Page 98 of Bounced!

Chapter 33

Dante

They came at nine. The bar was already full, but they packed in anyway. I stood at the door where I’d stood for two years, working the last night of the only job that ever taught me how to love.

Finn had been right. We didn’t go out quiet. Every light in the place was burning.

Rod had cooked like a man possessed. The food never stopped coming out of that kitchen. The band we’d hired played too loud in the corner.

The whole seven years of Barbacks had come home to say goodbye. Regulars crowded around the bar three deep. Grant Harmon held court by the taps, notebook nowhere in sight, off duty and openly a wreck.

Finn shed his paperwork and tended bar, returning to what had brought him to us in the first place. Chase sat at the counter the entire night, watching Finn, smiling his easy smile.

Benji, with his ring light abandoned for once, was just a man pouring drinks, crying, and laughing in a sequined jacket. Peter sat beside Chase, Benji’s rock whenever his emotions threatened to overtake the night.

Brendan sat beside Peter, waiting patiently for Adrian to appear.

Every face this bar had ever seen stood packed into it one last time, loud and grieving and celebrating and alive.

Mark worked the bar beside Finn, something he hadn’t done since the bar’s earliest months. I watched him do it, and I knew what it cost him, and I let him have it. A man like Mark says goodbye by taking care of everybody right up until the lights went out.

I would say it was a sad night, but it wasn’t, not exactly.

I guess that’s the thing about a wake, the kind Finn meant when he said we’d go out with the lights on. It wasn’t sad. It was full, and it was everything the bar had ever been, turned all the way up, one last time, because we’d decided that if we couldn’t keep the place, we could at least burn it bright enough that nobody in that room would ever forget it once stood.

So we drank, and we told the stories, the good ones. We laughed about the flood, the health inspector who’d fainted, and the Christmas Jacks got the tree stuck in the door and Skyler had to lift the whole thing over his head. We laughed about seven years of stories, passed hand to hand around the bar like something warm and precious. Every tale ended in belly-aching laughter. Most ended in crying, too. Nobody minded either, because that was the whole point of the night, to hold Barbacks all up to the light before the light went dark.

And then, near midnight, Benji climbed onto the bar, which he was not supposed to do, and clinked a glass until the band trailed off and the noise came down.

“Okay,” he said, wobbling and wet-faced, holding on to the beer tap for balance. “Okay, everybody, Adrian made something special for tonight. He wants to show us, and I need every one of you to shut your beautiful mouths, because I’ve seen him practicing and I’m not okay, and neither are you about to be.”

As he struggled his way down, the lights dimmed, and the whole bar dropped into a hush. The loud, warm, roaring room went still.

Adrian walked out into the cleared middle of the floor. A wide circle formed as bodies pressed against one another to give him space. He’d told nobody what this was. Three weeks he’d worked on it, alone, after close, with the door locked. Every time I’d caught sight of him through the kitchen pass, he’d been standing still with his eyes shut and one hand moving slowly through the air. He’d guarded this performance the way I guard things. So none of us knew, walking into that half dark, what we were about to witness.

He came out barefoot, wearing plain black. There was no costume, no sequins, no spectacle, only Adrian, the quiet one, the one who’d gone somewhere far off the day the news came and hadn’t fully come back, the one who said everything by saying nothing. He walked to the center of the floor and stood there with his head down and his arms at his sides. For a moment, he didn’t move at all, and the whole bar held its breath around him.

Then the music began, low, some piano thing with an ache built into the bones of it, and Adrian lifted his head.

And he danced the bar.

I don’t have a better way to say it, and I’m a man who hoards words the way other men hoard money. He didn’t dance about the bar. He danced Barbacks. Seven years of it, flowing through one body on a scuffed floor.

He started small and low to the ground, curled and closed.

A man alone.

And I knew that man.

We all knew that man, because every one of us had walked through the door as that man once, closed and braced and sure we didn’t need anybody.

He danced the coming-in.

The first drink nursed in a corner.

The way you hold yourself when you don’t yet believe you’re allowed to be somewhere.

And then he danced the opening.