He cleared the space; I reached for the bourbon.
I grabbed the shaker; he slid the ice.
We moved around each other with the kind of grace that dancers would recognize and that bartenders understood was its own form of choreography.
Between orders, Jacks glanced at the door.
“He’s coming,” I said.
“Who’s coming?”
“Skyler. You know, your husband, the NHL captain you keep checking the door for.”
“I’m not checking the door,” Jacks said, soundingmore like a pouty preteen than a former All-American football star.
“You’ve looked at the door seven times in the last ten minutes. I count things now. Peter’s ruined me.”
Jacks shook his head, but the corner of his mouth did a thing. Two minutes later, the door opened and Skyler Shaw walked in.
I’d gotten used to Skyler at Barbacks over the past year or so, but the sight of him still recalibrated the room. He was six-foot-three, built in the way that professional hockey players are built, and moved through the crowd with the awareness of someone who had spent his adult life being the largest person in most rooms. People parted for him without being asked, the instinctive accommodation that large, gentle men generated in crowded spaces.
He was also, every single time, visibly nervous walking in. Skyler Shaw, who performed in front of twenty thousand screaming people and millions more on television, got nervous walking into the bar where his husband worked.
Jacks came out from behind the bar.
This was a thing he did now, Jacks leaving his post to meet Skyler at the door, exchanging a brief contact and a few quiet words, then leading him to the stool at the end of the bar where the lighting was softer.
“Hey,” Skyler said.
“Hey,” Jacks said.
“Full house.”
“Adrian’s following keeps growing. Mark’s beside himself.”
“Mark’s beside himself,” Skyler repeated, looking at Mark’s booth. “Is that what that expression is? I thought he was just doing math.”
“For Mark, being beside himselfisdoing math. The math is just happier.”
Skyler sat on his stool and looked around the room, taking it in slowly and with respect. His eyes stopped on the back wall, where Finn had hung framed photos from the bar’s first year. There were images of opening night, the Paws and Pours event, the staff in their aprons doing whatever the staff did, and a candid of Jacks behind the bar that Chase had taken. That one photo captured the particular quality of Jacks in his element, steady and warm and entirely himself.
“That photo,” Skyler said.
“Chase took it.”
“It’s exactly right. It’s exactly you.”
Jacks smiled and went back behind the bar. Skyler watched him go the way he always watched him go, with wonder and the quiet acknowledgment that something extraordinary was happening and thatthe best thing to do was simply witness it.
Adrian hopped atop the bar at nine for his second set.
He’d already done a warm-up at eight, a shorter, lower-energy performance that served as an invitation rather than a main event, getting the room’s temperature up without burning through his best material. It was smart pacing, the kind of instinct that separated working performers from weekend hobbyists. Adrian understood that a night was a narrative and that narratives required structure.
His following had clustered near the center of the bar, a group of about fifteen regulars who showed up every Saturday and had developed their own rituals around his performances. There were specific spots they claimed, even more specific drinks they ordered, and a particular cheer they gave when he first climbed up.
They weren’t groupies.
They were fans in the original sense, people who had found an artist they connected with.
