Page 180 of Levi

“You’re not going to say anything to him?”

“He carried all of us and never mentioned it at that table.” He starts the SUV. “I’m not going to be the one who breaks the rule.”

The biggest paycheck of his life and it’s already spent for his father who’d be embarrassed to be thanked for his life’s work.

I spent a month trying to figure out Dante. First morning I made him for a rich fella in Italian shoes who sold glass boxes to other rich fellas. Then he dropped me at a sad apartment next to a dumpster and I decided one of the two had to be a lie. Neither one was. He had the money all along. He was just never showing it.

That’s the part of him nobody gets to see, because he goes to considerable trouble making sure they don’t. A bag of ribs in a refrigerator with no note on it. My worn-out shirts folded into a square on top of a dryer. Forty dollars of gas station telephone with one number in it. That man does a kind thing the way other men hide a body, Tex told me once, and Tex wasn’t wrong, and I don’t believe Tex knew the half of it.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me, what Dante wanted in a house. He sells mansions for a living and doesn’t want to live in one. Who spent a career selling people rooms built to be photographed, and when it came his turn, went looking for the opposite. Not the view, not the address, not one square foot of it meant to be looked at by anybody who isn’t us.

He never argued for a nice house. He argued for a peaceful one.

The house we bought isn’t on 30A. That was the first decision we made and we made it without much talking, both of us being allergic to the same thing. 30A is where money goes to be looked at. The manicured beach towns, the gates, the twenty-million-dollar listings like the one I hid inside of all summer.

We went east of all that, to a stretch of beach road where the towers haven’t gotten to yet. Down here it’s a regular beach with regular people on it and the houses don’t try to impress anybody.

Ours stands up on pilings, like every house along here, because the Gulf eventually comes and gets whatever’s sitting on the ground. It’s only a matter of time. Two stories over an open carport, cedar gone gray and soft with salt, wooden stairs up the side that announce every single person who climbs them.

Somebody built it in the seventies without showing off. There’s a hundred feet of sea oats between us and the water. Nothing about it would make you turn your head. That’s why we bought it.

There’s a fresh seafood shop up the road on the corner. The old fella behind the counter calls me Levi, because that’s how Dante introduced me and the man never bothered to look it up. He thinks I’m just a guy who moved in with the realtor.

He’s right. That’s exactly what I am.

The first time I ever laid eyes on Dante he was the listing agent on a house Freddie was paying a fortune to hide me in, and I told him to get out. Here we are at the far end of the same summer and the realtor and I have bought a place to live in together.

I paid for half. That one still catches me sideways when I think on it too long.

There was money available to me the entire time. A lot of it, sitting in accounts with my name across the top, growing year over year while I lived like a man on an allowance.

I genuinely did not understand it was mine to touch. My daddy signed me over and Freddie became the closest thing to a parent I had after that, and the arrangement was that Freddie held it and handed it back in amounts he decided on.

Nobody ever sat me down and lied about it. Nobody had to. Got my suspended driver’s license back in August, too. Turns out I’d been eligible for a while and nobody mentioned it either, same as everything else.

When the house came up, I called the financial guy my lawyer found me. I moved my own money, and I bought something I wanted. Then I braced, waiting for the phone to go off. Waiting for the screaming.

Freddie sent a one-line text that said congratulations on the house.

That was all. No call. Nothing.

We still work together, him and me. It looks nothing like it did before. The lawyers are grinding out the long version and we’re both content to leave it a little undefined while they do. He works for me now. It took me most of the summer to say that sentence without my voice catching on it.

The other thing that changed is I’m writing. Really writing, not assembling words, which is what the old job was. Sitting in a room with three men who’d never sung anything, building a song about a truck.

I go up to Nashville every couple of weeks, do my job and then I come home. I drive it. Eight hours up, eight back, and I don’t get on a plane anymore unless Dante can fly with me.

For years I flew constantly and I never did it sober. There was a pill for it and Freddie kept the refills current. I took one before every wheels-up, because I can’t sit strapped into a sealed tube with a door somebody else controls. I never said that out loud to a single person. I figured every man on that plane was doing the same thing.

Now I take my new truck. Straight shift, same as the one I learned on at fourteen. I drive up through Alabama into Tennessee with the windows rolled down. If I want to stop, I stop.

Sixteen hours of nobody talking to me is the best sixteen hours I’ve ever gotten to write songs in my head. I’ve written more on that road than I ever wrote in a room with three men and a whiteboard. The Martin rides on the seat beside me. I sing at the windshield and when a line comes, I say it into my phone doing seventy and sort it out at the next gas station. Three songs on this record got built between Montgomery, Alabama, and the Tennessee state line.

Dante rides up with me about half the time. Talks the full drive, hands me coffee, argues about the radio, sleeps the last hour with his head against the glass. Turns out the Dante I first met who spoke in snappy three-word sentences has plenty to say. And he’s funny, which caught me by surprise when he finally let me see it. After the drive, he usually stays with me a couple of days. Then he flies home, because he’s got a business that doesn’t wait on my schedule.

He says he’d rather have the eight hours in the truck with me than nothing.

I quit arguing with him about that a while back.