Chapter 72 Levi
I’ve played hundreds of rooms in eight years and I’ve never once been invited into one as myself.
You come in the back. Somebody walks you down a corridor, you go out and do the ninety minutes, and they walk you back up the corridor and put you in a car.
You can work a building for two hours and never learn where its front door is.
Tonight I’ve got a paper plate, a folding chair, and a place card with my name spelled right.
By the time the sun’s down, the first floor of the Roadhouse has turned into the party Benji wanted.
Newspaper down the long tables. A shrimp boil steaming in the middle of every one of them.
Gulf shrimp and corn and potatoes and sausage dumped straight out of the pot onto the paper.
The brisket Big Bertha started in the dark this morning.
Sheila’s slaw, Sheila’s beans, Stormy’s cornbread, Tex’s mama’s banana pudding.
And over all of it the Christmas lights doing exactly what they do.
I find my seat. Table One, between Dante and Stormy. Levi, in Benji’s fancy calligraphy on the card.
Sheila’s margarita machine is whirring against the far wall. She hands the first one of the night to Benji, kisses his cheek, and doesn’t say a word. Benji takes it in both hands like a chalice.
The toasts start early, before anybody’s too far gone.
Tex declines his turn. “I said mine outside during the ceremony,” he says. “I’ll give someone else a turn.”
Then Dante stands with a glass and the room settles. He’s in the black tux and he shaved close for it, and I lose whatever Stormy is saying in my ear.
“At the engagement party, I promised Benji a seven-minute toast,” Dante says, and half the room groans. “I’ve decided to spare you.”
He lets the laugh roll by.
“Seven years ago, Benji told me what he does for a living. He said, ‘I plan love for other people and I make it look like it happened by accident.’ So let me tell you about the day I stopped believing him.
“The first time I ever met Mickey, Benji was on the floor of a hospital room rubbing cream into his feet. Feet Mickey couldn’t feel at the time.
I recognized the cream jar. Two hundred dollars an ounce.
” A sound moves through the room. “In seven years, I have never seen Benji go completely quiet and still. That day I saw him go still. On his knees, on a hospital floor, rubbing cream into Mickey’s feet.
I knew in that moment that he was already gone. ”
He looks at the two of them, the white tux and the black one, Benji’s hand already in Mickey’s.
“I told him something else that same night. I told him to stop waiting. That later was just another word for distance, and distance makes it easy to pretend none of it was ever real.” He lifts his glass.
“Benji doesn’t do waiting. He drove two hundred miles a day until later ran out of road.
Benji spends his whole life making love look like an accident.
Tonight is the only one he never planned. To Benji and Mickey.”
Benji breaks down sobbing into Mickey’s neck. Mickey lifts his glass and gives one cop nod, and the room roars.
Dante sits back down beside me and takes my hand. “Seven years of material,” he says, low, just for me. “I used ninety seconds. Benji’s going to spend the honeymoon wondering what I’m holding.”
“What do you have?”
“Enough for the vow renewal. And the fiftieth. I’m a patient man.”
Stormy has appointed himself minister of music.
He’s got a handwritten set list taped to the jukebox glass and he guards it like a man guarding a moonshine still.
Both grooms handed him playlists. Neither one’s on that glass.
When the plates are cleared, he doesn’t make an announcement.
He thumbs something into the machine, the first song rolls out loud enough to end every conversation in the building, and the floor is open.
Benji pulls Mickey out into the middle of it.
Mickey stays in the chair. Walking Benji down that deck this evening was the most his legs have given him since the shooting, and it emptied the tank.
Stringing a few steps together on a cane is a different job than standing for six hours, and Mickey knows exactly where that line sits.
He takes the reception from the chair and saves what’s left for what counts later.
Benji folds himself sideways across his husband’s lap with both arms around his neck, and Mickey wheels them in slow circles with Benji’s shoes hanging off the footplate. Nobody’s dry. Sheila’s got a new dish towel over her face again.
Mickey’s father is at the next table over from ours, where Sheila set him up with a plate and a sweet tea, his chair angled so he can see everything.
The dementia took most of him a few years back, and it doesn’t hand any of it back once it’s got it.
Some nights he doesn’t know the year. Some nights he doesn’t know the grown man in the wheelchair is the boy he raised.
