“It wasn’t my career path,” he said. “It’s just what I do.”
I wasn’t sure I got the distinction. “Okay, but I want to be around music. You know. I want to play music and write music and be around musicians.”
“Musicians like to drink,” he said.
Understatement. “What I mean is that you don’t have to check with me if youwantto sell the pub,” I said. “I don’t know how you ran it this long, given, you know…”
Alex frowned. “My relationship to alcohol and drugs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I am not this place,” he said. “I run it. I work here. But McPhee’s isn’t the only thing I am.”
I was starting to understand that. “But wouldn’t it be easier not to be around booze all day? Not to go home smelling like the beer some drunk spilled on you?”
“I’ve never not been around it all day,” he said. “I grew up here. This is the place I know. And I get to be myself here. That’s easy, to be exactly yourself.”
“It’s notthateasy.” Was it?
“I wouldn’t have been myself in some office,” he said. “I like listening to people’s stories.”
“And answering questions about Capone and the ghost,” I said. “And keeping the treasure seekers from pickaxing the back hallway.”
Except the new tenants next door had done exactly that. I glanced at Alex nervously. If he was going to sell the building, what did it matter what had been done to the floors next door?
But it would still hurt him to learn about the damage. Beautiful, historic floors. Floors his grandfather had swept, his father. This place was everything to him.
“Don’t sell it,” I said. “Why would you sell it? Youlovethis place.”
“Because the offer is a lot of money. Maybe it won’t ever be as much again. And if you don’t want the pub someday… The money could help you now. Maybe you’d like to go to college—”
“Nope.”
“Or get your own place,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not the building I love.”
I was suddenly very uncomfortable. He was standing too close to me, even though he wasn’t. The sweater I was wearing was too thick and heavy, weighing me down.
“I—”
I needed… air. I needed to get out of here.
Alex stood between me and the door. I looked toward the window, and the street beyond, open and wide and cold. The curtain at the window in the big booth, in a knot.
“I didn’t know what your future would be,” Alex said. “I’ve turned down offers before. I wanted to see what you would do. Before I sold it.”
Joey had been right. Talking about the future made me sweat.
I didn’t like thinking of Alex putting his life on pause for me, but of course, he must have. When he took Marisa’s call, twenty years ago, he’d made a choice that had changed his life as well as mine. In all the years I’d been in care, he had never missed a monthly visit, never put me off to do something more fun than check in on some kid who wasn’t his. He’d never married. Had he ever dated? I wasn’t really sure that he had any good friends. Just the Jims as they came and went.
And now he got to watch me fail to launch.
“Do you mean, to see if I got a record deal?” I asked. “Got married? Popped out a few kids?”
“I don’t like to guess,” he said. “It’s your future. You would do whatever you did. Then I would know what it was.”
But he had madesomechoices for me. Joey had shown up, just as Ned had predicted, but he hadn’t been allowed near me. “What if I had wanted to marry Joey?” I asked cautiously.
He thought it over. “Did you want to marry Joey?”
