Bounced! Chapter 4
The procession had already reached the kitchen by the time I understood we were having one.
Benji led it. Of course, he did.
He’d fashioned, from a stack of black cocktail napkins and what I sincerely hoped was not the good bar tape, a veil, which hung from the crown of his head to somewhere around his collarbone.
It fluttered gently whenever the ceiling fan came around, giving him the look of a widow at a wedding she was pretending to enjoy.
He moved slowly, hands folded, chin high, at the head of a line that consisted of every person I employed.
Behind him, Jacks pushed a dolly. On the dolly, wrapped in a bar towel that had been arranged with care, sat the ice machine.
It was dead, decommissioned, being wheeled to its final rest by a procession that was set to music, because Jacks had found something on his phone that was a dance track and recognizably a funeral dirge at the same time, a slow, mournful, four-on-the-floor requiem that had no business existing and that Finn was enjoying more than any human being had ever enjoyed anything.
“What in the ever-loving gay hell,” I asked, “is happening?”
“Shh.” Benji didn’t turn around. “We’re grieving.”
Finn wiped his eyes, which were wet from laughing, and put a hand on my arm. “Ah, you’re just in time. You’ll want to be here for this.”
“I have a bar to run.”
“You have a bar to bury,” Benji corrected, gliding to a stop in the center of the kitchen, where he turned, veil settling, and folded his hands at his waist. “Places, everyone. Gather ’round. Mark, you can stand by Rod. He needs you.”
I glanced at Rod.
Rod was not okay.
He was leaning against the prep counter with his arms crossed and his jaw set. His kind eyes had gone genuinely, unmistakably wet, and when he caught me looking, he cleared his throat and stared hard at the ceiling like a man reading an exit sign in a burning building.
“Rod?”
“I am fine,” he mumbled.
“Are you… crying?” I asked.
“It was good machine,” he said. His voice cracked clean down the middle on “machine.” Something in my chest lurched, because Rod Silva was the steadiest man I’d ever met, a professional who’d stood in the heat of a real kitchen and not blinked—and he was coming apart over an appliance.
“Seven years, Mark, that machine and me.
With me every service, every rush. Never quit on me, not once, not until—“ He gestured at the towel-wrapped shape on the dolly, unable to finish. He turned away.
Jacks, now beside him, put a quiet hand on his back.
“That’s why we’re doing this,” Benji said gently.
I understood then, that under the veil and the napkins and the dour dance dirge, Benji had clocked that Rod was actually grieving and had built an entire ceremony so his friend wouldn’t have to grieve alone or feel stupid about it.
That’s the thing about Benji. I’d watched Dante do the same thing to me two days before. Apparently it was going around.
“We are gathered here today,” Benji began solemnly.
On cue, Jacks lowered the music to a respectful murmur.
Finn made a sound.
“Out of respect for the fallen,” Benji said, without missing a beat or turning his head.
Finn hushed instantly, chastened and utterly delighted.
“We are gathered to remember Sir Reginald Frost.”
There was a pause.
“Who?” said Jacks.
“The ice machine,” Benji whispered.
“The ice machine’s name is Reginald?” Finn was biting back laughter.
“Sir Reginald, and yes, it always was, you simply never asked.“ I don’t think Benji had planned this name. I would have bet the bar on it. He’d invented “Sir Reginald Frost” somewhere between the walk-in and the prep counter and was now prepared to defend his impromptu knighthood to the grave.
“He came to us seven years ago, a humble machine in a world that did not yet know his worth.
He asked for nothing but water and power and the occasional descaling.
He gave, in return, the ice of life, cube after cube after cube, without complaint, without applause—“
He paused, and his eyes found me over the top of the veil. I watched his second impromptu idea arrive.
”—unlike some members of this family who require applause simply to walk down a hallway.”
Here we go, I said to myself.
“I’m not naming names,” Benji intoned.
“You’ve been naming names for four straight days,” Finn muttered. “Speaking of your hallway,” Finn shifted, brightening, because if there is a single thing on this earth Finn loves more than a funeral dirge it’s watching me suffer, “how’s the search going? The civilized one, on your phone.”