Tonight he’s somewhere back before all of it, and he seems comfortable there, and his wife stopped correcting him a long time ago on which decade he’s visiting.
She just holds his hand on the tablecloth and goes where he goes.
But he watches the floor, and when Benji spins past in Mickey’s lap the old man leans over to me, and says, “That’s my boy. Fastest boy in Bay County.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “He sure is.”
“Fast as hell,” he says, satisfied, and goes back to his tea.
When the song turns over, Benji goes and collects his mother, a small bright woman who’s spent the evening about three feet off her son.
Then he leans down and takes Mickey’s mother’s hand and pulls her up off her chair at the next table, and he takes both women out onto the floor at once, one on each arm.
He spins the one and then the other, and the two mothers laugh at each other over the top of his head, and Mickey’s father claps along. Half a beat off, delighted, watching his wife dance with the pretty blond boy and not needing to know one thing past the fact that she’s happy.
Then Benji walks them both back to Mickey.
Mickey’s mother takes one of his hands. Benji’s mother takes the other. The two women stand on either side of the chair and hold on, and Benji sets a hand on each of their shoulders behind it, and not one of the four of them says anything, because there’s nothing that needs saying.
Mickey’s got one mother by blood and one by marriage as of sundown, and both of them have him now. The old man watches his wife hold the hand of his son in the wheelchair, and he smiles and claps one more time.
Then Dante stands up and holds his hand out to me.
“I don’t dance,” I tell him, taking it anyway.
“You do now.”
We go out under the lights. He puts a hand at the small of my back like he’s done it a thousand times, and we haven’t, not once. I’ve never danced with another man. He takes the weight of all that and leads me onto the floor.
“Your mother’s watching us,” I tell him.
“My mother’s been watching us since July.” He turns me easily. “She told me on the phone she loved you. She hadn’t even met you yet. She loved the idea and decided the rest was paperwork.”
“That where you get it?”
“Get what?”
“Deciding a thing’s done before anybody’s agreed to it.”
He smiles. “You agreed.”
I did.
The song’s an old one, slow, a record cut before I was born. Usually I’d have the title and the key and the year of it before the second line. Tonight I don’t reach for any of that. It’s just a song, his hand on my back, and the floor solid under both of us. It’s good.
Across the way Dante’s mother has stopped dancing to watch us.
Both hands pressed over her mouth, tears running, the way she’s cried since the ceremony.
She catches me seeing her and she doesn’t wave it off.
She just nods at me, once, like something’s been settled, which in Dante’s family is how it gets done.
Then his sisters arrive. Mirta lifts my hand right off Dante’s shoulder and Clara already has Dante by both of his, and the four of us end up in a knot in the middle of the floor.
I get handed back and forth between two women who have known me a week and dance with me like they raised me.
Dante watches his sisters steal me and doesn’t lift a finger to save me.
“They kept you twenty minutes,” he says when Mirta finally trades me back.
“Felt like five.”
“Twenty. That’s a record. They gave Benji eleven his first year.” He turns me easy. “My mother’s already building Nochebuena around you.”
Sometime during the party Benji’s Aunt Lorraine goes to work.
Benji flew his family up from Miami, and the one everybody warned me about is the aunt.
Benji spent a week of his planning trying to keep her three tables clear of anything in a uniform, because Lorraine at an open bar is a documented event.
She’s in a sundress like every woman here, except Lorraine’s is cut down near to the county line, and Lorraine was not built to be overlooked in it.
Tonight the open bar produced a biker named Tank. Big fella, gray in the beard, a leather cut, a Roadhouse regular. Lorraine found him by the margarita machine an hour ago and hasn’t surfaced since.
And here’s the thing nobody planned for. He likes her.
He’s not humoring her and he’s not scared of her, which I’ve heard is the usual split with Lorraine.
He’s leaned way down to hear her over the machine, and whatever she’s telling him is working, because the man keeps laughing this big slow laugh that shakes the cut, and every time he does she lays a hand flat on his chest like she’s checking it still runs.
Benji clocks it from Mickey’s lap. He freezes, then lights up because his aunt the running gag just walked into the one thing at this wedding he didn’t plan.
“I’ve always said Lorraine’s a catch,” Mickey says, watching it with him. “Looks like Tank caught her.”
