Page 123 of Levi

The apology is ready by the time the neon comes up on the right. Short, no excuses, offer to cover the damage. I need to find Tex and make it right by him.

Then I turn into the lot, and the apology dies in my mouth.

Big Tex’s Roadhouse is throwing a party.

The lot’s full and filling. Someone’s hung more Christmas lights pole to pole over the gravel, on top of the strings that’ve been here forever. Stormy and Benji are fighting the wind for a banner. Big Bertha’s out in the middle of the front parking lot. She’s throwing hickory smoke over everything, and the smell reaches me through the window before I’ve got the SUV in park. The jukebox is cranked up full volume, classic rock belting out. Sheila’s wheeled the portable bar out under the eave and she’s standing liquor bottles up in rows.

I sit there with the engine ticking. I came to say I’m sorry for the damage to the Roadhouse’s reputation. Now I’m not certain there’s any damage.

I recognize what they’re doing. When Hurricane Peter came through about a year ago and damaged the building, they didn’t close. They dragged the bar operation out into the lot and ran it off generators, Big Bertha, and coolers of beer until the inside could be repaired.

Tex doesn’t close the bar. And nothing is broken this time around. But the plan is the same.

Stormy is up the ladder with the staple gun and a row of spare staples held in his teeth. Benji is below with both arms full of slack, directing.

“Left side’s low. Two inches. Now it’s high, you went three. Stormy. Two.”

“It’s the wind,” Stormy says, through the staples.

“Wind is not an excuse for the banner to be crooked. I’ve hung ‘Just Married’ banners in a tropical storm and they read straight.”

Stormy puts in one staple, dead center, and the banner sits flat. “Banner’s fixed.” Stormy belongs to this bar. Watching him work, I can’t imagine him anywhere else.

Neither one needs a full sentence to tell the other what’s wrong. They’ve hung a hundred of these. Since Benji moved upstairs with Mickey into the loft, he’s convinced Tex to throw a special party for every occasion.

I step out into the noise and the smoke, holding an apology I might not get to use.

Tex is at the smoker, working a pair of tongs. He sees me coming and he smiles.

I get four words out. “Tex, I owe you—”

He waves it off with the tongs, one big slow swat at the air, like he’s shooing a fly off the brisket.

“Owe me? What you owe me is to quit standing in my way with that funeral on your face and let me cook. Why do you keep running in here every damn day trying to apologize?” He turns a piece of meat. “I’ve run this bar a long while. I’ve seen every kind of bad night a bar like this knows how to make. Drunks, divorces, damn fools of every make and model. Levi grabbing a handsy asshole by the collar doesn’t even make the bottom of my list.”

He sweeps the tongs at the gravel, the lights, Bertha, the crowd already three deep at the rail. “Levi did me a good turn. Guess what was in the back of that video besides you? A big neon sign on the wall flashing, ‘Big Tex’s Roadhouse.’ Every soul on this coast who watched that little video wants to come stand in the spot it happened. They’ll drink my beer and eat my brisket and tip Sheila into a different tax bracket. On Saturday, they’ll lose what’s left of their minds before his concert, and I’m going to fix the back of this building with what they leave on that bar. You think I’m mad at one living person right now?”

“Let me at least cover the extra staff tonight. The—”

“Dante. Don’t insult me in my own lot. Stop apologizing. Jesus Christ! What’s wrong with you?”

“Understood.”

He checks the firebox. Then he puts the tongs down.

“Now. Listen up. You’re gonna go back to Levi. Whatever he’s off somewhere telling himself about what he did to my bar, you set him straight. A man carrying the history he’s carrying is telling himself something ugly. He got claimed here a while back, and the door is exactly where he left it. He might want to wait out the crowd to come walk through it and then again, maybe not.”

There’s not a lot to say to that. “Thank you, Tex.”

“Go get a plate if you’re hungry,” he says.

I don’t get time to stand around being grateful, because Benji finds me. There’s glitter on his face, and eyeliner holding immaculate in the swelter. He looks me up and down as if I’ve turned up to a rave in black tie.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “No. You’re not standing in my party in designer clothes looking like you came to read a will. It is ninety-one degrees, Dante. You haven’t sweated once, which I resent. Come with me. Move it.”

He herds me toward the stairs to the loft, narrating every step.

“Stormy is forty chairs short for the overflow. Sheila will not be removed from that bar with a crowbar and I’ve stopped trying. Which leaves the heavy furniture lifting to me and you.” He throws a pair of shorts and a faded shirt at my chest. “Change. You’re the help now. Try to hold the feeling about that until later.”