One Last Thing Before I Go (20 page)

He nods to himself for emphasis, then throws the car back into gear and starts driving again.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as an afterthought.

“Don’t be,” Oliver says.

“It was a good speech,” Silver agrees.

“Really? I thought maybe I took it a bit too far with the whole pissing-on-your-graves thing.”

“Nah,” Silver says. “That was fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. You’re good.”

“It was really more of a metaphor,” Jack says, and something in the way he says it sends Casey into a fit of tearful laughter that lasts for a good half mile or so.

CHAPT
ER 49

T
onight feels complicated.

For one thing, Silver is seeing stars. Not stars, really, but glimmers, like the air is wearing sequins, so from his seat at the bar between Oliver and Jack, everything in the room is glittering. For another, he is on his third glass of bourbon, neat.

He has never been a beer drinker, has always found it to be a sluggish buzz. He sticks to bourbon, always neat, and has learned through trial and mostly error to start watering them down after his third. But still, three shots of Noah’s Mill can give him that warm flush, that sense of shifting, as if someone has been making minor adjustments to the gravity in the room.

So there’s that.

Also, Lily is sitting on a stool at the center of the small, jerry-rigged stage in the corner of the bar, strumming her guitar and singing a soulful, acoustic rendition of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong,” which he finds both beautiful and random. He is here at her invitation; it was the last thing she said to him as he clumsily backed away from her in the bookstore.

“I’m singing at Dice tomorrow night. I don’t get much of a crowd. You should come by.”

He had sensed and been moved by the forced nature of her seemingly casual invitation, tossed out there like it was of no consequence, and now here he is, simultaneously hopeful and angry at himself for being so. Hope has never been a friend to him.

Tonight is also a little bit tricky because Miranda, the mother of Jack’s bastard son, Emilio, is tending bar, and she is clearly not happy to see Jack here. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Silver thinks. And Jack’s not making it any easier, staring her down over the lip of his beer mug.

And Oliver has come along, not so much to provide Silver with much-needed moral support but because today he faced his son for the first time in a decade and met his grandsons for the first time, and he needs to drink his pain, hope, and fear into submission.

And Denise will be getting married this weekend, and the date looms totemic in Silver’s mind. He doesn’t know if that will be the best or worst thing that could possibly happen to him, if it will save his life or be the thing that puts him over the edge.

So, yeah, it’s complicated.

Time is bending. It’s slowing down and speeding up with no rhyme or reason. Lily finishes the Pat Benatar and starts singing Chrissie Hynde, but suddenly she’s finishing that one and Silver can’t remember hearing the song through. Now she’s playing “She Talks to Angels,” by the Black Crowes—which for some reason is required in every acoustic set played in every bar across the country—and he’s hearing every note, seeing the chords as colors in the air around them, flashing and changing through the glittery air.

She never mentions the word addiction, in certain company.

Her hair is down tonight. It’s the first time he’s seen it like that, and she’s wearing a bit of makeup, and a dress and boots that stop just below her knees. Silver is entranced, in a way that makes him pray to God, to himself, to whomever might come through, that he find within himself some basic level of social competence tonight, and maybe, from some forgotten corner of his personality, just the faintest hint of charm. He doesn’t know that he was ever charming, but he suspects he may have once been at least a little bit.

She’ll tell you she’s an orphan, after you meet her family.

Lily’s voice, high and soft, pushes past the tin buzz in his ears to land softly in his head. The air shimmers, giving everything a dreamlike quality. Oliver tosses back another shot of Maker’s, and Jack curses at Miranda under his breath.

“You got something to say?” Miranda says to him, her voice filled with the threat of violence. She is a short, coffee-colored woman with exquisite bone structure and thick dark hair that falls around her like a mane, and she moves behind the bar with a liquid grace, ducking the lame attempts at protracted flirtation from her patrons, ensuring tips with her easy laugh and the low-cut sleeveless T-shirt proclaiming the name of the bar in bright pink letters. It’s easy to see what it was that pulled Jack in.

“No. Nothing,” Jack says, slapping down an excessive tip onto the bar. “Another beer, please.”

“That guy giving you a problem?” someone says from farther on down the bar. They all look down to see the guy, late twenties, hair locked into place with pomade like it’s the ’50s, shoulders and biceps rolling off each other beneath his tight T-shirt.

“She’s my baby mama,” Jack calls down to him.

