Page 17 of Bounced!

He just watched, his smirk holding, his eyes glittering toward me in a way I felt more than saw. When the noise died down, he said in that voice that came up through the floorboards, “Bet it was a good bio.”

“It was,” I said, appreciating the affirmation in my moment of need.

“’Course it was.” He went back to his book.

I didn’t examine the thing that did to my chest. It wasn’t on the schedule.

We got serious, eventually, because a bar couldn’t run on grief and gossip, however well the two pair. A new Sir Whatever was ordered, though our next problem was larger than simply ordering a new ice machine.

“Two weeks?” I said, reading the confirmation off my phone, thumbs behaving for once. “Delivery’s two weeks out.”

Rod made a wounded noise.

Two weeks without ice was, to Rod, less of a logistical problem than it was a further insult to the memory of the departed.

“We can’t go two weeks without ice,” Finn said, all business now, the funeral and my equally dead dating life fully behind him. “We can’t go two days. You know what a Tampa summer does to a bar with no ice. We’ll be serving warm well drinks to people who came here specifically not to be hot.”

“There’s a floor model,” I said. “Restaurant supply place out past the fairgrounds has one they’ll sell today. It’s a commercial unit, same class as Sir—” I caught myself. “Same class as the old one.”

“So go get it,” Benji said.

“It’s a commercial ice machine, Benji. It weighs about twice as much as I do. It’s not a thing a man carries out of a warehouse and sets in his lap. It’s a two-person job, minimum.”

I glanced around the room, which is a thing I did when I needed hands, and watched every single person I loved discover an urgent prior commitment.

“Inventory,” Finn said instantly. “Wednesday. It’s Wednesday. That’s an inventory day. Can’t be helped.”

“I’ve got a shift,” Benji said, “and also, I would drop it, and it would kill me, and then you’d have two funerals.”

Jacks looked stricken. “I would help, but I promised Sky I’d—” He stopped, visibly trying to remember what he’d promised Skyler. “—a thing. There’s a thing. It’s hockey related, I think.”

“Rod?” I asked.

Rod looked at me with the wet-eyed solemnity of a man who has just buried one machine and wasn’t emotionally prepared to go adopt its replacement the same afternoon. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “Not today. It’s too soon.”

“It’s an appliance, Rod.”

“Is too soon, Mark.”

So there I stood, in my own kitchen, at the funeral of an ice machine I now knew was named Sir Reginald Frost, needing exactly one strong body and finding, in a room full of people who owed me their livelihoods, not a single volunteer. I opened my mouth to say I’d figure it out myself, that I’d rig some kind of ramp and a strap and do the thing a large man does, which is decide the impossible is merely inconvenient—

When a hand went up.

A big one.

Every head in the room turned at once.

“I’ll go,” Dante said.

No one spoke.

I want to be accurate about the silence, because it was a specific silence, the kind that fell when a thing happened that has never happened.

Dante didn’t volunteer for things. In all the years the man had worked for me, he’d done every job asked of him flawlessly and offered to do exactly none that weren’t. He guarded the door. He read his books. He went home to his greyhound. He did not raise his hand in meetings, and he did not, ever, sign up for a two-hour round trip past the fairgrounds to wrestle an oversized appliance.

And he’d just done it without being asked.

Benji’s mouth had come open again. He shut it. Then his eyes cut to me, fast, and then back to Dante, and then back to me. I watched him file something away in that lightning-quick vault of his and, for once in his verbose life, say absolutely nothing, which alarmed me more than anything that had happened all day.