And that was how a funeral for an ice machine became a debrief of my dating life, which, if you’ve ever attended either, you’ll know are structurally identical events. Grief and gossip breathe the same air. People lean in for both.
“It’s going,” I whispered because, well, it was a funeral, sort of.
“That’s a ‘nope’ voice,” Benji said, veil aside now, all business.
“It’s not a ‘nope’ voice,” I protested.
“Mark. I invented the ‘nope’ voice. I hold the patent.” Benji hopped up to sit on the clean end of the prep counter, funeral adjourned without a vote.
“Tell me everything. Did you meet someone? Did you go on a date? Did you go on a date and it was terrible? For the love of the gay gods, did you get laid? Your face is doing the terrible thing.”
So, surrounded and outnumbered, I surrendered.
I told them about Grant, who had seemed like a miracle right up until the tequila proposition.
I got as far as “basically runs itself” before Finn had to sit down.
I told them about the high-energy connector, and his Thursday group that was definitely not a pyramid scheme, and how somewhere over an untouched plate of pasta I’d understood I wasn’t a date, I was a lead.
Benji made a groan of real pain, hand to his heart, more moved by this than he had been by Sir Reginald.
Rod’s tears still flowed, though the cause had shifted from our frozen knight to the onions he was now chopping.
“Two men?” Benji said. “One wanted your liquor license and the other wanted your downline?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Nobody wanted the coffee,” Jacks asked.
“Nobody wanted the coffee,” I shook my head.
I didn’t tell them about the grid or the wall of torsos or the man four hundred feet away who’d sent me a photograph that left nothing to translate.
I especially didn’t tell them about the message I’d sent, in earnest, to a stranger about my short ribs and my back patio being nice this time of year.
Some things a man takes to his grave, ideally next to Sir Reginald.
But Benji was Benji.
“Wait.” His eyes narrowed then his head cocked, veil flopping. “What app did you use?”
“You told me to use an app. You didn’t say which one.”
“Markus Arellius Cleopatra Darnel Walker Delgado, which app did you use?”
Finn lost it.
My head lowered, along with my voice. “The one with the mask.”
The kitchen went silent.
Rod’s chopping stilled.
Even the dirge, which Jacks had turned back up, seemed to lower itself out of respect.
Finn’s whole face changed.
Benji’s mouth dropped open and hung there.
And down at the end of it all, leaning in the kitchen doorway with his beefy arms crossed and a book tucked under one of them, Dante, who I hadn’t even heard come in, because you never do, let the corner of his mouth curl into the smallest smirk I have ever seen a man permit.
“Oh, honey,” Benji said, and there was so much love in those words—and so much horror. “Oh, no, baby doll, just no. That’s not a dating app.”
“I’m aware of that now.”
“That’s a hunting app,“ he added.
“I said I’m aware.”
“Did you write a bio?” Finn asked.
“...No.”
“You wrote a bio,” Benji steepled his fingers and grinned.
“It was a nice bio,“ I said, with the last shred of dignity I owned.
The kitchen came down around me, Finn openly weeping again, Benji clutching his veil, Jacks asking with total sincerity whether short ribs were a euphemism and being told, gently, by Rod, that they were not.
Only Dante didn’t laugh.
He just watched, his smirk holding, his eyes glittering toward me in a way I felt more than saw. When the noise died down, he said in that voice that came up through the floorboards, “Bet it was a good bio.”
“It was,” I said, appreciating the affirmation in my moment of need.
“‘Course it was.” He went back to his book.
I didn’t examine the thing that did to my chest. It wasn’t on the schedule.
We got serious, eventually, because a bar couldn’t run on grief and gossip, however well the two pair. A new Sir Whatever was ordered, though our next problem was larger than simply ordering a new ice machine.
“Two weeks?” I said, reading the confirmation off my phone, thumbs behaving for once. “Delivery’s two weeks out.”
Rod made a wounded noise.
Two weeks without ice was, to Rod, less of a logistical problem than it was a further insult to the memory of the departed.