Silver watches Lily sing, transfixed. It’s ridiculous, the love and tenderness he feels filling him up. He wonders if it might be yet another stroke, but then reminds himself that there’s been something about her since he first saw her, more than a year ago, singing in the bookstore. He’s been around long enough to know that men, or at least men like him, can fall in love like that. He sees something in her, senses it from her crooked smile, from the way she opens her eyes between verses to look out at the back of the room, from the soft uncertainty of her voice, from the songs she chooses. He knows her without knowing her.

“Shut the fuck up,” Jack says, although Silver’s pretty sure no one has said anything.

“Take it easy,” he hears himself saying.

“Peter and Max,” Oliver says, naming his two grandsons. “Max looks just like Tobey did at that age.”

The conversations have all started to blend together.

“I’m just trying to talk to you.” Jack.

“Really, the spitting image.” Oliver.

“Back off, Jack. I’m not playing.” Miranda.

“Tobey looked older than I thought. Did he seem old to you?” Oliver.

“You used to like playing with me.” Jack.

“Go easy, man.” Silver.

And all the while, Lily’s voice is filling his ears as she sings about talking to angels. It is, he thinks for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, the perfect song for her to sing.

“Shut up.”

“Two boys. Nice-looking kids.”

“Fuck you.

“Whatever.”

Silver can’t follow the various threads of these conversations anymore. He’s always been something of a lightweight when it comes to drinking, has often thought of alcoholics with a certain wistful admiration. He could never get there. Dizzy after three drinks wouldn’t really bode well for binge drinking. Whatever problems alcoholics might have, commitment isn’t one of them. And in this respect, he feels inferior.

Up onstage, Lily starts to play something that he can’t place right away. A light, dragging bass line is integrated into her strumming. It’s only once she starts to sing that he realizes she’s playing “Rest in Pieces.” He has never imagined the song this way, and he is stunned by the simple elegance she has brought to the silly pop song he wrote. Was it always there, waiting to be discovered, or has she imbued it with new properties it never before possessed? It seems to him that this is a profoundly important question, one with far-reaching implications, but he is too addled and buzzed and keyed up and lost and found and in love and terrified and tired to figure it out just now.

Lily finishes playing and stands up to a warm round of applause. It was the last song of her set. He wonders what, if anything, that means. He is waiting for her when she comes down from the stage, carrying her guitar. She doesn’t seem surprised to see him waiting for her, which he decides he will take to be a positive sign.

“That was really beautiful,” he says.

She smiles and looks down at her boots for a second. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.”

“So, you know who I am, then.” For some reason, he is momentarily thrown by this idea.

She looks at him like he might be joking, sees that he isn’t, and she smiles. “You’re humble,” she says. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“Not really.”

“That’s exactly what a humble person would say.”

He looks at her and thinks she is beautiful in a way that goes beyond her looks. She is weathered but somehow unbowed, or barely bowed, or maybe she is bowed, but has a sense of humor about it. Time will tell. But she is possessed of an innate kindness that he sees almost like a color coming off of her.

And she is just so pretty.

“You seem like a very kind person,” he says.

She laughs, surprised. “You don’t have much of a game, do you?”

“No. I guess I don’t.”

She meets his gaze and holds it, and he holds hers, and it’s an effort for both of them, and he feels a thrill building. The air shimmers between them like fairy dust. He wonders if she sees it too. Something is happening here. There are words he can say right now that will elevate them from strangers to something more, and he would give anything to know what those words are. And then they come to him, and he smiles, knowing that he will say them, and she will hear them, and the universe will change in a profound and permanent way.

And that’s when Jack sucker-punches the muscle-head at the bar, and a minor fracas breaks out.

* * *

No one has patience for another stupid bar fight, and the whole thing fizzles fairly quickly. The guy Jack hit has youth and size going for him, but Jack has Silver, who steps in, looking to break it up, and ends up being knocked off balance and falling down against the bar in a fuzzy haze. There follows a good deal of shouting and jostling, and then, suddenly, in the midst of the chaos, he sees Lily’s face, hovering above his, the hint of a wry smile at the corners of her mouth.

“That was fast,” she says.

“The good fighters always finish fast.”

Her laugh is instant and lovely. Silver looks up at her in a way that makes her look at him funny. “What?” she says.

“I want to kiss you.”

She grins. “This doesn’t really seem like the right time.”

Behind them, he is vaguely aware of Jack cursing a blue streak as management drags him out of the bar.

“It will after the fact,” he says. “When you tell the story.”

“So there’s going to be a story? That must be some kiss you’re planning.”

