Page 62 of Levi

“What’s it mean?”

“It means we could.” He raps the bar twice, satisfied, and orbits on.

Down the bar, Sheila is adding something to a handwritten tape by the register, and whatever she’s working on has her face glowing. “Four receipts,” I hear her say to nobody. “Stapled.”

The card says course fourteen is key lime pie. That’s not what comes out.

What comes out is a platter, carried by Sheila with Stormy a pace behind her, and on it is a bowl of banana pudding, a slab of red velvet cake, and a chocolate brownie under a scoop of ice cream already going soft at the edges.

“Stormy heard you,” Tex says, sliding in on cue. “About the pie. The kitchen adapted. The document has been amended.” He points at the platter, left to right. “The red velvet is Sheila’s, and that’s all the introduction it needs or she’ll stand here while you eat it. The brownie is on the menu because Stormy keeps it on the menu. He put it in writing. There is always a chocolate dessert in this building, because kids come in here with their families, and a kid at a table needs a chocolate option. He was outvoted on it twice. The brownie remains. You don’t win against a man like that, you just eventually agree with him.”

Then his hand comes to rest on the rim of the pudding bowl, and the volume goes out of him for the second time tonight.

“The banana pudding is my mama’s. It’s the only recipe of hers we’ve got. Sheila makes it now.” He clears his throat and straightens up. “Eat that one first.”

I eat the banana pudding first.

I eat all three, is the truth of it, while the room goes on around me, and Tex circles, and Sheila runs her tape.

Stormy comes for the platter at the end. He looks at the stack of empty plates at my elbow, fourteen courses deep, the celery untouched as designed.

“You cleaned every plate,” he says. As far as I can tell it’s the highest thing he knows how to say. Then he’s gone.

The beers went slow. Two across the evening, with Tex’s mandated sweet tea holding down the middle, and I couldn’t tell you the hours. There’s no phone in my pocket to keep the time, and not knowing is its own clean kind of free.

Two beers over a full night, which for a man with my legal paperwork is functionally sainthood. The cap Dante hung on me isn’t a wall I’m clawing at. I forgot it somewhere around the shrimp. If anything, there’s a small dumb warmth in the fact that he set it at all. He sat down somewhere and settled on the number three. Three’s enough to be a person going out and not enough to be the bad thing.

Sheila clears the last of the plates and looks me over like a woman inspecting her own work.

“You come back anytime, baby,” she says. “Tonight was a pleasure.”

I’m gathering myself to stand when Tex comes off his final orbit and drops onto the stool beside me at last, leaning in close, checking both shoulders first, which is how I know whatever’s coming is meant for an audience of one.

“Don’t tell Sheila I told you this. You know that bill she’s been running up? The final number’s been in the register drawer since this afternoon. She wrote it out before you walked in, Levi. Before the kitchen fired one shrimp. Before the oysters hit the ice.” He taps the bar once, solemn. “She wrote the ending first and then we all lived it.”

And then, he reaches into his shirt pocket, and that’s when I understand why he finally sat down. He’s carrying the final bill.

Four receipts, stapled, folded once down the middle. He lays it flat on the bar in front of me and smooths the fold out with his palm, careful.

Sheila’s handwriting, top to bottom. Every course, listed. The oysters. Same shrimp, three ways. The gumbo. The deviled eggs. The celery and ranch. All fourteen, itemized in blue ink, and not one price beside any of them. No numbers anywhere on the page.

Tex doesn’t say a word. He puts one enormous finger on the bottom line and leaves it there.

All items at market price.

The laugh comes up out of me. It’s loud. The kind that bends me over the bar with my head down next to Tex’s, howling at four stapled receipts with no numbers on them.

Tex sits there beside me with his finger still on the line, glowing like a man who just won a prize he’s been working toward all night.

Then he folds it back down along its crease, slides off the stool, and carries it to the far end of the bar, where he stands it up against the register drawer for Sheila.

“Preview’s over,” he says, coming back. “She wrote it, she delivers it. I wouldn’t take that off her for money.”

I’ve not laughed like this, sober, with nobody on God’s earth wanting a single thing from me, in so long I’d quit believing I had it in me. My eyes are running and I can’t stop.

Then Dante walks in, and just like that the warm goes out of everything.

He’s got Little Blondie with him. The staging guy with the flower arrangements from that first morning. They come in laughing, and Dante’s got a hand on the back of Blondie’s neck, loose and certain, and Blondie’s leaning into it. They’re a unit. Two good-looking men who plainly belong to each other, strolling into a bar at the tail of a night they spent together.