Jacks put his hand on my shoulder. It was a brief, firm contact, the physical vocabulary of a man who expressed support through his mere presence ratherthan words.
“You’re happy,” he said.
“I’m wrecked. I’m so completely wrecked. I’m emotionally compromised in every direction. I can’t cut limes. I can’t count bottles. I smiled at Dale, and Dale isn’t even working today. We’re without Dale. We’re Daleless.”
For the third time in as many minutes, Jacks snorted.
“You’re happy, Benji,” he said. “You’re allowed to be happy, especially here, with us.”
I looked at the transparent lime.
At the garnish tray.
Then at the bar, where, an hour earlier, a man with a tattoo about dance had moved with a kind of honest, full-bodied joy that I recognized from the best version of myself. It was the version that had existed before my knee blew out and the half second Peter had named. It was the version of me that Peter was slowly, carefully, through Post-it notes and stove lights and folded boxers, helping me find again.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m happy.”
“Good,” Jacks said, his meaty paw shifting to pat my cheek as though I was some wayward child. “Now cut the limes at a functional width. Nobody wants a transparent lime in their drink.”
“A transparent lime is an aesthetic choice.”
“A transparent lime is a cry for help. We need wedges, not wedgies.”
And just like that, I laughed, and my nerves eased, and a broad smile returned to my lips.
I re-cut the limes. Jacks restocked the well. Rod made soup.
The afternoon sun flooded through the floor-to-ceiling windows and drifted across the bar floor.
Somewhere in West Tampa, a man named Adrian Voss was probably telling his grandmother he got the job. She was probably already planning what to bake for Saturday.
The whole machinery of what was coming next was already in motion, the way it always was, long before the people inside it realized they were even moving.
Chapter 30
Peter
Two weeks had passed, and I’d became someone I didn’t recognize.
Recognize was too harsh a term.
Remember.
I barely remembered the person I was becoming . . . or returning to . . . or something.
It was all very confusing.
But not dramatically so, and not in the ways that movies depict a transformation, with montages and sudden revelations and a man staring at his reflection and seeing a stranger. The changes were small and incremental, the kind that accumulate without announcement until you look up from your coffee one morning and realize that the person holding the mug is not the person who held it a month ago.
I slept through the night, every night, which was something I’d never done successfully often before. But I’d done so for fourteen consecutive nights, astreak that I hadn’t achieved since before David’s diagnosis. I attributed this to, with clinical precision, the presence of another body in my bed. The data was clear. Benji’s weight on the mattress, his breathing beside me, and his arm that inevitably draped across my chest during the night were inputs that produced a parasympathetic response that my nervous system had apparently been waiting two years to receive.
I slept the way Hiro slept after a good day.
But it wasn’t just my sleep that changed.
Benji and I watched television on the couch, which was an activity I had not engaged in since recently, because the couch was a piece of furniture designed for multiple people. Using it alone had felt like eating at a table set for two.
Benji sitting on the couch changed the couch.
