Page 105 of Bounced!

“So,” Skyler said. “We’re the suits now, and we’re saying, ‘Yes,’ to your plan, if you want to do it. It’s a job, Mark, a real one. We’d pay you real money to run it, but mostly it’s—” He stopped, looked at the bar, looked at all of us. “It’s the thing you wanted to build. We just want you to build it.”

I’d watched Mark Delgado take a lot of hits that year. I had not, until that moment, watched one land that he had no defense for at all.

“They told me no,” he whispered, barely audible. “I drew it and they . . . they called it an encumbrance—”

“They were wrong,” Sky said simply. “We read it. It’s beautiful. Build it.”

And Mark, my Mark, a man who’d spent three months learning he couldn’t save the thing he loved, sat there holding the dream somebody had crushed in October. He put his hand over his mouth again, and Rod, passing by with a tray, stopped and looked and said, “Oh, no, is he crying again? He cries now. This is new. I liked him better when had no emotions—”

Mark laughed and cried at the same time, then told Rod to mind his kitchen.

The why-did-you-hide-it conversation happened later, smaller, just a few of us.

“You could’ve told me,” Mark said to Skyler. “In November when I was . . . when I put the house . . . you could’ve said, ‘Hold on, we’re working on something—’”

“I could’ve, but like I told Jacks, we didn’t know it would work.” Skyler turned his glass. “And you know how you are. If you’d known there was a shot, you’d have tried to help. You’d have inserted yourself into the middle of it and started managing it. You’d probably have called Meridian yourself and blown the whole thing up trying to fix it faster.” He said it fondly, but it was all true. Mark had the good grace to look caught. “So no, we did it the only way it could get done, which was quietly and behind a curtain, because you’re family. Sometimes family doesn’t let you carry the thing. Family carries it while you’re not looking.”

Mark opened his mouth.

“Don’t,” Finn silenced whatever he was about to say. “He’s right. You know he’s right. For once in your life, just say, ‘Thank you,’ and don’t try to renovate the thank-you into something bigger.”

“I was going to say, ‘Thank you.’”

“You were going to say, ‘Thank you,’ and then something else I’d slap you for,” Finn said. “I know your thank-yous. There’s always a ‘then.’”

There was, in fact, going to be a “then.” I could see it on him. Instead, he said, “Thank you,” and left the “then” in his mouth.

Finn cleared his throat. “There’s one more thing that can’t wait.” I watched whatever Finn was thinking land on Mark before the Irishman had a chance to say it. Theirs was a funny bond, a friendship in which words were rarely needed. Finn went on, “The benefit money, the hundred and ten thousand dollars the whole neighborhood put into Benji’s jar to save a bar that was, as of last night, already saved. What do we do with it?”

“That’s not ours,” Mark said. “People gave that to keep the doors open. The doors are open. We can’t just keep it.”

“We know.” Skyler had that quiet look, the one that meant a thing was already decided and he was just being polite about telling us. “We already talked about it, the four of us. If it’s all right with you and Finn, we’d like to split it three ways between Paws and Pours, so they can keep doing the rescue days here, the Raptor Center, because Murph won’t shut up about the owls—”

“The owls were incredible,” Murph said, wounded that anyone might think otherwise.

“And the team’s foundation,” Skyler finished. “Which does a lot of quiet good in this city that nobody puts a hockey player’s face on. Every dollar the street gave to save this place goes back out into the street. Nobody keeps a cent. Not us, not you.”

Finn and Mark sat quietly, staring at one another, probably sharing another thought in their freakish way.

“You’d give it all away?” Finn said slowly.

“It was never ours to keep,” Skyler said. “Same as the building was never really about the building.” He shrugged. “People gave it out of love, so we send it back out the same way. It just feels right.”

Rod, who had been silent in his kitchen doorway, wiped his hands on his apron and said, gruff, to nobody, “Is right. Money did job, brought street here. Now it goes and feeds street back.” He nodded once, hard, and disappeared before anyone could see his face do the thing it was doing.

“All right, that’s settled,” Mark said, but I could tell some other idea was begging for daylight. I could see his heart swelling inside his eyes. He locked onto Finn and pinned him in place. “We should do a buy-in, too.”

Finn’s whole face scrunched, then smoothed, a sunrise of a smile blooming in both his lips and his eyes.

Skyler cocked his head, dark blond locks drooping with the gesture, momentarily reminding me of Jacks. “Buy in to what? The building’s—”

“Not the building, the bar.” Mark was turning a coffee cup he wasn’t drinking. “Finn and I, we’ve been talking. You guys gave us the building, gave us twenty years, and it got me thinking. Why is Barbacks still just mine and Finn’s? After all this, after everybody bled for it . . .” He looked up. “We want to open it up, let everybody buy in, whoever wants a piece gets a piece. Rod, Benji, Jacks, Adrian, any of them, make it really theirs in whatever measure they can afford or want.”

I thought that was one of the best things I’d ever heard him say, and I told him so, and he flushed like he always did when I caught him being good.

“So,” he went on, turning toward me. “That includes you, obviously. I mean, you don’t have to. There’s no—Dante, listen, I don’t want you to think I’m asking you for . . . you already . . . you don’t owe the bar a—”

“Mark.”