23. Adrian #2
“Good, isn’t it?” Brendan said, still not looking up. “My mother’s been coming here for forty years.”
“What does she usually order?”
“Moussaka, every time. She’s been coming here since she was six and has never once ordered anything else.”
“Not once?”
“I ordered the lamb when I was fourteen,” he said. “She looked at me the way your abuela looks at people who microwave bread.”
I laughed. “I know that look. I’ve been on the receiving end of it.”
“So have I,” he said. “You’ve aimed it at me.”
“I have never—”
“The leftover pan dulce.”
“That pan dulce was already compromised and needed twelve seconds in the oven, which I explained very patiently and at no point made a face about—”
“You made the face,” he said, looking up with a triumphant stare.
“I made a concerned face, a professional, bread-advocacy face. There’s a significant difference.”
He laughed, warm and genuine. “You were scandalized by my microwave.”
“Your microwave is perfectly good for many things. Reheating pan dulce is not among them. These are facts, Brendan, not opinions.”
“I’ll put it on a plaque,” he said.
“Please do. I’ll sign it.”
He was smiling his wide smile now, the one that made a mess of my insides. In that exact moment, I decided the only way to survive the evening was to stop looking directly at him the way you couldn’t look directly at the sun.
Stavros brought wine. Brendan insisted on pouring it. As he did, his smile smoothed into something I couldn’t quite read.
“Adrian.”
“Yeah?”
He set the wine bottle down, reached into his jacket pocket, and set something on the table between us. It was a small framed print of sheet music cleanly mounted in a simple dark frame.
I stared at it. Then, slowly, I looked up at him.
“That’s the song,” he said. “The one that was playing the first night I came to Barbacks, the first night I saw you. It’s your warm-up track, before your set. It took me a few days to identify it and another few to find someone who could reproduce it.”
I picked up the frame carefully.
I knew this song. Of course I knew it. I’d been hearing it before my sets since Finn built the warm-up playlist two years ago.
I knew every bar of it. I’d never once thought about it as anything other than the music that played before I climbed onto the bar.
Brendan had heard it once in a room he’d only come to because Peter had casually mentioned it.
He’d spent days figuring out what it was.
“The Shazam app failed you?” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could manage.
“Completely insufficient. I had to call someone.”
“Who?”
“Peter.”
“Peter knew it?”
“Immediately. He didn’t explain how. He frightens me more than my mother.”
“Your mother frightens Stavros. Peter frightens you. What does that make Peter?”
“The most frightening person in Tampa.” Brendan chuckled. “Who also happens to know every song ever written, apparently.”
I set the frame on the table and kept both hands around it. “You’ve been planning this for eight days?”
“Yes.”
“You planned the table. You found the song. You called your mother.” I leaned forward. “Brendan, she called Stavros three times.”
“She’s thorough.”
“This might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
He said nothing.
“I mean that.”
“Okay,” he said. “I wanted to do something that was specifically for you, not a restaurant I liked nor a place I knew was impressive. I wanted something that said—” He looked at the table for a moment and then back at me.
“That I’ve been paying attention to who you are, not the dancer or the baker. You.”
The table fell utterly still.
Stavros appeared with food, read the table, and found something urgent to go look at in the kitchen.
“You’re going to make me cry in the middle of a Greek restaurant,” I said.
“Please don’t.”
“Why?”
“Stavros will come over.”
“Is that bad?”
“He’ll call my mother.”
I laughed and reached across the table, putting my hand over his. He turned his hand over and held mine, as I tried, desperately, not to cry.
We ate dinner in that warm, unhurried room while the evening went fully dark outside. Neither of us was in any hurry to be anywhere else. I kept the frame in my lap through all of it. I was aware of doing this. I was also aware that Brendan was aware of it and was choosing not to comment.
When we stood to leave, I tucked the frame carefully under my arm. Brendan held the door, and we walked out into the Tarpon Springs evening. He fell into step beside me, and we walked to the docks, because that was where the evening was always headed.
The water was black and drifting, the dock lights catching it in pieces. The tourist boats were done for the night, so the docks had gone quiet in the way that working places got quiet after hours. They weren’t empty, just settled, doing the private version of what they did all day.
Brendan walked close enough that our arms brushed every few steps.
“Tell me the real version of growing up here,” I said.
“You’ve been getting the real version.”
“You’ve been giving me the highlights. I want the other parts.”
He looked at me sideways. “What other parts?”
“The embarrassing ones, the ones Alan has documented.”
“Alan documented more than I’d like.”
“Start there,” I said.
He chuckled and shook his head, then told me about the summer he was twelve and tried to teach himself to fish off the docks, catching his own jacket three times before catching anything else.
Alan had photographed the whole thing on a disposable camera and presented the evidence at Brendan’s high school graduation party in a slideshow.
“A slideshow?” I said.
“With captions,” Brendan confirmed. “Alan titled it Fish: 3, Brendan: 0. My mother laughed for four minutes straight.”
“I think I might love Alan,” I said.
“Alan is a plague,” Brendan said, in the tone of a man who loved his brother completely and found him deeply irritating and would never change either of those facts.
I put my hand on his face and kissed him at the end of the dock in Tarpon Springs with the September evening warm around us and the water moving below and the framed sheet music tucked carefully under one arm. When we pulled back, our eyes locked.
“Thank you,” I said. “For all of this . . . for the planning and Stavros and the church and the song.” I paused. “For noticing it was in my lap.”
“You were holding it like it might get away,” he said.
“It might have.”
“It wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Brendan.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for paying attention,” I said.