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Every heartfelt sentence I sent went out pocked with typos, because the keyboard was built for a hummingbird, and I have the hands of a man who once bent a rebar tie by accident.

Eventually, the penny dropped, and it dropped the way pennies do, all at once and too late. A man four hundred feet away, after I’d asked him a warm and genuine question about his weekend, sent me a photograph. It was not of his weekend. It was not of his shoulder, either. It was a full and frank and well-lit account of exactly what he was hoping the evening would hold, composed with a confidence I could almost admire.

I set the phone face down on the table.

“Oh,” I said, to my empty kitchen. “Oh!”

The gay magazine had not advertised a dating app. It was sending me back to the bathhouse, only now the bathhouse was in my pocket, where it could follow me to the grocery store or the bar or wherever I might go—and it knew exactly how far away everyone was at all times.

The mask logo made a great deal more sense then.

I’d built a heartfelt little profile about short ribs and belonging and put it up, earnest as a church flyer, in the one room in America where nobody had come to read—or barbeque.

I did, in the interest of due diligence, go on two “dates” before I gave up.

The first was a man named Grant. In his messages, he had seemed normal to the point of being a miracle. He typed in full sentences, had a face in his photo, and suggested we meet in a wine bar, an actual public establishment with tables and lighting. I’d shown up, hopeful, in my one good shirt.

Grant was pleasant for eleven minutes, then he asked what I did for work. I told him I owned a bar, and something behind his eyes began to compute. By the time the wine came, he had a business proposal for me involving his cousin’s tequila brand and a “very simple” distribution arrangement that would “basically run itself.”

I left before the second glass.

He texted afterward to ask if I’d at least think about the tequila.

The second date was worse, and I only have myself to blame. His profile had a red flag I chose to read as charming. He’d described himself as a “high-energy connector.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I found out over dinner. It meant he didn’t stop talking, not once, not to breathe, not while I answered a question he’d asked, not while the waiter tried four times to take our order.

I deleted the app in my driveway, thumbs and all. It took me four tries to find the delete button, because my hands were too big for the screen even at the end, even in defeat.

Then I sat in my truck for a minute, the way I’d sat in my truck outside a bathhouse a week before, and I noticed I was in the exact place I’d started. Only now, I’d confirmed it with data. I’d run the experiment properly. I’d used the tool, and the tool had told me, in a wall of torsos and a man selling tequila, that the thing I was looking for wasn’t out there in the numbered dark.

I picked up my phone.

It had twelve percent battery, no notifications, and a contact list I already knew by heart.

There was exactly one place I wanted to be, and it wasn’t a date or scrolling through an app or in a steam room. It was a bar in Ybor with a broken ice machine and a pelican problem and a man who read Tolstoy by the door.

I started my truck, because the one thing I still knew how to do, reliably, at any hour, with hands too big for anything delicate, was drive myself back to the people who already knew me.

Chapter 4

Mark

The procession had already reached the kitchen by the time I understood we were having one.

Benji led it. Of course he did.

He’d fashioned, from a stack of black cocktail napkins and what I sincerely hoped was not the good bar tape, a veil, which hung from the crown of his head to somewhere around his collarbone. It fluttered gently whenever the ceiling fan came around, giving him the look of a widow at a wedding she was pretending to enjoy. He moved slowly, hands folded, chin high, at the head of a line that consisted of every person I employed.

Behind him, Jacks pushed a dolly. On the dolly, wrapped in a bar towel that had been arranged with care, sat the ice machine. It was dead, decommissioned, being wheeled to its final rest by a procession that was set to music, because Jacks had found something on his phone that was a dance track and recognizably a funeral dirge at the same time, a slow, mournful, four-on-the-floor requiem that had no business existing and that Finn was enjoying more than any human being had ever enjoyed anything.

“What in the ever-loving gay hell,” I asked, “is happening?”

“Shh.” Benji didn’t turn around. “We’re grieving.”

Finn wiped his eyes, which were wet from laughing, and put a hand on my arm. “Ah, you’re just in time. You’ll want to be here for this.”

“I have a bar to run.”

“You have a bar to bury,” Benji corrected, gliding to a stop in the center of the kitchen, where he turned, veil settling, and folded his hands at his waist. “Places, everyone. Gather ’round. Mark, you can stand by Rod. He needs you.”