“She is,” Benji says, wrecked all over again. “She really is.”
Benji flew more than the aunt up here. There’s a group of his Miami friends on the floor, loud and glittering and three shades better dressed than anybody local.
A few of them have taken on a project for the night.
They’ve decided the bikers are the most magnificent thing they’ve ever seen and they are working shamelessly to get them out on the floor.
It’s slow going. I watch a man in a leather cut who could deadlift a Harley get walked into a line dance by a fella half his size in a sparkly white top, the two of them solemn as deacons.
Benji belongs to Dante’s people too. His sisters have adored Benji for seven years, and every third song one of them peels him off Mickey’s lap and turns him around twice and hands him back.
Then the jukebox comes back up and the night gets loud.
The set list is classic rock wall to wall, and the floor fills with the strangest crowd this county has ever put under one roof.
Half the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, off duty and drinking like it, elbow to elbow with the bikers who hold this bar down the other six nights a week.
Two crowds that spend their working lives on opposite ends of a traffic stop, doing the Wobble together in a barbecue joint at eleven at night, because they all belong to the same two men.
Benji and Dante’s Miami people glitter through the middle of them, and Dante’s mother and sisters run the floor like a family business.
I go over to the jukebox at some point to see what Stormy’s guarding so hard. E-7 has a slip in it, in Stormy’s print. Breathe. My song. The one I played to put it all on the line for Dante, right here, the night I quit being careful. It isn’t cut yet. It will be soon.
The slot behind the glass is empty for now.
Tex pulled Patsy Cline out of a working jukebox for a song that doesn’t exist yet, had Stormy write up the card, and slid it in.
Tex hasn’t said one word to me about it, and I don’t bring it up either.
Stormy just grins and moves the next card up in the line. He lets me stand there and look at it.
Around midnight a slow song comes on, and Stormy does the one thing I haven’t seen take him off that jukebox all night.
He leaves his post, walks straight out across the floor, and holds his hand out to Tex.
Tex sets down the story he’s telling, mid-sentence, for what I’d bet is the first time on record.
The two of them dance close in the middle of all that noise, Tex’s chin leaned down on the top of Stormy’s head, Stormy’s face gone soft in a way I have never caught on it, and the room lets them have it.
Later, when Benji makes his final rounds, Mickey’s father catches his hand as he goes past. Looks up at him a long moment, working on something.
“Are you the one?” he asks. “Mickey’s?”
Benji squeezes his hand gently. “Yes, I’m the one.”
“Good.” He pats Benji’s hand once and lets go. “He waited for you.”
Benji makes it four steps past the table before Stormy hands him a bar napkin for his face without being asked.
I come off the dance floor after midnight with my collar open and my hair a mess.
I drop into the chair next to Dante. Out on the floor Benji’s still in Mickey’s lap and the two of them are spinning through the crowd while everybody claps them around.
Lorraine and Tank have taken it outside to the deck.
Stormy’s back at the jukebox, guarding the list.
Dante slides a water in front of me, not a beer, because he watched me switch two hours ago.
“Having a good night?” he says.
“Great night.”
“Yeah.” He looks out at the floor a moment, at Benji spinning in Mickey’s lap, and whatever he’s thinking, he keeps most of it. “Me too.”
Then he tips his glass toward the two of them. “I checked my jacket for those rings four times tonight. After they were already on their hands.” His eyes come off the floor and land on me. “Benji made me best man because I don’t lose what I’m holding. I don’t plan to start.”
I take that the way he means it.
And it hits me all at once, sitting there with my heart still going hard from the dancing.
I haven’t looked for the door.
Not once. Not walking in, not sitting down, not out on that deck this evening with my back to a deck full of people I couldn’t see.
Years of knowing every exit in every building before I knew who I was talking to.
A lifetime before that. I know this bar’s doors by heart.
I mapped them the first night I ever walked in.
Tonight I never checked one. Not one time, in six hours.
The habit didn’t need beating. It just quit coming to work.
Dante’s hand finds mine on top of the table. In the open, where anybody can see it, where everybody already does.
The margarita machine churns. The floor shakes. Somewhere in the middle of all of it Benji laughs, and Mickey smiles and holds on tighter, and not one person in this room is looking for a way out.
The Christmas lights stay up. They never come down at the Roadhouse.