“We can’t go two weeks without ice,” Finn said, all business now, the funeral and my equally dead dating life fully behind him. “We can’t go two days. You know what a Tampa summer does to a bar with no ice. We’ll be serving warm well drinks to people who came here specifically not to be hot.”
“There’s a floor model,” I said. “Restaurant supply place out past the fairgrounds has one they’ll sell today. It’s a commercial unit, same class as Sir—“ I caught myself. “Same class as the old one.”
“So go get it,” Benji said.
“It’s a commercial ice machine, Benji. It weighs about twice as much as I do. It’s not a thing a man carries out of a warehouse and sets in his lap. It’s a two-person job, minimum.”
I glanced around the room, which is a thing I did when I needed hands, and watched every single person I loved discover an urgent prior commitment.
“Inventory,” Finn said instantly. “Wednesday. It’s Wednesday. That’s an inventory day. Can’t be helped.”
“I’ve got a shift,” Benji said, “and also, I would drop it, and it would kill me, and then you’d have two funerals.”
Jacks looked stricken. “I would help, but I promised Sky I’d—“ He stopped, visibly trying to remember what he’d promised Skyler, and landed on, ”—a thing. There’s a thing. It’s hockey related, I think.”
“Rod?” I asked.
Rod looked at me with the wet-eyed solemnity of a man who has just buried one machine and wasn’t emotionally prepared to go adopt its replacement the same afternoon. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “Not today. It’s too soon.”
“It’s an appliance, Rod.”
“Is too soon, Mark.”
So there I stood, in my own kitchen, at the funeral of an ice machine I now knew was named Sir Reginald Frost, needing exactly one strong body and finding, in a room full of people who owed me their livelihoods, not a single volunteer.
I opened my mouth to say I’d figure it out myself, that I’d rig some kind of ramp and a strap and do the thing a large man does, which is decide the impossible is merely inconvenient—
When a hand went up.
A big one.
Every head in the room turned at once.
“I’ll go,” Dante said.
No one spoke.
I want to be accurate about the silence, because it was a specific silence, the kind that fell when a thing happened that has never happened.
Dante didn’t volunteer for things. In all the years the man had worked for me, he’d done every job asked of him flawlessly and offered to do exactly none that weren’t.
He guarded the door. He read his books. He went home to his greyhound.
He did not raise his hand in meetings, and he did not, ever, sign up for a two-hour round trip past the fairgrounds to wrestle an oversized appliance.
And he’d just done it without being asked.
Benji’s mouth had come open again. He shut it.
Then his eyes cut to me, fast, and then back to Dante, and then back to me.
I watched him file something away in that lightning-quick vault of his and, for once in his verbose life, say nothing, which alarmed me more than anything that had happened all day.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s your day off.”
“I know.” Dante closed his book, thumb marking the page out of habit even though he was setting it down. “No man should lift a commercial unit alone. Somebody could get hurt.” A beat. “I’d have to file a complaint.”
Finn snorted so hard he had to leave the room.
“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out fine, ordinary, a man agreeing to a sensible arrangement, which is exactly what it was. “Okay, thanks. Truck’s out back.”
“I know where the truck is,” Dante said.
Of course, he did. He was Dante. He knew where everything was.
He picked his book up off the counter, tucked it under his arm, and headed for the back door.
I grabbed my keys off the hook and followed him out into the bright afternoon.
Behind me, I heard the funeral quietly reconvening, Benji’s voice lifting again over the endless, looping dirge, promising Sir Reginald Frost that his sacrifice had brought two people together on this day, which I chose not to hear.
The back lot shimmered.
Dante was already at the passenger door, one hand on the frame, looking at the truck the way you look at a thing you’re about to fold yourself into, all six feet and two inches of him considering the geometry.
He opened the door and climbed in.
That was how it all started, though I wouldn’t have called it “starting” anything at the time.
I’d have called it an errand.
I climbed in after him, and the cab of my truck, which had felt plenty big for eleven years, was suddenly a very finite size.
I put the key in the ignition and didn’t look at the man filling the whole right side.
I pulled us out of the lot into the two-week problem that had, against every reasonable expectation, just handed me a very unexpected afternoon.