Chapter 31 Family
Sam
Saturday night at Vibes and Summer has commandeered the corner booth.
She is at one end of it in a sweater the color of red wine and a pair of jeans Bex would approve of.
Autumn is across from her with a notebook open between them, pencil tucked behind her ear, debating something with the focus of a woman who has been arguing with Summer King her entire life and refuses to be wrong now.
Colt is wedged next to Summer in the dark shirt I have come to recognize as his attempt to dress for a venue he still doesn't entirely understand.
He has one arm along the back of the booth behind her shoulders.
He isn't touching her. He has learned, watching her these last weeks, to wait for her to lean in.
I see when she leans in. Her shoulder against his bicep, her head tilted toward Autumn, finger pointing at the notebook.
"Patricia sent the draft promotional book launch itinerary. I think we start in Knoxville."
"Charleston," Autumn says.
"Knoxville is a shorter drive. Charleston is fourteen hours. You aren't flying to Charleston every other weekend for a book signing."
"Charleston is the book. The whole book is Charleston in a coat. I have to launch it there or I am a coward."
"You can launch it there and then also do Knoxville. The two aren't mutually exclusive."
"Knoxville doesn't need me. They have plenty of authors. They have Dolly."
"They have Dolly?"
"Dolly is from East Tennessee. Same area code emotionally."
Colt picks up his bourbon. Doesn't contribute. He is watching Summer's profile with a face that suggests he could listen to her argue with Autumn about regional book-tour logistics for the rest of his natural life and consider it a fair trade for whatever he did to deserve it.
I pour drinks at the bar. The Saturday crowd is two-deep.
Bex is between numbers, in the wings, drinking water and stretching her hamstrings.
Marisol is in the dressing room with Lucia, who has been on a sugar high since four o'clock and is currently, by Marisol's report, attempting to braid the curtains.
I don't interrupt the booth. The three of them are deep in a book-tour debate I have heard before in different forms. Summer is arguing with everything, Autumn is cataloguing it in the notebook, Colt is watching both of them like he is the luckiest man in any room he happens to be in.
He is being absorbed. He doesn't push. He waits for an opening.
When one opens, he takes it. Autumn has stopped looking up to squint at him; she hands him the salt now. He hands her napkins back.
Across the bar, Dominic Vargas pushes through the door looking, as he has all month, like a man who has misplaced his own face. He scans the room. Finds Marisol's name on the schedule chalked behind the bar, finds out she has one more number tonight, settles. Walks over.
"Lucia gave me a new one."
"How is Marisol?"
"She let me drop Lucia at preschool on Wednesday."
"That's big."
I pour him a bourbon and he carries it to a stool at the end of the bar and watches the empty stage where she will appear in thirty minutes. He has the patience of a man who's decided to wait as long as it takes.
***
Bex's number wakes the room up. She does the floor piece, with the white feather fan that she chases around the stage like a thought she is trying not to lose. The house light comes up between sets and the crowd buzzes and Summer slides out of the booth and crosses to the bar.
"Pour me one."
"You are on number two."
"Pour me a third one anyway. Autumn is being insufferable."
"About Knoxville."
"About everything. She found a quote in my acknowledgments and has informed me it is, quote, too sincere."
"Is it too sincere?"
"I thanked two men in it. She thinks that is fifty percent more men than the acknowledgments needed."
"Mm."
I don't look at her when I say it. I pour the bourbon. Slide it across, and lock eyes with Autumn from across the room for a moment.
"It isn't weird," she says. "Tell me it isn't weird."
"It isn't weird."
"I am asking because if it is weird, I will rewrite it."
"It isn't weird, Summer. It's true. You don't flinch from true. Don't start now."
She drinks. Her hair is down tonight. She is half-laughing already at something Autumn is in the middle of yelling across the bar, and she turns to deliver the line back, and Colt, from the booth, is watching her with the small tired smile of a man who is finally getting eight hours of sleep again.
I come out from behind the bar. I walk her back. She leans her shoulder against my arm for half a step. I don't comment on it. Neither does she.
