Page 51 of Taking Savannah
"No speeches here. Bar policy."
"Good policy."
We drink until my head spins, and I need to sit for a bit.
"Savannah."
"Yeah."
"I told you first. Not Leone, not Claudio, not Emilio. You." She looks at me and her eyes are red-rimmed and glassy. "You're behind the bar and you don't bullshit me and you don't make me explain myself. I sat down and you poured and you waited and you let me get there on my own. I can't do that with the people I grew up with. They need things from me. You just need me to sit on the stool and drink the whiskey."
"That's what bartenders are for."
"It's more than that."
I know it is. I know it because Gigi was the same thing for the women in our neighborhood. The ones who came into the bar after their shifts, after their fights, after their days, and sat on those stools and told her things they wouldn't tell their sisters. The bartender is the confessor. Neutral ground. The person who holds the secret and doesn't weaponize it.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," I say. "That's yours to share when you're ready."
"I'll be ready tomorrow."
"Then tomorrow."
She nods and finishes her drink.
"My father told me something, the night before he died. He said he was proud of me for finding my own way and not caving when he pressured me. He'd never said that before. Not once in twenty-six years." Her voice is calm, but her hands are shaking, just barely, a tremor in her fingers that she'd kill me for noticing. "And I keep thinking about how you can spend your whole life waiting for someone to say one thing, and they finally say it, and it's too late for it to matter the way it should. Because they're dying when they say it, and you can't tell if they mean it or if dying just made them generous."
I don't have an answer for that. I'm not even sure one exists.
"Gigi told me she loved me every day," I say. "Every single day. When I was eight and when I was sixteen and when I was twenty-two and holding her hand in hospice. She said it so much it became background noise, and I didn't hear it properly until she was gone and the silence where it used to be was the loudest thing in my life."
Dahlia looks at me. The bartender and the Don's daughter, standing across a polished counter in the middle of the night, both carrying love they got too late or took for granted.
"See ya later, Sav."
"Yeah, try to get some sleep."
She walks out. Her boots on the corridor floor, fading until the sound is gone and I'm alone.
I wipe the counter because my hands need a job. I cap the bottles. I push the stools in. I fold the rag and set it on the shelf, and then stand in the empty bar and press the bottle cap into my palm and think about secrets.
Aurelio's son. A whole person out there, made from the blood that ran through the veins of the man I just watched get buried.
I wonder what he’s like. If he’s like Aurelio, or if he’s like Dahlia. Do they share the same mother?
There’s so many thoughts rolling through my head, but only one sticks out to me.The sins of the father don't belong to the child, but the consequences sure as hell do.
With a sigh, I turn off the light and close the door before walking down the corridor to Emilio's room.
He's awake and sitting on the bed, phone in his hand, probably texting Claudio, probably still processing the folder, probably doing everything except sleeping because sleep requires a brain that's willing to shut up and Emilio's brain has never shut up for a single second in its entire existence.
"Dahlia was at the bar," I say, closing the door behind me.
"Yeah? What did she want?"
"To drink. And to tell me something." I pull off my shoes, climb into bed beside him. "She'll talk to Leone tomorrow. She's got things he needs to hear."
"About the folder? About Westpoint?"
