37. Brendan
Brendan
The private party, exclusively for staff and their families, had been Finn’s idea, which meant it had a spreadsheet, a timeline, and a seating chart.
By seven o’clock, the seating chart had been abandoned entirely.
Chase had pulled two tables together without consulting anyone, while Jacks had rearranged the chairs into a configuration that made more sense for a group that wanted to talk to each other rather than face the same direction.
Finn had watched all of this without saying a word.
He merely made a note on his clipboard and let it go, which was how I knew the evening had shifted from work event to family function.
I sat in my usual booth, because it was my booth, in the way places became yours without anyone making a formal decision.
Also, from that particular spot, I could see the whole room—the tables pushed together in the center, the bar where Benji was mixing something that smelled like citrus and failed ambition, and even the kitchen pass-through where Rod was visible only at intervals.
Mofongo was under the table on my foot. He had completed a full-perimeter assessment of the party, accepted food from three separate people he had no business accepting food from, and located the warmest spot in the room, which was my foot.
He installed himself there with the confidence of a dog who considered any surface he occupied to be his by right.
Adrian was at the bar talking to Benji. He caught my eye across the room, and something passed between us. It was a small, specific warmth, the eye contact of two people who had found each other and noted it without making a big deal of it.
For some reason, that simple glance made my palms sweat. I picked up my whiskey, which was already down to the hockey-puck-shaped ice cube, a nice touch Benji came up with for our larger, more athletic brothers, and took a long, satisfying pull.
Jacks appeared and set a fresh one in front of me. “You need anything else?”
“I’m good,” I said. “You know you’re not working, right? This is a party for all of us.”
“It’s good. I like taking care of people, and you, well, I’m pretty sure you’re my people now, too. You belong here.”
This was a Jacks sentence, delivered with complete sincerity. I had been on the receiving end of enough of them to know that the correct response was simple.
“Thanks, Jacks. You’re my people, too.”
He nodded and went back to the bar.
The door swung open, and Mark entered, his hands completely empty.
“Where’s your laptop?” Benji asked before Mark had fully cleared the doorway.
“I left it at home.”
Benji blinked with wide, dumbfounded eyes. “You . . . left . . . your laptop . . . at home?”
“Yes.”
“Voluntarily?”
“That’s generally how leaving things happens,” Mark said.
“Mark.” Benji set down the bottle he was holding.
“In the five years since we opened this bar, I have never once seen you without that laptop—not at staff meetings, not at closing, not at Peter’s birthday dinner when you said you were just stepping out to check one thing and came back forty minutes later because you’d found an anomaly in the Q3 beverage costs. ”
“The anomaly was significant,” Mark said.
“It was eleven dollars,” Benji said. “And we were at a birthday party.”
“Eleven dollars per week is—”
“Five hundred and seventy-two dollars annually,” Chase said from the table where he waited for Finn. “He told us at Christmas.”
Mark looked at Chase. Chase raised his glass and smiled pleasantly.
“One night,” Finn said, appearing from wherever Finn appeared from when the moment required him. He put a hand briefly on Mark’s shoulder. “One night without the laptop. You’ve earned it.”
Mark scanned the room. He studied the tables pushed together, the family assembled, the bar lit warm and full.
His jaw ticked, likely the ghost of a calculation that had nowhere to go without the spreadsheet to receive it.
Then he went to his corner booth and sat, sans laptop.
After another moment, Dante stepped through the front door, walked directly to Mark’s booth, and sat down across from him.
Mark looked at him, no hint of expression on his face. Dante set his book on the table between them but didn’t open it. They sat there in the easy silence of two people who had been in the same room enough times that the silence had stopped needing to be filled.
Benji watched this from the well for exactly three seconds before he turned back to his bottles. He did not produce the napkin. Some things didn’t need to be written down.
Peter arrived at seven-twelve, which was late for Peter. Benji’s entire posture shifted the moment he walked through the door, not dramatically, just the small adjustment of a person whose room had become complete.
“You’re late,” Benji said, though there was no scolding in his tone.
“I’m three minutes early,” Peter said. “The invitation said seven-fifteen.”
“The invitation said seven. I told you seven.”
“You told me seven-fifteen. I have the text.”
