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“They said it was impressive.” I laughed, and it came out wrong. “The guy called it a hell of a package, then said, ‘No.’ They don’t want a tenant. They want, he called it, ‘clean dirt.’ They’re not even building the thing. They’re flipping the block to somebody else, and that somebody wants it empty.”

Dante came and stood next to me and looked down at the drawings. My Barbacks-that-could-have-been in my own hand, dead on the counter.

“It’s good,” he said quietly. “For the record, it’s really good. You did everything right.”

“Doing everything right doesn’t matter if they don’t want the thing you’re right about.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

And he didn’t try to fix it, because he’d learned I didn’t need fixing. I needed company. He put his arm around me, and we stood there over the ruins of my good idea. After a while, he surprised me by saying, “Keep the drawings.”

“Why? They’re worthless. It’s a dead deal.”

“Keep them anyway.” He didn’t explain. He just squared the pages and slid them into a folder, then he set the folder on the shelf. “You never know when the ground’s going to move again. Sometimes it moves the right way.”

I didn’t believe him. Not that night. My brilliant idea was dead. I’d watched it die politely, and forty thousand dollars was two percent, and December was coming like dark storm clouds over the horizon.

Still, I let him put the drawings on the shelf.

Chapter 29

Dante

October went out gold and gray, the way most Florida Octobers did, the light coming in low and syrupy by late afternoon, the first real cool of the year riding in on the evenings. The cigar shop three doors down had skeletons in the window. Somebody’s porch across the street had gone full graveyard, foam headstones and a fog machine that ran on a timer nobody could find.

The year was tipping toward its end, and I could feel it, that turn in the air that said the warm months were spent and whatever I didn’t finish, I was running out of season to finish it.

Nine weeks. That’s how long it had been since Mark stood behind the bar in the dead hour after lunch and told us we were losing our home. Nine weeks since the wake that turned into a war. Nine weeks of Benji’s segments and Rod’s exhaustion and my notebook filling up and everybody not sleeping. It had all funneled down to this, the last Saturday in October, the day we took our plea to the street.

We got the permit on a Thursday. By Saturday afternoon, we’d taken over the block.

I stood at the top of Seventh at four o’clock and watched a thing I’d built with a notebook become real in front of me. It stopped my breath a little. There were barricades at both ends of the road. The bar’s doors were thrown open, spilling music and light onto the sidewalk. A stage held court at the far corner where a local band was tuning up, the good kind of local, three guys and a woman who played horns like they meant it. Tables stretched the full length, a few under canopies, most naked to the coming night. String lights we’d hung the night before caught the low shimmer of the setting sun.

And the people. God, the people. They came like water finding low ground, families with strollers and old men from the cigar shop and the whole gay half of Ybor. Hundreds of faces I’d never seen, faces of people who’d read about us and come to stand in a street for a bar they barely knew packed in with our regulars, the men who’d made Barbacks viable, made it loud and raucous and friendly, those who’d made it a home.

By five, it wasn’t a benefit anymore. It was a neighborhood.

It poured out onto one closed block on the last Saturday in October, and everybody represented money we needed and proof of the thing I’d been telling Mark for weeks.

We can’t move this to some other location. We could move the bar, but we couldn’t move this.

A reporter found me by the dunking booth.

“Dante Pierce?” The guy was pencil-thin with a face like a beautiful exclamation point. He had his notebook out and a grin that said he’d never once been the least interesting person in a room and didn’t intend to start. “Grant Harmon. I write the city’s culture column. I’ve been a Barbacks devotee since before half these people knew the address. I want the whole story. Walk me through it. Who is everyone?”

A gift, that’s what Grant Harmon was. He was the press angle I’d been building for a month, arriving in tight jeans with a recorder and an infectious smile.

“Walk with me,” I said, preparing myself to walk Grant through my family. He wrote it all down. “Finn O’Brien, the ginger over there, co-owns the place with Mark. Finn’s the dry one, unless he’s had a pint or two, then everything turns Irish and all bets are off.” Finn lifted his glass at us without changing his expression. “That’s Chase, his husband. He’s a lawyer. They’ve been together since before the bar existed. Chase is one of the reasons there is a bar. He did the lease paperwork the night they met.”

“I love a founding myth,” Grant said, scribbling.

“Over there, the tall one pretending he’s not filming everyone, that’s Tyler. He plays for the Lightning. So do the two beasts next to him. The enormous blond is Erik, and the small, angry one who looks like a dwarf from Lord of the Rings is Murph. They come in after games and eat everything our kitchen can make.” I pointed toward the game booths. “The one on his knees losing at ring toss to a nine-year-old is Skyler. He’s the Lightning captain. He’s married to Jacks, our barback. Yes, that Skyler.”

Grant’s pen stopped. “The Lightning captain is losing at ring toss to a child?”

“Badly.”

“This might be the best day of my life. I need a photographer.”