"She'll bring a flashlight. She's resourceful."
"Zoe."
"Teague." She takes a drink, still grinning at me. "They need to see your world. They've seen the brunch version. They've seen the avocado toast and the careful answers and you on your best behavior. That's not you. This is you." She gestures at the bar. The neon, the pool table, the Clash poster. "And the shows are more you than this. If they're going to know you, they need to see you where you're real. I want them to know the you that I do."
She's right. Zoe is almost always right about people, about what they need, about the distance between where a relationship is and where it should go. She reads people the way I read rooms, generously, with the assumption that everyone is trying even when they're failing.
But Martin and Patricia in that lot. Martin in his button-down. Patricia in her good earrings. The volume, the crowd, the language in Cal's lyrics. The distance between their Saturday night and this Saturday night is measured in something larger than blocks.
"Fine," I say.
"Really?"
I'm stiff as I nod. I don't like this. But I know we have to do it. They have to see me as I am. And I want them to see Zoe too. The happy, carefree, punk loving girl that she is. "If they're coming, they're coming. I'm not going to pretend it's something it isn't."
"I would never ask you to."
"I know you wouldn't. That's why I said fine."
She grins. She gets off the stool and comes around the bar and kisses me on the cheek and goes back to her stool and the whole thing takes four seconds and a guy at the bar watches the entire operation with the pleased expression of a man who has been watching a story develop from his regular seat and feels personally invested in the outcome.
****
Saturday. Eight o'clock. I'm at the lot early because Britt asked me to help with the PA, which means holding cables while she runs sound check and pretending I understand the difference between monitor mix and front-of-house. The stage is the same as last time. Pallets, plywood, work lights. The banner is new: SCORCHED ORDINANCE, same spray paint, but someone added smaller text underneath that reads EVERY LOT IS A VENUE.
Cal is warming up behind the stage, pacing, doing vocal exercises that sound like a cat fighting a radiator. The guitarist is sitting on an amp eating a granola bar with the concentrated focus of a person who treats food as fuel and nothing else.
I check my phone. Zoe texted ten minutes ago:leaving now. dad is wearing his protest shirt.
His protest shirt. I don't know what this means but I'm choosing to interpret it as a good sign.
Twenty minutes later, they arrive.
I see Zoe first. She's walking through the entrance in her dark jeans and the black t-shirt from last time, already scanning the lot for me. Behind her: Martin, in a faded black t-shirt, and Patricia, in dark jeans and a denim jacket and her good earrings, the gold ones from brunch.
The protest shirt. Martin's shirt has text on the front. I can't read it from here. They get closer, weaving through the crowd that's starting to fill in, and I catch it: white text, old printing, cracked from years of washing. GIL SCOTT-HERON. THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED.
Martin Kimball is wearing a Gil Scott-Heron t-shirt to a punk show. The same Gil Scott-Heron he mentioned at brunch, the same era, the same fight. He pulled this shirt out of wherever he keeps the clothes from before he was a post office worker and a father and a man who maps three routes, and he put it on for tonight.
"Hi," Zoe says, arriving. She takes my hand and it's automatic now, the hand-finding, something neither of us initiates because we both do.
"Mr. Kimball. Mrs. Kimball."
"Martin." He extends his hand. He's done this before, the handshake, at brunch, but this one is different. His grip is the same but his posture is looser. The shirt is doing something tohim, pulling something forward from whatever shelf he put it on thirty years ago. "Good to see you, Teague."
"Good to see you."
Patricia is looking at the lot. She's taking it in piece by piece: the stage, the work lights, the crowd, the charcoal grill, the nacho station, the chain-link fence, the banner. I watch her catalogue each element, filing and sorting, and I can see her organizing the information into a framework that makes sense to her, which is probably a matrix of safety concerns and social observations.
"This is different," she says.
"It's a lot show," Zoe says. "It's where punk happens."
"I can see that." Patricia adjusts her jacket. She's not uncomfortable. She's calibrating. There's a difference, and I recognize it because I do it too, the process of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and adjusting your settings before you commit to being there.
"The nachos are good," I offer. "Pulled pork. Baking sheets."
"Baking sheets," Patricia repeats.