“It might be my last one.”

“What, are you dying or something?”

“I might be. It’s not clear yet.”

She looks at him, really looks at him, trying to understand the things about him that he himself doesn’t, and he finds himself smitten anew by her simple sincerity.

“Well then,” Lily says. “I guess you had better get to it.”

She offers him her hand, and he climbs to his feet. The room wobbles around him for a minute before becoming completely still. He looks at Lily. She has been lonely. He recognizes this as only another lonely person can—that small, almost invisible edge in her expression that comes from too many solitary meals and movies, too much time spent in worthless introspection, too much time spent regretting a past that can’t be undone. This is someone who is ready to be loved, he thinks.

“I like you,” he tells her.

“It’s your funeral,” she says with a grin.

“You have no idea.” He pulls her close exactly the way someone with confidence would, and he kisses her mouth. Her lips collapse against his in a manner that feels like surrender and conquest simultaneously, and he is flooded with a sweet desire he hasn’t felt in years. When it ends, the room wobbles around him for a minute before becoming completely still.

And then he does it again.

* * *

He loved a girl once; for no particular reason, just a lot of little ones thrown together. Isn’t that what love is, anyway? The sum of a million intangibles that all come together in just the right way at just the right time? Like conception. Or the universe. He loved her before he met her, which isn’t as romantic as it sounds, because for some people, loving at a distance comes naturally. And then they did meet, and when she smiled at him through the shimmering air he felt it in his belly. He took her home with him—they didn’t discuss it, it just became their presumed destination—and the sex was sex: exciting, intimate, and awkward. These things take time. But afterward, after they had dispensed with it like a formality, they lay in bed speaking in low voices, confessing any sins that came to mind, absolving each other the way only near strangers can. Then it was morning, and she was dressing to leave, and as he kissed her good-bye, he was overwhelmed by the notion that they were, in fact, still strangers to each other, and he couldn’t for the life of him see how to get from there to somewhere else. The whole notion of building a relationship from scratch seemed like a vast and complex enterprise, the thought of which was instantly exhausting. And yet . . .

In spite of the strangeness of it all, of the way they seemed to find even small talk a strain in the harsh light of day, of her quickness in leaving and his desire to be alone with his fears, in spite of all of that, he felt something he hadn’t felt in years, a warm energy spreading across his chest, filling him. It seemed equally possible that he might love her forever or might never see her again, but that energy was incontrovertible proof, long overdue, that there was still some juice in that creaky, battered heart of his.

CHAPTER 5
0

S
ad Todd is going home.

They sit in the lobby, Silver, Jack, and Oliver, as Todd moves back and forth, overseeing the two porters who are moving his possessions out to the small U-Haul he’s got idling in the driveway. A number of the other men have come down to watch the proceedings. They are all similarly cynical and awestruck.

Reconciliation. The impossible dream.

“So she took him back,” Jack says.

“It happens,” Oliver says.

“She doesn’t need her husband back. She needs reinforcements. I mean, you’ve seen those kids, right?”

“Maybe she missed him,” Silver says.

Jack looks at Silver and raises his eyebrows archly. “You’re just not seeing things clearly because you got laid last night.”

Silver smiles. He can’t really argue. He is still seeing Lily’s smile every time he closes his eyes, can still smell her and taste her.

“And you got your ass kicked.”

Jack is sporting a nasty laceration under his eye and a bandage across his knuckles.

“Hey, I gave as good as I got.”

“How was it with that girl?” Oliver asks him.

“It was good.”

He doesn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he has no idea how good it was. It was something, and whatever that something was, it was better than the nothing that’s been his default for the last seven years.

Sad Todd rolls a cart with his computer supplies across the lobby. Silver pictures the den that will be reclaimed, can feel the sense of renewal that will permeate Sad Todd’s house, and he’s happy for him.

“He’ll be back inside of a year,” Jack says.

“Shut up, Jack,” Oliver says. “Let’s give him this moment.”

“Guess we can’t call him Sad Todd anymore,” Silver says.

The loading is finished, and a handful of men gather around to say their good-byes. Silver, Jack, and Oliver join them, shaking Todd’s hand, wishing him well. Stay in touch, Todd says. He does not take a last look around the lobby, doesn’t take a sentimental pause, a last breath in these sad environs. He just heads out to the driveway, throws the U-Haul into gear, and drives off.

Sad Todd has left the building. They will never see him again. And in no time at all, he will be largely forgotten. Life swallows people up like that.