“I told you seven knowing you’d interpret it as seven-fifteen. I was compensating.”
Peter looked at him steadily. I was fairly certain he was biting back a smile. “You scheduled me with a fifteen-minute buffer?”
“I scheduled you accurately for who you are. I know my people.”
“That’s either very loving or very insulting.” Peter’s smile finally emerged.
“It’s efficient. Don’t make me walk back to the office and get Post-it notes,” Benji said, his own grin surfacing. He handed Peter a drink as Peter settled onto a stool at the bar, as close to Benji as he could get without climbing over the counter.
Skyler and Jacks had claimed the end of the pushed-together tables, which put them near Finn and Chase, which meant the four of them were in the formation of two married couples who had been friends long enough to have a shorthand of their own.
Finn was saying something that made Chase put his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh.
Skyler was listening to Jacks with the attention he always gave Jacks, which was the complete and total kind, as though Jacks were the most interesting person in the room, which to Skyler he clearly was.
That, given all our affection for Jacks, made my heart warm.
Erik stepped up and sat at the bar beside Peter.
The pair dove into a conversation that seemed, from where I sat, to involve something Erik was explaining at length and Peter was receiving with a silence he brought to information he found useful.
I was fairly certain I heard the words “yurt” and “skull,” though I could’ve been mistaken.
I leaned slightly toward Adrian, who had come to my booth.
“What are they talking about?” I asked, nodding toward Erik.
Adrian glanced at them. “No idea, but when Peter goes quiet like that, he’s either bored or fascinated.”
“Which is this?”
“He hasn’t checked his phone,” Adrian said. “I’d say fascinated.”
Tyler was everywhere simultaneously, at the tables, at the bar, back at the tables, and telling a story to Jacks that seemed to require both arms and most of his upper body to tell.
Jacks was laughing with the innocuous, unrestrained joy he brought to most moments.
Skyler watched Tyler with the fond exasperation of a man who had made his peace with his craziness and found it genuinely endearing.
At some point, I’m not sure when, Rod emerged from the kitchen.
He actually left the sanctity of his pass-through and walked into the bar-proper.
Benji saw him first, his mouth opening slightly, then he reached under the bar, produced a glass, and poured something without breaking eye contact with Rod.
Rod took it, and they stared at each other for a moment in companionable silence.
“You came out,” Benji said.
“Yes,” Rod said.
“Do you want a chair?”
“No.”
“Do you want to come sit with—”
“No,” Rod said. “I can see from here.”
He raised his glass.
Benji raised his.
They each took a sip.
Rod went back to the kitchen.
Benji stood and stared for a moment.
“That,” he said, to nobody in particular, “is the most emotional thing that man has ever done.”
Finn’s toast happened at eight, which was when Finn had scheduled it on the timeline, because Finn’s emotional moments ran on time even when everything else didn’t. He stood at the end of the tables with a glass raised in one hand and his clipboard on the table before him.
“Five years ago,” he said, “Mark and I opened a bar because Mark said the numbers made sense, and I hated my job, and we both thought Ybor needed something. We were both probably wrong about our reasons but completely right about the outcome.” He paused.
“I had a speech prepared. It was on the clipboard.” He motioned to the clipboard with his glass.
“What happened to the speech?” Benji asked.
Finn took a sip, then glanced at Mark. Mark gave him a nod and the slightest of smiles. Finn swallowed hard and returned his gaze to us.
“I looked at all of you,” he said, “and the speech seemed like the wrong thing.”
The room fell quiet in the warmest possible way.
“The bar didn’t make us a family. It was just the magnet that drew us all to the same place,” Finn said.
“We made the bar. Everything good about this place came from the people in this room—the numbers, the kitchen, the bar, the Saturday nights.” He looked at Adrian.
“The dancing.” He looked at me, briefly, which I hadn’t expected.
“The people who found their way here and stayed.” He finally turned to Chase and held his gaze the longest. “And those we ran into who changed our lives forever.”
Chase set his glass down and wiped his eyes.
“To five years.” Finally, Finn raised his glass again. “The hall stands.”
Erik, from the bar, shot to his feet and raised his glass with the contained gravity of a man hearing his own contribution given its proper weight.
“The hall stands,” Erik bellowed.