"These are going to make it," he says, and the relief in his voice is real and deep. "They need to dry out and they'll need new felt and some refinishing, but the frames are solid. Dad picked good wood."
"He sounds like he knew what he was doing."
"He knew what he was doing with everything except his lungs. The man could build a bar from scratch, rebuild it after a hurricane, cook a burger that makes grown men cry. But you could not convince him that cigarettes were going to kill him. My mama tried. Sheila tried. I tried. He'd just light one up and say, 'I've survived worse than a Marlboro.'"
Tex pauses. His hand is on the pool table rail, and his eyes go somewhere else for a second, somewhere I can't follow.
"He hadn't, though," Tex says, quieter. "He hadn't survived worse."
I don't say anything. I don't say I'm sorry, because people say that and it never helps and it never means what you want it to mean. I just stand there with him and let the silence be what it is, which is two people in a wrecked bar thinking about the things that break people.
After a minute, he clears his throat and pats the pool table twice, the way you'd pat a dog.
"When we get these fixed up, we're going to play," he says, his voice back to normal, or his version of normal, which is booming. "Fair warning, I'm terrible. Sheila beats me every single time and she doesn't even try."
"I've never played."
"Never? Not even once?"
"Never."
"Well, that's just tragic. We're fixing that as soon as the felt is replaced. I'll teach you everything I know, which, based on my track record, will make you almost good enough to lose gracefully."
"That doesn't sound like a great sales pitch."
"It's not. But honesty is one of my few virtues and I'm committed to it." He picks up a piece of ruined felt and drops it in a garbage bag. "Most people have five or six virtues. I got three and a beard. The beard does a lot of heavy lifting, personality-wise. Without it, I'm just a large man who talks too much and overcooks bacon. With it, I'm a large man who does that but looks rugged doing it. My other virtues are burger-making and talking. That's the complete list. Three virtues. I peaked early."
I almost make a comment to correct him. It's right there, forming in the back of my throat, this thing I want to say that isn't about the bar or the work or the cleanup.
You have more than three.
You're kind. I don't know what to do with kind, because kind has always been a trick and you're making it look like it's not. I slept on your shoulder during a hurricane and you didn't move and nobody has ever held still to let me sleep.
I don't say any of it. But I think it, and the thinking feels like a door opening a crack, and I don't slam it shut the way I usually do. I just leave it. A crack. Just enough light to see by.
By late afternoon, the worst of the cleanup is done. Not finished, not even close, but the water is gone and the ruined materials are pulled. The building is breathing again, with hot air flowing through the open doors and starting to dry what's left.
"Tomorrow, we'll start on the exterior, clearing debris from the parking lot and pulling the plywood off the windows that survived," Tex says. "We've done enough for today. Come on."
He grabs two beers from a case he brought down from the second floor earlier. They're warm. He doesn't seem to care. He hands me one and I take it. The glass is smooth and room-temperature in my hand, and I realize this is the first time he's offered me alcohol. The off-limits rule, broken by the man who made it.
"I said you had to ask me first," he says, reading my face. "Consider this as me asking you. You want a beer?"
"Yeah, thanks. I'd love a beer."
"Good answer."
We go upstairs. Past the second floor, past the apartment on the third floor, to a door at the end of the hallway that opens onto a narrow staircase. It leads to the roof.
The roof of Big Tex's Roadhouse is flat concrete with a low wall around the edge, and it's the highest point on this stretch of beach. When we step out into the evening air, the Gulf of Mexico is right there, filling the entire western horizon, massive and flat.
The sun is going down to the right of us. It's sinking into the Gulf like a coin into a wishing well, slow and deliberate, and the water catches the light and scatters it in every direction. The sky is on fire. Orange, pink, gold, purple at the edges, colors stacked on top of each other in layers so vivid they look painted. After two days of gray skies and rain and destruction, the world is showing off. Making up for lost time.
Below us, in both directions, the coastline is wrecked. I can see the debris, the damaged buildings, the sand pushed into places sand doesn't belong.
Tex leans on the wall and looks out at the water. The beer is open in his hand and the sunset is painting his face in warm tones and he looks tired. Exhausted really, for the first time since I've known him. The nonstop energy, constant talking, and the relentless optimism have been running on pure adrenaline, and it's wearing down. I can see it in his shoulders, the way they're lower than usual, and in his eyes, the way the crinkles look deeper, less like smile lines and more like the lines you get from carrying things.
He's been carrying a lot. The bar, the storm, the rebuild.
