Page 82 of Levi

I run a hand over my own bare jaw and don’t recognize it. I look like a man who sells out arenas. I look like a stranger. I look like the end of everything I want is coming faster than I can stop it.

She packs up and goes. The house empties out.

The one human thing I have left is the cheap phone in my front pocket.

I take it out for a peek between things all day. While the stylist worked, while the crew argued about the sound rig over at the party house. Dante’s been grounded at the Miami airport since morning, a storm sitting on the Gulf, and he’s been texting during the wait. Answering him is the only stretch I feel like myself.

Dante: Still at the gate. Storm won’t move. Packet’s killing me. Broker wants everything notarized.

Levi: You’ll have it all done Friday and complain the entire time.

Dante: I don’t complain. I narrate hardship.

Levi: That’s a real fancy way to say complain.

Dante: Probably. Buyer might be coming back to see the place again. Thursday or Friday, she won’t commit.

Levi: Don’t worry. You hooked her the first time.

Dante: We’ll see. Old money likes to make you sweat before it lets you win.

Levi: You’d know. You invented making people sweat.

Dante: I prefer the term creating urgency.

Dante: How are you holding up over there? Everything good?

Levi: Yeah. All good.

Dante pictures me bored, rattling around an empty place, killing a slow week till he’s free. He doesn’t picture the beard now on the kitchen floor, or the soundcheck I’ve got at six, or me getting bolted back together.

Levi: How’s the family?

Asking is the closest I’ll ever get to a family like that.

Dante: Clara’s still texting me about my phone habit. And I’m flying home with a brick of frozen pernil in my carry-on. If this storm ever lets me. My mother doesn’t trust me to eat.

Levi: What’s pernil?

Dante: Roast pork shoulder, low all day, skin like glass. I’ll make you that too. If you want.

Levi: I want. You’re building a Cuban restaurant menu.

Dante: Keeping a list. You’ll eat it eventually. I’ll hide it in your fridge.

Levi: How big is the rest of the family? Cousins and all that.

Dante: Big enough my mother cooks for a neighborhood and calls it “just us.”

Dante: Are you eating? Or is it chips and pie again?

Levi: You’re starting to sound like your mother.

Dante: Answer the question.

Levi: I’m eating.

Dante: Levi.