“Who’s Dante?” Rod asked.
“The bouncer. He’s reading Tolstoy. He has agreyhound named Dostoyevsky,” I repeated.
There was a pause from the kitchen, during which I could almost hear Rod processing this information through whatever calm, methodical system governed his interior life.
“I’d like to meet him,” Rod said.
“Of course you would. He’s your soulmate, Rod. You’re both quiet men who do important work and appreciate the finer things. You’re going to be best friends. I can see the whole arc.”
“Please don’t plan my friendships.”
“Too late. The vision is clear. I’m seeing book clubs and Sunday dinners. I’m seeing two large, thoughtful men sitting in companionable silence while a greyhound named Dostoyevsky and a beagle named Ruthie sleep at their feet. Though I’d be cautious about letting this grow into anything more than friendship because I think our Dear Leader has a crush, and woe be unto the man who gets between the Soulless Wonder and a crush. Jacks, have you ever seen Mark crush? Has he ever even dated? Does he know how?”
Jacks was smiling.
He wasn’t commenting or answering, just smiling, because Jacks knew that interrupting me during a tangent only extended the tangent and that the most efficient path to the other side was patience.
Thirty minutes later, Mark hired Dante.
This surprised exactly no one, because Mark’s interview face had shifted from “evaluating” to “calculating start date” approximately ninety seconds into the conversation, and the remaining half hour had been a formality conducted for the sake of professional protocol.
Dante’s first shift would be the following Thursday, which was Paws and Pours night, which meant his introduction to Barbacks would involve drunk customers, adoptable animals, a one-eared pit bull, a hairless cat in a carrier behind the bar, and whatever chaos the universe decided to contribute, because the universe had never once looked at a Paws and Pours event and thought,This could use less chaos.
Dante showed up thirty minutes early for his first shift, which was the first indication that he was going to fit in and possibly blow the curve for the rest of us. He wore all black, because bouncers wore all black the way priests wore collars. They were uniforms that communicated purpose before a single word was spoken. His book was nowhere in sight, replaced by a small earpiece and the focused, scanning attentionof a man who had switched from reader mode to professional security guard mode in zero point two seconds flat.
“Dante,” I said, extending a hand across the bar. “Benji. I’m one of the bartenders. I was also the guy pretending not to listen to your interview last week.”
“I know,” he said, shaking my hand with a grip that was firm without being performative. “You’re a terrible spy. You dropped the ice scoop when I mentioned Dostoyevsky.”
“In my defense, you named a greyhound after a Russian novelist. That’s an ice-scoop-dropping revelation.”
“My last dog was named Chekhov. The one before that was Gogol.”
“You have a series of canines?”
“Russian lit is good dog-name territory. They like long vowels, and dogs respond to long vowels.”
“Is that so?”
“I have no idea. I made that up just now, but I really do like Russian literature.”
I laughed, the surprised one, the one that came out before I could shape it. Dante’s face shifted into something that wasn’t quite a smile but was definitely smile-adjacent. It was a warm acknowledgment that the joke had landed, and that he was pleased about it without needing to make a productionof the fact.
I liked him immediately.
This was not unusual for me, because I liked most people immediately, which was both my greatest strength and the reason I’d once accidentally joined a pyramid scheme because the woman selling essential oils had seemed “really genuine.”
Oils aside, I liked Dante in a different way, in the way you like someone you can tell is going to become important to the ecosystem you inhabit and is going to shift the dynamics of a room simply by being in it.
Jacks emerged from the back and stopped when he saw Dante. Jacks always took a moment to assess new people. I guessed it was a holdover from the hockey world he’d entered when he started dating Skyler, where sizing someone up in the first three seconds could save you a lot of trouble.
“Jacks,” I said, nodding toward our resident former footballer. “This is Dante. Dante, this is Jacks. He’s our barback, and he might be the best person in this building and possibly in this city, and I’m including the entire medical profession and the clergy in that assessment.”
Jacks blushed all the way to the tips of his ears, and his head ducked in such an adorably endearing way it made me think of the kittens and General Tso andPeter.
Shit. I thought of Peter.
I shook my head, physically, in front of Jacks and Dante, desperate to get the rattle out or make it stop or . . . shit.