We stop at the end of the booth. Colt looks up.
I tip my chin at him. He tips his back. Summer slides in next to him.
Summer says something to Autumn in a tone of finality that suggests they have, at last, agreed on a city.
Colt leans his head down so it is almost touching hers and says something I can't hear, and she snorts into her drink and elbows him in the ribs and he laughs.
Autumn looks up at me and smiles and winks at me.
I wink back at her and go back to the bar.
Behind me, Dominic exhales like he just remembered to.
"Marisol is up."
"I have eyes."
"You look like you are about to combust."
He stands. Smooths the front of his jacket.
Walks to the front row. Sits in the seat he has made his own.
Marisol doesn't glance at him when she takes the stage.
She never does. But when she finishes the number, the very last beat, when the lights go out and the audience erupts, Dominic stands and claps and Marisol, in the second of darkness before the houselights, allows herself, for the first time since he started showing up, to look directly at him.
He doesn't see it.
I do.
***
After the show, the room empties out in stages.
The last of the Saturday crowd settles their tabs.
The dancers drift to the dressing room to change.
Marisol comes out with a wide-awake Lucia on her hip, the toddler having gotten her second wind from the music, and Lucia spots the corner booth and screams, "WUCY SEES AUNTIE. "
"Inside voice."
"WUCY SEES AUNTIE."
"That is the outside voice."
Summer is already standing. She holds out her arms and Lucia leans dramatically out of Marisol's grip toward her, and Marisol passes her over with the practiced motion of a woman who knows the angles.
"Hello, my love."
"Auntie's hair."
"Lucia, no."
"Auntie's HAIR."
Lucia gets two fistfuls and Summer winces and laughs and Autumn is taking pictures on her phone like a woman documenting historic events, and Colt is sitting in the booth watching this whole tableau with an expression I have decided to translate, charitably, as I have no business in this scene but I would die before I left it.
Marisol slides in next to Autumn. "What are we deciding."
"The book tour," Autumn says.
"What about it."
"Summer thinks Knoxville is optional."
"Knoxville is not optional."
"Thank you, Marisol."
"Knoxville is where my cousin lives. She runs an indie bookstore on Gay Street. If you skip Knoxville, my cousin will fly to Chicago and find you, Summer."
"Fine. Fine. Knoxville is on the list. I am going to die on this tour. You can put that in the acknowledgments. To Marisol, for killing me with kindness."
"Better than sincere," Autumn says.
"I will hit you."
"Try it."
Colt, from his quiet corner: "Knoxville's a nice drive from here. Long, but pretty. Once you cross into Tennessee you start seeing the hills. The leaves should still be turning when she goes."
The booth goes a little quiet.
Summer turns her head and looks at him. Just looks.
He has, without meaning to, said what a husband says about a city his wife is going to visit.
Not I'll come, not I'll fly down, just the easy aside of a man who has already thought about the route.
Marisol's mouth quirks at the corner. Autumn writes something down in the notebook and doesn't show us what it is.
Summer says, "Yeah. The leaves." And she doesn't look away.
He doesn't look away either.
It lasts a beat too long for a casual moment and not long enough to be a scene, and then Lucia, who has lost interest in Auntie's hair, declares "WUCY WANTS THE PURPLE CRAYON," and the tension breaks because the only thing more powerful than two people remembering they are in love is a toddler with a specific equipment request.
"It is in your mom's bag, baby."
"Wucy needs it NOW."
Marisol digs the crayon out and Lucia takes it and clambers, with the focus of a tactical operator, off Summer's lap and across the table and into the booth seat next to Colt, where she proceeds to lay her construction paper across his thigh and begin a drawing, ignoring him entirely while requiring his leg as a desk.
He sits perfectly still.
"Don't move," Summer says.
"I won't move for the rest of my life."
Dom, from across the booth: "Get used to it, Bennet."
"I have been crayoned on by Lucia exactly once before and Marisol made me throw out the jeans. I am being practical."
