Page 18 of Bounced!

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s your day off.”

“I know.” Dante closed his book, thumb marking the page out of habit even though he was setting it down. “No man should lift a commercial unit alone. Somebody could get hurt.” He paused for a beat. “I’d have to file a complaint.”

Finn snorted so hard he had to leave the room.

“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out fine, ordinary, a man agreeing to a sensible arrangement, which is exactly what it was. “Okay, thanks. Truck’s out back.”

“I know where the truck is,” Dante said.

Of course he did. He was Dante. He knew where everything was.

He picked his book up off the counter, tucked it under his arm, and headed for the back door. I grabbed my keys off the hook and followed him out into the bright afternoon. Behind me, I heard the funeral quietly reconvening, Benji’s voice lifting again over the endlessly looping dirge, promising Sir Reginald Frost that his sacrifice had brought two people together on this day, which I chose not to hear.

The back lot shimmered.

Dante was already at the passenger door, one hand on the frame, looking at the truck the way you look at a thing you’re about to fold yourself into, all six feet and two inches of him considering the geometry.

He opened the door and climbed in.

That was how it all started, though I wouldn’t have called it “starting” anything at the time.

I’d have called it an errand.

I climbed in after him, and the cab of my truck, which had felt plenty big for eleven years, was suddenly a very finite size. I put the key in the ignition and didn’t look at the man filling the whole right side. I pulled us out of the lot into the two-week problem that had, against every reasonable expectation, just handed me a very unexpected afternoon.

Chapter 5

Dante

Iraised my hand because no man should lift six hundred pounds of stainless steel alone.

That’s the reason I gave myself, and it was true, though it was not the real reason.

I had been turning the actual reason over in my mind since around the second half of the funeral, which is to say I had been ignoring it with great discipline, the way you ignore a sound in your house, telling yourself it’s the pipes settling and knowing, underneath, that houses don’t settle on a schedule.

The real reason was that Mark had stood in the center of his own kitchen asking for one pair of hands and was handed, by everyone who loved him, a wall of excuses. Something in me had refused to let that stand. He wore it well. He always wore it well, but I have spent much of my life reading the difference between a man who is “fine” and a man who was pretending to be fine. Mark asking for help and getting none had been the second kind, and I couldn’t stand at the end of a kitchen and watch it.

So I raised my hand.

Everyone went quiet in the way people go quiet when furniture speaks. Now I was folded into the passenger seat of Mark’s truck with my knees somewhere near my ears and the whole of Tampa sliding by. I was, against every policy I hold, having a feeling about it.

I moved the seat back as far as it would go. It was nowhere near far enough. Then again, it’s never far enough. I didn’t even think about Mark, who was an inch taller, squeezing himself into the cabin every day.

“Sorry,” Mark said. “It doesn’t go back much. Wes was—” He stopped and reset. “The seat’s always been like that.”

I registered the flinch but said nothing, because it wasn’t mine to pick up, and because a man tells you what he means to tell you and you shouldn’t go digging in the parts he closes off with his own hand.

I know a thing or two about closed parts.

“Fairgrounds,” I said instead, which was not a question, because I had seen the address on his phone and already knew the route better than the route knew itself.

“About twenty-five minutes.” He pulled us onto the interstate with the unbothered competence of a man who had driven this same stretch a thousand times. “You need the A/C higher?”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

I considered this. He was right. I did always say that. It was, in fact, the thing I said most, though I had never once suspected that anyone was keeping count.