Page 80 of Levi

“It’s a loud one.” But I hear what’s underneath it. “You didn’t have that growing up? A loud table?”

The pause runs long enough that I think I’ve overstepped. “No,” he says. “Never did. Where I came up, silence was the best outcome you could pray for. Loud meant somebody was about to get something they hadn’t asked for. But I like hearing yours. Crack the door a second. Let me listen to them. Even if I don’t understand what they’re saying.”

I reach over and open the door slightly. I let the noisy conversation inside pour down the line to someone who’s never once had it.

“Thanks,” he says, when I bring it back to my ear.

“For what?”

“For letting me hear it.”

We talk easy about nothing for another few minutes, and that’s where I leave it.

“Get some sleep,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I will. Glad your deal closed.”

“Thanks.” I look at the glass, the warm room behind it. “Talk Wednesday.”

I hang up and stand on my mother’s porch a while, the family loud at my back. I add whatever Levi didn’t say to the list of things he won’t tell me. The list is getting long.

Later, my mother walks me to the door with a foil-wrapped plate of pernil I didn’t ask for and won’t refuse. She holds my face again and says, “Bring him to the table sometime. Whoever’s got your head.”

“It’s the house, Mami.”

“Sure.” She pats my cheek, twice, the way you pat someone you’ve given up correcting and decided to love anyway. “The house.”

I book the first flight out the next morning. The beach house needs me. Jonathan, the packet, the second look, the number I’m walking toward. A clean, full set of reasons, every one of them real.

I’m at the gate an hour early anyway, watching the board.

Chapter 29: Levi

My backup musicians and crew roll in Wednesday like a tornado you can’t outrun. A driver that Freddie hired pulls up mid-morning to pick me up in a sleek black SUV.

“Lee Streeter?” he asks.

“That’s me,” I tell him, then I slide in the back seat. My anonymous days are over.

He doesn’t offer his own name, and drives me to the crew’s rental house in Panama City Beach. A Gulf-front monster somebody booked off a photo. Eight bedrooms, a pool, a wet bar the length of a bowling lane. Leased three weeks, so the outfit has got a place to sleep and drink and stage out of.

Two black trailers and a box truck are already in the drive when we pull in. By noon the place is full. Backup singers I’ve sung beside for years and couldn’t name one of their kids. Two guitar techs. The drummer. Lighting guys hauling road cases off the truck. A sound man already cussing at the rental’s wiring. The stylist, who hugs me like we’re close and we’re not.

They spill onto the deck. Somebody opens the wet bar and the music comes on. The house fills up rowdy, like these houses always do.

I stand square in the middle of it and feel more alone than I have since I arrived in the Panhandle.

This is the work family. Twenty people who’d take a bullet for the tour and not one who’d take my call in the middle of the night. They scatter like roaches the second the lights go down on the last night. They always have. I never minded before. Now I’ve got experiences to compare it against. The reality is brutal.

Freddie doesn’t stay with the crew at the party house because he’s executive level. He books his own place up the beach. Freddie keeps a floor of air between himself and the help.

Later that afternoon, when he comes to see me at my beach house, it isn’t a man killing time down a hall. It’s a decision he drove across town to carry out.

I hear a car in the drive, a door, and the car pulling away. He comes in already sizing up the place, those sharp eyes going over every inch of the room like I’ve hidden contraband in the flower vases.

First thing he does, the very first fucking thing, he sets a sweating water bottle on the long table by the window. On the wood. No coaster. In a house Dante is trying his best to sell. Then he drops his bag on the couch, right on the throw that smells a little like Dante now, and shoves it aside with the back of his hand to make room.

I snatch that throw off the couch, fold it over the chair, and slide a coaster under his water.