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“Don’t,” I told him.

He didn’t. He’s a good dog. He put his head back down and left me alone.

I picked my book back up and read the same paragraph four times. I have read a great many love stories. It’s a strange thing, at thirty-nine, to feel one open its eyes and look back at you. I put the book down, went to bed, and didn’t sleep for a while. The not-sleeping was, I already suspected, only the beginning of a bill coming due.

Chapter 10

Mark

Icame in the next day looking, by Benji’s later and frequently repeated account, “like a coat that had been left out in the rain and then worn to a funeral.”

God, I felt worse than that.

Four-and-a-half bourbons was nothing if you’re twenty-five. I hadn’t been twenty-five in twenty years. I’d slept in my clothes. I’d found my keys in the refrigerator, of which I had no memory. Apparently, truck keys pair well with a brick of gouda.

I had pushed through the door into the bar hoping for a quiet corner, a coffee, and a solid ninety minutes of nobody speaking to me above a whisper, but Benji was already behind the bar, and Benji had seen me coming through the window.

“Oh,” he said, lighting up like a slot machine, “oh, this is a gift. This is a present. Somebody baked me a cake and the cake is you, Markolicious.”

“Benji.”

“No, don’t. Don’t rush this. Let me look at you.” He came around the well, delighted, detailing the wreckage. “All right, I’m channeling my inner Dione, and I’m picking up that you slept in that shirt, you found your keys somewhere terrible, and . . . yes, spirits? . . . oh! You’ve got the face of a man who called somebody at midnight and is now working out how much of the conversation he has to apologize for.” He gasped, joy compounding. “Who’d you call? Oh, my God. Who drove you home? I know you didn’t Uber. That wouldn’t be very Mark of you. Tell me it was—”

“For fuck’s sake, Benj,” I growled, rubbing my temples.

“Benji,” snapped a voice from the end of the bar. It sounded like a whip-crack, and the whole bar suddenly changed temperature. Dante hadn’t raised his voice—he never did—but he’d looked up from his book and his tea and smacked one word down on the counter between us like a flat hand on a chest. There was something under his voice, too, a level, unhurried something that I’d only ever heard him aim at drunks who were two seconds from becoming a problem. I’d never once heard it aimed inside the family.

Benji froze like he’d been turned into glass.

“I was just—”

Dante glared at him. That was all. He just stared with his unreadable, dark steadiness. He let it sit, and whatever passed between them passed in a language I was too hungover to fully translate, but the gist was legible even to me.

The man is hurting, and he’s in no shape, and you will not go at him, not this morning.

Benji’s mouth closed. His hands came up, small, surrendering. He went back behind the bar and found something to polish that didn’t need polishing.

Dante set his book face down, marking his place with a coaster. He stood, crossed to me, and took me by the arm, not roughly, not like a bouncer. He got a hand around my bicep, the same bicep a glittered child had squeezed like a blood-pressure cuff twelve hours before. Dante’s hand didn’t appraise anything. It just steadied. He turned me and walked me across the room to my usual booth in the back corner, the one I use for paperwork. He sat me down in it, and then, to my genuine surprise, slid into the booth across from me.

It’s important to note, Dante never sat with people.

The man took his tea standing, or at his own end of the bar, alone, with Tolstoy. I could count on no hands the number of times I’d seen him fold himself into a booth across from another human being for the purpose of simply sitting across from them. And he did it like it was nothing, like it was just a Tuesday.

“Stay right there,” he ordered. “I’ll get you water.”

He also brought me, without asking, a plate of dry toast Rod kept for exactly this genre of morning. His hands full, he somehow also managed to carry a mug of coffee, black, with one Splenda. My head hurt too much to register how he’d known my preference. He spread everything out in front of me, then strode back to the bar to collect his book and mug. Settled back in the booth, he opened his book and read, while I put myself slowly back together over toast.

It occurred to me then, dimly, through the fog, that I’d never seen him do any of this before. He’d shut Benji down on my behalf (a miracle if there ever was one), walked me to a booth, and sat with me. I got about half a thought into what it all might’ve meant before my head throbbed hard enough to end the inquiry. I decided Dante was just being decent, because Dante was decent, and that was as far as a man in my condition had any business reasoning.

“Thank you,” I muttered when the water and coffee and toast had done enough that words were possible again. “For last night . . . and this. I don’t, uh . . . I don’t usually call people at midnight.”

“I know.”

“Finn was on Silent Mode.”

“I know that, too.” He turned a page. “You told me. Several times.”

“Did I?” I had no memory of it. In fact, I had no memory of a lot of it, which was its own small mercy. “What else did I say?”