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“Thank you.”
“When you’re ready to dance,” Joe said, lifting his beer, putting a little innuendo on dance, “you know where I am.”
I did a super-awkward smile-laugh-shrug combo that was kind of my trademark and quickly got out of there. More champagne was needed, but where was one of those snappily dressed waiters with trays of it when you needed one?
When we renovated the top floor to make it a fancy-shmancy party room, we’d put in an old bar that the designer unearthed out of a condemned Denver hotel. It was one of those fancy Wild West mahogany bars that had actual bullet holes in it. I found my way to the side of it to get another glass of champagne.
And that’s when I saw him.
Across the bar, sitting with a beer and talking to two of Joy’s glassblowers and Annie in sales, was Fucking Sam Porter.
3
He wasn’t in a suit. Not even a tie. Just a dress shirt that was too big, because he’d lost weight on his last deployment. His jet-black hair was still jarhead short, which revealed the long, jagged scar over his ear (that he got as a kid climbing a tree), and another one on the back of his skull that was still pink and raised (that he got in mysterious circumstances on his last top-secret deployment, and was part of why he was home and part of why he’d lost so much weight). A third scar (something he’d gotten in a bar fight defending—as he claimed—Wes’s honor) sliced through his eyebrow. As I watched, he ran his hands over his head, front to back and back again, the way he always did when he was agitated.
It was the party. He didn’t like crowds.
One of the glassblowers tipped her head back and laughed a real tinkly laugh at something Sam said, which was dubious because Sam was not at all funny, and then she put her hand on Sam’s arm.
Looking away, I drained half my glass of champagne. I heard him laugh. Laugh at something the glassblower said. The rare, low rumble of it cut through the music and the distance and my heart.
I’d been ten when Wes found Sam and brought him home. Or maybe it was Sam who’d found Wes, just when they needed each other. Hardly mattered. They met and became inseparable. Brothers more than friends. And Sam treated me like he was another older brother. Part fierce protector, part ambivalent friend, part annoyed family member. And I was pretty stupid, but I wasn’t so stupid as to say I fell in love with him when I was ten and he was fifteen. (No, I managed to save that for a few years). The first time I saw him he’d had a black eye and a ripped shirt, and he’d eaten fistfuls of the microwave popcorn I’d popped. And then Mom had come home and while Wes and I argued about where to hide Sam, Sam sneaked out the back door taking a silver candlestick with him.
A move that had been so scandalous to me when I was ten. Now I loved it. Loved that he took that candlestick, got some food and his mom some antibiotics for a sinus infection that wasn’t going away and a pair of slick new tennis shoes. I loved that he took that candlestick and came back the next day. For Wes. And more popcorn.
“You can stay,” Wes had told Sam. “But you can’t steal. My mom finds out and she’ll have you arrested or something. So you ask me for anything and it’s yours, but you can’t steal.”
They smacked hands and ran off to do very thrilling and mysterious fifteen-year-old boy stuff, and I’d run after them as fast as my legs could carry me.
And then, suddenly, Sam was just there. More often than not. He asked for money one other time, and Wes and I pooled what we had in our birthday stashes and gave it to him. A thousand bucks.
Wes had said it was for bail for his dad.
Sam never said anything, but six months later he paid us back. I have no idea what he did to make that money.
Yeah, I didn’t fall in love with him then. Or when he enlisted three years later, and Wes and I saw him off. Sam hugged me so hard my feet were lifted up off the ground, and he whispered, all rough and gruff in my ear, “Stay safe, kid.”
Two years later, I didn’t make the cheerleading team in high school and Wes must have told him. And out of the blue Sam wrote me a letter telling me that cheerleaders were lame and the fun at football games was always under the bleachers. Not on the field.
He took the time and the care to try and make me feel better about stupid high school shit by writing a letter from some place in Iraq. I mean…maybe I fell a little in love with him because of that letter. We started playing video games on-line after that.
