Page 92 of Bounced!

I’ll tell you what a man does when he decides he’s going to move millions of dollars by himself.

He fails.

That’s what he does.

But God, the ways he fails are spectacular.

I started with the banks again, the real way this time, not the hopeful plea I’d made in September. I put on my one good suit, and I sat across desks from people half my age, and I made my case.

They were kind. That was the theme of November. Everybody was so kind.

Still, “A bar’s a bad bet, Mr. Delgado, especially a bar with a lease running out in six weeks and no building to secure the note against. You’re asking us to lend millions against goodwill. We can’t lend against love.”

“I know,” I said, desperate to hide my desperation. “I know you can’t. I just didn’t have anything else to—”

Except I did.

I had one thing.

My house was paid off.

Wes and I had killed the mortgage the year before he left, one of those milestones we celebrated with a nicer bottle than usual while standing on the back porch. Then he was gone, and the paid-off house stayed. It was mine, the one solid thing I owned outright in the whole world. Owning a house was my father’s idea of what a man was, a roof he owned, no one able to take it from him. I’d finally gotten there at forty-something and then rattled around alone inside my own achievement.

I could borrow against a paid-off house. In Tampa’s housing market, I could borrow a lot.

I did the math a hundred times. Every time, it came out the same. Every time, I told myself no. Every time, the “no” got quieter, because here was a tool, here, finally, was a tool I could use.

It wasn’t enough of one, though. A line against the house wouldn’t get us millions. It wouldn’t come close, but it would get me a piece, a real piece, six figures of real piece. I thought, Maybe six figures of my own skin is the thing that’ll turn a pile of other people’s contributions into a number somebody will take seriously. Maybe mine is the log that jams the rest of the damn thing into a bridge.

I grabbed my phone to call Finn, because I always called Finn. He was my best friend and partner in all this. But I set it down without punching the screen, because I knew what he would say if I told him.

They’d all say the same thing.

Dante would say no, flat, final, in that quiet voice that didn’t argue because it didn’t have to. He’d say, “You are not putting your house on this, Mark, absolutely not. That’s the one thing that’s yours.” Finn would say no with more swearing. It would be passionate and determined and a little funny, my leprechaun best friend, his feet stomping. The whole family would circle up and protect me from the thing I wanted to do, the way I’d spent seven years circling up to protect them—and they’d be right. I’d let them talk me out of it, and then I’d have failed the one test that mattered, which was whether I’d give everything for them, down to the roof over my own head, for the people I loved.

So I didn’t tell them.

I’m not proud of it.

I sat in a loan office on a Tuesday in November, and I signed my house into the fight. I didn’t tell a soul. Not Finn. Not the family. Not even Dante.

That was the one that truly sat wrong.

Dante had spent months teaching me, patient as water on stone, that a man doesn’t have to carry the whole weight alone. He’d preached that hoarding the load and calling it love was just pride wearing a nicer coat. And there I was, going behind his back to stake my house in secret, doing the exact thing he’d supposedly cured me of on the grounds that some things a man does carry alone.

I told myself it was different. I told myself sometimes the protector needs protecting, too. The only way I could think to protect him was to not let him stop me. I told myself I’d tell him after. When it worked. When I could set the whole thing at his feet already done and say, “Look what I saved. Look what I did for you.”

I told myself a lot of things on that back porch in November.

The paperwork went through on a Thursday. The money was real. It was over a half a million dollars against the house my father would’ve said made me a man, quietly wired into an account nobody knew about.

It felt like the first solid ground I’d stood on in weeks.

And it didn’t last.

Because the house, on top of the benefit and the family’s scraped savings and every dollar any of us could put our hands on, came to a number I finally let Finn add up. In the office, with the door shut, in the second week of November.

I made him say it twice.