Page 190 of Levi

And here’s the thing nobody planned for. He likes her.

He’s not humoring her and he’s not scared of her, which I’ve heard is the usual split with Lorraine. He’s leaned way down to hear her over the machine, and whatever she’s telling him is working, because the man keeps laughing this big slow laugh that shakes the cut, and every time he does she lays a hand flat on his chest like she’s checking it still runs.

Benji clocks it from Mickey’s lap. He freezes, then lights up because his aunt the running gag just walked into the one thing at this wedding he didn’t plan.

“I’ve always said Lorraine’s a catch,” Mickey says, watching it with him. “Looks like Tank caught her.”

“She is,” Benji says, wrecked all over again. “She really is.”

Benji flew more than the aunt up here. There’s a group of his Miami friends on the floor, loud and glittering and three shades better dressed than anybody local. A few of them have taken on a project for the night. They’ve decided the bikers are the most magnificent thing they’ve ever seen and they are working shamelessly to get them out on the floor. It’s slow going. I watch a man in a leather cut who could deadlift a Harley get walked into a line dance by a fella half his size in a sparkly white top, the two of them solemn as deacons.

Benji belongs to Dante’s people too. His sisters have adored Benji for seven years, and every third song one of them peels him off Mickey’s lap and turns him around twice and hands him back.

Then the jukebox comes back up and the night gets loud. The set list is classic rock wall to wall, and the floor fills with the strangest crowd this county has ever put under one roof. Half the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, off duty and drinking like it, elbow to elbow with the bikers who hold this bar down the other six nights a week. Two crowds that spend their working lives on opposite ends of a traffic stop, doing the Wobble together in a barbecue joint at eleven at night, because they all belong to the same two men. Benji and Dante’s Miami people glitter through the middle of them, and Dante’s mother and sisters run the floor like a family business.

I go over to the jukebox at some point to see what Stormy’s guarding so hard. E-7 has a slip in it, in Stormy’s print. Breathe. My song. The one I played to put it all on the line for Dante, right here, the night I quit being careful. It isn’t cut yet. It will be soon.

The slot behind the glass is empty for now. Tex pulled Patsy Cline out of a working jukebox for a song that doesn’t exist yet, had Stormy write up the card, and slid it in. Tex hasn’t said one word to me about it, and I don’t bring it up either. Stormy just grins and moves the next card up in the line. He lets me stand there and look at it.

Around midnight a slow song comes on, and Stormy does the one thing I haven’t seen take him off that jukebox all night. He leaves his post, walks straight out across the floor, and holds his hand out to Tex. Tex sets down the story he’s telling, mid-sentence, for what I’d bet is the first time on record.

The two of them dance close in the middle of all that noise, Tex’s chin leaned down on the top of Stormy’s head, Stormy’s face gone soft in a way I have never caught on it, and the room lets them have it.

Later, when Benji makes his final rounds, Mickey’s father catches his hand as he goes past. Looks up at him a long moment, working on something.

“Are you the one?” he asks. “Mickey’s?”

Benji squeezes his hand gently. “Yes, I’m the one.”

“Good.” He pats Benji’s hand once and lets go. “He waited for you.”

Benji makes it four steps past the table before Stormy hands him a bar napkin for his face without being asked.

I come off the dance floor after midnight with my collar open and my hair a mess. I drop into the chair next to Dante. Out on the floor Benji’s still in Mickey’s lap and the two of them are spinning through the crowd while everybody claps them around. Lorraine and Tank have taken it outside to the deck. Stormy’s back at the jukebox, guarding the list.

Dante slides a water in front of me, not a beer, because he watched me switch two hours ago.

“Having a good night?” he says.

“Great night.”

“Yeah.” He looks out at the floor a moment, at Benji spinning in Mickey’s lap, and whatever he’s thinking, he keeps most of it. “Me too.”

Then he tips his glass toward the two of them. “I checked my jacket for those rings four times tonight. After they were already on their hands.” His eyes come off the floor and land on me. “Benji made me best man because I don’t lose what I’m holding. I don’t plan to start.”

I take that the way he means it.

And it hits me all at once, sitting there with my heart still going hard from the dancing.

I haven’t looked for the door.

Not once. Not walking in, not sitting down, not out on that deck this evening with my back to a deck full of people I couldn’t see.

Years of knowing every exit in every building before I knew who I was talking to. A lifetime before that. I know this bar’s doors by heart. I mapped them the first night I ever walked in. Tonight I never checked one. Not one time, in six hours. The habit didn’t need beating. It just quit coming to work.

Dante’s hand finds mine on top of the table. In the open, where anybody can see it, where everybody already does.

The margarita machine churns. The floor shakes. Somewhere in the middle of all of it Benji laughs, and Mickey smiles and holds on tighter, and not one person in this room is looking for a way out.