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I’d priced out subfloor moisture barriers for fun. I had opinions about joist spacing. I was a guy who saw scaffolding and thought, That’s beautiful. And yet, I couldn’t, standing in that hangar, locate a single sentence to say about an ice machine with a loyalty program, because the part of my brain that handled words had simply lain down and given up.

Dante, meanwhile, had gone quiet in a different way than usual. He’d walked up to the thing and was looking at its little glowing screen with its nine cube profiles scrolling past in a demo loop, half sphere, half diamond, half nugget, an ice machine performing for an audience of one enormous, unreadable man.

And I watched the corner of his mouth twitch.

“Rod’s going to fall in love,” Dante muttered.

It was so quiet and so certain and so exactly, precisely true that I laughed before I’d decided to. Dante was right. Rod, who’d wept over the last machine, Rod who had a seven-year love affair with a box that made one kind of ice cube, our Rod was about to meet a machine that made gourmet spheres and texted at 2 a.m. It was going to be one of the great romances of his professional life, and there would be no talking him out of it, and we were going to have to watch.

“He’s going to name it,” I said.

“He’s going to name it something with a title,” Dante agreed. “Duke. Baron. Something with land.”

“Naa, Benji did the title thing,” I said. “Rod’s going to give it a romantic name, something he thinks sounds like making love.”

“To ice?”

“To ice.” I laughed again.

“Benji’s going to write a birth announcement or some crazy-ass shit,” Dante said, and there it was again, that dry certainty, the man three moves ahead of a family he pretended not to be studying. I had the sudden, vivid sense that Dante Pierce had been quietly cataloguing every one of us for two years the way I catalogued lumber. He had simply never mentioned that he had the whole inventory memorized.

“Six hundred ten pounds,” Cyril said, back to business now that his sermon had landed. He gestured at a hand truck leaning against the wall with a motion that was more dare than help. “You boys got a plan?”

“We’ve got a truck,” I said.

“That’s not a plan, son. That’s a vehicle.”

Chapter 7

Dante

Benji was waiting on the sidewalk when we pulled in.

He was holding a sign. I couldn’t read it yet, but I could read him, which was a skill I’d never had to work at with Benji. The boy broadcasted on every frequency all at once.

In that particular moment, he was vibrating.

Whatever the sign said, he’d made it in the two hours we’d been gone, and he’d made it with the total commitment he brought to everything.

“Brace yourself,” Mark said, killing the engine.

“I’ve been bracing since the fairgrounds.”

The sign, once we were close enough, read, “WELCOME HOME, BABY,” in letters cut from what looked like a flattened case of Modelo. Each was colored in with a different marker. Below, in Benji’s careful script, it read, “(It’s a machine. Yay!).”

“We didn’t know the gender,” Benji explained before either of us had time to ask, “so we went robotic-neutral. We’d never want to offend our new baby before he . . . um . . . it . . . made it into the kitchen.”

Behind him, our bar family had assembled.

Finn leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed. He wore the expression of a man who’d decided to allow this but was still questioning his own judgement. Jacks stood a little to the side holding a bundle of blue and pink balloons, looking, as he often did, like a man who’d agreed to a plan before fully hearing it.

In the center of the sidewalk, hands clasped in front of him, waiting with the still and terrible patience of an expectant father, stood Rod.

I’d watched Rod Silva work a Saturday rush without breaking a sweat. I’d seen the man plate two hundred covers and never once raise his voice. He was the calmest professional in the building, myself included; and yet, he stood on the sidewalk with his jaw working and his eyes already darting, because in the bed of my truck, strapped upright and gleaming in the Florida sun, was his new ice machine.

“Oh,” Rod said softly when I dropped the tailgate and he caught his first glimpse. “Oh, she’s beautiful.”

“She?” Mark murmured to me, not quite under his breath.