Chapter 32 #2
It was also the proof that Peter Loupier, who had owned four identical gray T-shirts and called it a system, had walked into a store and chosen a color because I’d asked him to while sitting in a zoo café eating a Flamingo Wrap.
He found his stool, adjusted his glasses, and looked at me across the bar top with his dark, steady gaze that I felt in the back of my teeth.
“Full house,” he said.
“Adrian’s catalyst effect. That’s what Mark calls it. According to him, our numbers are up forty-three percent.”
Peter’s brows arched. “Forty-three percent is statistically significant.”
“Forty-three percent is Mark’s love language. He almost showed an actual emotion on Monday.”
“Mark shows emotions. They’re just expressed in basis points.”
I made his tea and set it in front of him. Yes, Peter drank tea when he visited the bar. And yes, I had brought a mug from home just to serve him his tea . . . in the bar . . . when everyone else drank beer or wine or alcohol.
It was his thing, and I loved him for it.
Our fingers touched on the mug, brief and deliberate.
“I love you,” I said.
I’d been saying it for a week now, since the first time it had slipped out without planning, without a system, without a Post-it note to announce its intention.
It had simply arrived, in the middle of a Wednesday night while Peter was reviewing the foster kittens’ weight charts, and I was sitting on the counter eating cereal.
I’d said it the way you say things that are so true they don’t need preparation.
Peter had looked up from his charts without so much as a flinch and said, “I love you, too. I had a Post-it note drafted for this. The Post-it note was more comprehensive.” I’d laughed, and he’d kissed me, and the Post-it note was delivered the following morning, taped to the bathroom mirror.
I love you. This is the comprehensive version. The verbal version was insufficient but accurate. The feeling is larger than any format I’ve attempted. I’ve tried four. This is the fifth. None of them are adequate. I’m going to keep trying.
— P
I kept the Post-it in my wallet.
I was going to keep it forever.
“I love you, too,” Peter said before sipping his tea. “The statement remains accurate and comprehensive.”
“You’re going to say, ‘accurate and comprehensive,’ every time, aren’t you?”
“Until I find better words. The search is ongoing.”
“Search on, good man, though I don’t need better words.”
“You deserve better words,” he said, and I swear someone ground pepper nearby, because my eyes began watering, and the more I wiped them with my nasty bar towel, the wetter they became.
“If you make my mascara run, I may never forgive you.”
“You don’t wear mascara.”
“Exactly!” I stabbed a forefinger in his direction. “If you can make it run when it’s not even there, we have a serious problem that simple forgiveness may never solve.”
He looked at me with the expression that was mine and mine alone, the one he’d never made for anyone else and swore he never would.
I went back to making drinks. He sat on his stool and watched me work the way he’d been watching me since the first night he’d sat in the bar, with the quiet, comprehensive attention of a man who saw everything and who had decided that what he was looking at was worth staying for.
After closing, the bar belonged to us.
Not the public us or the customers-and-staff us, but the real us, the family that Barbacks had built one person at a time.
Skyler was arm-wrestling Rod in a booth. This was a rivalry that had started two weeks earlier as a joke and had escalated into a genuine athletic contest, because Rod did not do anything casually, and Skyler did not lose at physical competitions. Ever. For any reason.
Two large men were locked in a silent, non-violent battle while Ruthie watched from the kitchen pass-through with an expression that suggested she had money on her husband.
Skyler won.
Rod’s wrist hit the table with a sound that made Finn wince from across the room.
“Rematch,” Rod said.
“You said that last week,” Skyler growled.
“I wasn’t ready last week.”
“You’ve had seven days to prepare,” Skyler countered.
“Next week. I’ll be ready next week.”
He wouldn’t, but no one argued the point.
Adrian was teaching Mia a body roll at the far end of the bar. Mia was producing a motion that looked less like a wave and more like a person trying to unstick a zipper from the inside.
Finn and Chase sat in a booth near where Mark pecked away at his keyboard.
Chase’s arm draped along the back of the seat behind Finn’s shoulders.
Finn was making notes on the evening’s performance, because Finn made notes on everything.
Chase was reading over his shoulder, occasionally adding a comment that Finn would consider, accept or reject, and write down regardless.
At one point, they both looked at Mark’s booth.
Mark’s laptop was closed.
This was remarkable.
Mark’s laptop was never closed during operating hours, and the bar had only technically stopped operating twenty minutes earlier. Still, Mark had shut the laptop and was watching the room with an expression that wasn’t his usual spreadsheet expression but something softer and less quantified.
He was watching Adrian teach Mia to dance.
Or he was watching the room in general.
Or he was watching the door where Dante sat with his dog.
It was hard to tell with Mark, whose attention was always distributed across multiple data points, but something in the distribution had shifted over the past few weeks.
That shift was visible if you knew where to look.
Dante was at the door, which was locked now, but Dante remained at his post because the door was his post and Dante did not abandon it even after hours.
Dostoyevsky was asleep at his feet, his long gray body twitching with dreams that were, I hoped, about open fields and running and the joy of a creature who had been given a second life.
Peter was at the bookshelf.
Jacks was beside him.
They were doing the quiet thing, the conversation between two introverts who had found in each other a person who understood that talking was optional and that standing beside someone in comfortable silence was its own form of communication.
Skyler watched them from the booth, one arm draped over the back of the seat.
Skyler watched Jacks the way he always watched Jacks, with the attention of a man who was still learning the civilian version of the person he’d married, the version that existed in this bar with these people, and who liked every new thing he learned.
And I stood in the middle of it all.
I stood behind the bar, in my apron, with a towel slung over my shoulder and the last of the night’s glasses drying in the rack.
I stood in the middle of all of it and thought about a man in New York with a good knee and a dance career and a life that had been moving in one direction until it wasn’t.
I thought about the series of events that had brought that man to Tampa, to a bar and a hallway and a foster room in an apartment belonging to a veterinary surgeon who communicated through Post-it notes.
I thought about that veterinary surgeon and how he had, in the course of only four months, taught him that the half second between wanting and reaching was not a wall, but a door.
And I thought how that veterinary surgeon had learned that his door he’d thought long closed and locked was now wide open—and that walking through it was not the end of something, but the beginning.
Peter looked up from the bookshelf and found me across the room.
Our eyes met.
He didn’t smile.
He did the other thing, the thing that was better than a smile, the thing where his whole face went quiet and open and the walls came down and the person underneath was visible.
I lifted my hand in a small wave, the kind you give someone across a room when the room is full.
It’s the wave you give when the distance is too far for words, and the wave is enough, because it says, “I see you, and I’m here, and this is the thing I came to Tampa for, even though I didn’t know it then. ”
He lifted his hand back.
The hallway was getting shorter every day.
And everything was going to be fine.