Page 69 of Bounced!

“For the building and then some. Here’s the part you should understand, Mark, so you know what you’re up against. I owned most of the building, the bar, the four units above and beside you, the bones of the place, but not the corner opposite your bar. That corner storefront and the little unit behind it, Meridian picked those up two years ago from the Castellano estate before any of us knew what they were doing. They’ve been sitting on a piece of my building this whole time, buying up the parcels around it, and waiting. When they came to me, they already half owned the place. That’s why I couldn’t fight the number. They weren’t a buyer I could shop against. They were the only buyer there’d ever be, because they were already inside the walls.”

“Their own plans,” I repeated, too stunned to form my own words.

“I don’t know what all they’re planning. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know, honestly, once it was done. It’s all above my pay grade now.” He sighed. It was a real sigh, an old man who liked me and hated this. “I’m sorry, son. I mean that. You built a good thing in my building, best tenant I ever had. If it were up to me, you’d be in there till they carried you out. But it stopped being up to me the day that number crossed my desk. I’m too old and too tired to have said no to it. I hope you can understand that.”

And the hell of it was that I did understand it. That was the worst part. There was no villain here. Gerald Foss was a decent man who’d fixed my roof and sent his regards to my family every year. He was sixty-eight with bad knees and a wife who wanted to see her grandkids. Somebody had put a number in front of him too big to refuse, and he’d taken it. I’d have probably taken it. There wasn’t anyone in the whole thing to be angry at.

The ground had just moved. It did that sometimes—it moved under you with no warning and no reason you can hold in your hand.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Gerald. I understand. You’ve got no reason to apologize. You’ve been good to us. I hope you and Deena wear those grandkids out.”

“You’re a good man, Mark. I’m real sorry.”

“Take care of yourself.”

I hung up. The house was quiet around me, my whole too-big house. I sat at my desk with Gerald’s number in one hand and the card in the other and did the only thing I knew to do, which was run the math.

December thirty-first was a little over four months away.

Four months before seven years of my family’s whole life was gone.

Rod’s kitchen and Reina and the booth where Dante sat with me and the door where he stood every night and the funeral we held for an ice machine and every closing shift and every Paws and Pours and the exact spot on the floor where I’d stood not two weeks ago and watched a man I love kiss me stupid on top of a queen.

All of it gone.

Not sold to somebody who’d keep it a bar.

Simply gone.

To somebody’s development plans.

I put the card down on the desk.

I’m the guy who fixes things, I thought, desperate to believe. Give me a problem and I’d read the manual and buy the tool and measure it twice and arrive so ready the problem gives up and leaves. That’s who I’d always been. That’s the whole of who I was. Yet, I sat there and looked at the problem, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, find a tool that would work.

You can’t out-stubborn a signed contract.

You can’t rig a ramp under a done deal.

And I couldn’t carry it, either.

That was the other thing that came up, slowly, in the quiet. Whatever this was, it was too big for me to pick up alone and hold on my shoulders the way I held things so nobody else had to.

Because it wasn’t just mine.

That was what I kept landing on, sitting there. The bar wasn’t mine, not really, not the parts that mattered. The building was Gerald’s, now Meridian’s, but the bar, the thing inside the walls, that belonged to all of them, to Finn and Benji and Rod and Jacks and Adrian.

To Dante.

I’d just spent a night telling a man I didn’t run from what’s mine, that I took care of what I kept; and there I was, already sliding toward the old move, the carry-it-alone move, the swallow-it-so-nobody-worries move. I could hear Dante’s voice from the couch telling me to be careful with it, that I don’t have a spare. I understood, sitting at that desk, that I’d just been handed the first real test of whether I meant a word I’d said for most of my life.

I couldn’t protect the people I loved from a thing that was coming for all of them. I had to tell them. I had to put it on the table where everybody could see it. Dante had taught me that himself, last night, in my bed, with both our ghosts on the floor between us.

I looked at the card one more time. Then I picked up my phone, and I didn’t call Finn, and I didn’t call the family, not yet, because there was a right way to do this, and it wasn’t over the phone. I sent one text to all of them, the whole family, to Finn and Benji and Rod and Jacks and Adrian and, at the end, to Dante.

Family meeting. Tomorrow at one o’clock. Everybody. It’s important. Nobody panic—but everybody be there.

Then I sat in my too-big house with the bacon going cold and the best morning of my year turned to ash on the counter. I waited for the phone to start lighting up, and I let myself, just for a minute, be scared.