Page 95

It went about how I expected.

Benji cried. Rod got very quiet and very Spanish, whatever that meant. Jacks asked three times if we were sure, if we’d tried everything, if there was really nothing. Each time it got harder to say, “Yes, we’re sure. Yes, everything. Yes, nothing.” And then, when it had all settled, when the worst of it had been said out loud and the bar had gone silent under the weight of its own ending, Finn set down his rag.

“Right,” he said. “So we’re agreed. It’s over.”

Nobody answered. Nobody had to.

“Then I’ve got one thing to say about how we do this.” He looked around at all of us, and the dry was still there, but under it, something had lit, something with a spine in it. “We are not going out quiet. I’ve watched a lot of places close in this town. They all do it the same way. They get sad, they get small, they turn the music down like they’re embarrassed, and one Tuesday, there’s just brown paper on the windows and nobody even got to say goodbye. That is not happening here, not to this place, not to us.”

“Finn,” Benji started, wet.

“If they want the building, fine, they can have the building. In January. This bar has six weeks left, and we are going to do our worst with the time we have left.” He was building now, the way Finn never did, and the whole family had lifted their heads. “We are going to throw the biggest night this place has ever seen, bigger than the benefit, but not to raise a dime. There’s no dime to raise. We’ll do it just to be what we are, all the way to the end, in front of everybody. How about it? One last night with everyone we love? The whole family, the husbands, the hockey circus, all of it. When they finally lock the doors on us, we’ll have gone out with every light in the place burning and the music so loud they’ll hear it from the condos they build on our grave.”

The bar was quiet for a second.

Then Benji, through the tears, started to grin. “A wake.”

“A wake,” Finn agreed.

“An Irish wake,” Benji breathed, and I watched the idea take him over like a fever, watched our Director of Communications come roaring back from the grave. “Oh. Oh, no. Oh, this is going to be enormous. We’re not doing sad. We’re doing a send-off. Open bar and a band and every person who ever loved this place in one room. Rod, you’re cooking. You’re cooking everything. This is your Sistine Chapel—”

“I cook,” Rod agreed, fierce, already somewhere else, already planning. “I cook like world is ending.”

“Peter can bring the؅—no, never mind. No animals at the wake.” Benji was pacing now, hands going. “Tyler’s going to want to perform. We let him. God help us, this once, we let him—”

“I want to make something.”

Everyone turned.

Adrian stood in the kitchen doorway, still in his apron, looking like he hadn’t slept since October. Our beautiful dancer looked hollowed out, gray around the eyes. He’d barely said a word since the day Mark told us. He’d moved through his shifts like a man underwater, surfacing for nothing. Now, he stood there with his jaw set, wrung out and quiet, but there, all the way there, for the first time in a month.

“A piece,” he said. “A dance for Barbacks.” His voice caught, and he pushed through it. “I used to make things. I haven’t wanted to in—I don’t even know how long. I want to make one for this place. I want to do it at the wake. Something that says what . . . what I can’t say.”

The bar went quiet in a different way than it had all night.

Adrian, who’d gone somewhere far off the day the news landed and hadn’t come back, Adrian, who said everything by saying nothing, was offering the one thing he had, the thing he’d stopped doing since however long ago, hauled back up out of the dark because the bar dying was the thing that finally reached him.

“Yeah,” Mark said, rough. “Yeah, Adrian. Make us something.”

Adrian nodded once and went back into the kitchen. For the rest of the night, I could see him through the pass, not going into his room to change or stretch, just standing still with his eyes closed, one hand moving slowly through the air like he was already hearing music none of the rest of us could.

“Everybody comes,” Jacks said then, quietly, and pulled out his phone. For the first time in days, sweet Jacks was smiling. “I’ll tell Skyler. He’ll tell all of them. Everybody comes.”

I stood at the edge of it, at the door where I always stood, and watched my grieving family turn on a dime into a family planning a party. That was the thing about them, the thing I’d spent two years too scared to let myself love.

They couldn’t stay down.

You could hand them the worst news in the world, but give them ten minutes, and they’d be arguing about the playlist. It wasn’t denial. It was the opposite. They knew exactly what they were losing. They simply decided to lose it the way they’d had it, loud and together and with the lights on.

Mark came and stood next to me. He slid his hand into mine, in front of everybody.

“You okay?” he asked, low.

“No,” I said. “You?”

“No.” He watched Benji assign Rod a food budget that didn’t exist. “But look at them.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”