Marisol laughs. Actually laughs. It is the first time I have heard her laugh at something Colt said, which means he has, without anyone noticing, crossed into the second circle of trust. He registers it. He doesn't draw attention to it.
"You wear two-hundred-dollar jeans, brother. That's your problem."
"I'll consider it."
Dom raises his bourbon at him. Colt raises his back.
He keeps his thigh still and accepts the role of human easel.
Lucia draws a shnake. Then another shnake.
Then what might be a moon or might be a pancake.
Autumn glances at me at the bar. Her wavy red hair is backlit by the show lights, and she is absolutely stunning.
She's doing what she's done all weekend, looking a half-second too long, then looking away.
I haven't responded to her DM yet. The one she sent on Wednesday night that said: if I'm ever in Chicago again would you actually want to get coffee or are we doing the polite thing.
The DM has been in my phone since Wednesday.
I have read it more times than I'm going to count.
I haven't answered because every answer I have drafted has been wrong in a different way.
Yes was wrong because it was too fast. Maybe was wrong because it was a coward's word.
I would like that was the right one and I deleted it twice because I don't entirely know if I am ready to put like that in writing.
She knows I haven't answered. She hasn't asked. She is just here, in the booth, doing what she does, holding her own space.
I pour her a fresh mezcal. Walk it over. Set it in front of her. She looks up and her green eyes are sparkling at me.
"Are you closing soon?"
"Half hour."
"Will you come sit?"
"For a minute."
"For more than a minute."
I look at her. She holds my gaze. Steady. Like her best friend does. It is a King-Hayes inheritance, that look. They learned it from each other in middle school and never put it down.
"For more than a minute," I say.
I go back to the bar. I do the last of the cash.
Tony, the new closer, comes on. I hand him the keys to the register and I cross the dim room to the booth where my favorite people are arguing about Knoxville and a two-and-a-half-year-old is drawing pancake-moons on a man's leg.
I sit down on the end of the bench next to Autumn, and she shifts to make room, and the warmth of her against the side of my arm is a small thing I notice and don't push away.
Across the table, Summer catches my eye.
The smallest tilt of her chin. The corner-lady acknowledgment.
I see you, Sam. I see what you are doing.
I see you back. Corner-watching woman.
We close the booth at one. Outside, Dominic helps Marisol load a sleeping Lucia into a car seat.
Autumn stands with her hands in her jacket pockets in a way that is meant to look casual and isn't. Colt and Summer are a few feet down the sidewalk, his hand at the small of her back, hers tucked into the crook of his elbow, both of them looking up at the marquee.
VIBES. Burlesque. Cabaret. The Art of Being Seen.
"You ever wonder about that line," Summer says.
"What about it."
"Whether it is a promise or a dare."
"Both. Probably."
She tilts her head against his shoulder. Just for a second.
"We leave Tuesday."
"Tuesday."
"You sure you want to do this with me."
"Summer." He turns her gently so she is facing him on the empty sidewalk under the gold marquee, and I, locking the door of my own club from the inside, look up at exactly the wrong moment, and what I see isn't a husband and a wife reconciling.
It is two people standing on the same ground for the first time in too long.
He has both her hands. She is looking up at him.
He is looking down at her. He says something I can't hear and her shoulders drop, like they do when she has been holding something all day and gives it up.
"Yeah," she says, loud enough to carry. "Yeah, okay."
He kisses her forehead.
Not her mouth. Her forehead.
The forehead kiss of a man who has been told, expressly, that he doesn't get to lead.
I lock the door. Turn out the bar light. Go upstairs to my apartment above the club, where my phone is sitting on the kitchen counter with Autumn's DM still glowing on the screen.
I pick it up. I type.
Yes. Coffee. I know a place in Wicker Park. You can pick the time.
Send.
Three dots. Almost immediately. The dots stop. Start again. Stop.
Tomorrow at ten?
I stare at the screen.
Tomorrow at ten.
I set the phone down. I look out the apartment window at the sodium-orange light at the marquee I've built everything around, and I feel something in my chest. Not the ice. Something else.
It feels like the start of something.
I am ready to write it.