Chapter 11 #2
The event wound down around 9 p.m. In the end, three dogs were adopted, including the brown-and-white mutt who left in the arms of a seven-year-old girl and her two crying fathers.
Two cats found forever homes, including the bonded tabbies who went home with the young couple.
Rod’s adoption of Ruthie the beagle was pending a home check that everyone knew was a formality.
General Tso, who Peter had brought as a “featured resident” in a carrier with his name on a card and a photo that Mia had taken at a very flattering angle, had spent the evening hissing at a golden retriever three times his size and had generated a dedicated fan following among customers who admired his commitment to hostility.
We raised over twelve hundred dollars for the clinic’s stray fund.
Mia’s content from the evening would go on to accumulate over two million views across all platforms. Finn admitted, while counting the register, that Thursday’s revenue had beaten every non-hockey weeknight in Barbacks history.
Peter helped break down the adoption area with Carlos, loading empty crates back into the clinic van, while moving through the cleanup with the efficient, unhurried manner of a man completing a task he’d planned for.
I watched him carry the last crate out the back door and then stand in the parking lot for a long moment alone, looking at the sky with an expression I couldn’t read from inside the bar but that looked, from a distance, like a man allowing himself to feel something he usually kept under tight control.
He came back inside a few minutes later.
Rod intercepted him near the kitchen with a plate of food and what appeared to be the beginning of a conversation about braising.
I watched Peter’s posture shift as Rod talked, the tension in his shoulders easing by degrees, his responses growing from monosyllabic to something approaching conversational.
By the time I finished wiping down the bar, Peter and Rod were sitting at a corner table.
Peter was describing something with his hands, actually gesturing.
Rod was nodding with the focused respect of one craftsman listening to another.
I had never seen Peter talk with his hands before. I didn’t know he had that in him, that capacity for physical expressiveness, that willingness to let his body participate in a conversation instead of holding it in reserve like a witness who might need to testify later.
I was still watching when Jacks appeared beside me with a bin of dirty glasses.
“This was a good night,” Jacks said.
“Great night,” I replied.
“The family with the little girl.”
“I know.”
“Peter was really good with them.”
“I know.”
Jacks set the bin down and gave me a look that was gentle and knowing and entirely too perceptive for a former football player who was supposed to be sorting glassware.
“You keep saying, ‘I know,’ like you’re trying to convince yourself it’s not a big deal.”
“It’s not a big deal, Jacks. Peter is good with animals and, by extension, good with people who are nervous about animals. That’s his job. It’s what veterinarians do.”
“He kneeled down to talk to that little girl at her eye level. That’s not what veterinarians do. That’s what good people do.”
I didn’t have a response to that.
Or I had several responses, all of which involved admitting something I wasn’t ready to admit, so I picked up the bin of glasses and carried them to the back and spent longer than necessary loading the dishwasher because I refused to stand in the bar having feelings in front of Jacks.
Peter was waiting by the door when I came back out.
He had his jacket on and his keys in his hand and the slightly dazed expression of a man who had just spent three hours surrounded by strangers and noise and emotion and was running on whatever fumes were left.
“Ready?” he asked.
It was the first time he’d ever waited for me, the first time he’d stood at the door with his keys like we were leaving together, like going home was a thing we did in tandem rather than separately.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” I said. “Let me grab my stuff.”
We walked to the parking lot. There were two cars parked beside one another, because we’d driven separately, because we always drove separately, because driving together would imply a level of coordination that neither of us had acknowledged.
Peter stopped at his truck and turned around.
“That was good, Benji,” he said. “What you did tonight, the event, the whole thing, it was really good.”
“Thanks. You were pretty good yourself. That little girl.”
His head cocked. For a moment, his face did something I hadn’t seen before, something that wasn’t quite vulnerability and wasn’t quite warmth but existed in the territory between them. I thought it was a brief lowering of the drawbridge before it went back up.
“She reminded me of someone,” he said.
He didn’t explain.
Instead, he got in his truck, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking lot.
The parking lot was suddenly empty.
The bar was dark.
Somewhere across town, a little girl was falling asleep with a brown-and-white dog on her bed for the first time.
Somewhere closer, Peter was driving home to an apartment full of animals he’d rescued because saving things was the only language of love he trusted.