgiven me. I know that. Nothing’s fixed. He’s going to wake up still knowing what I am, and I’m going to wake up still being it.
Instead of putting my head on it, I pull his pillow close against my chest where I can hold it tight.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not even a start.
But I’ve built songs out of less than this, and I know how to start small.