“Retired?”
“Marines.”
“Did you shoot anyone?” It was an obvious question. The one everyone always asked.
“Many times over,” Aberlour answered without caring how Bart might react to that admission.
“Did you lose anyone?” So easy. He asked it like it was nothing. Nothing at all.
“Too many,” Abe replied just as easily. What else was there to say?
“My brother was in the Navy,” Bart said, casually. But his voice was high pitched.
Aberlour thought he sounded stressed.
“Retired?”
“Dead.”
There was silence then. Because just maybe, they had a whole helluva lot more in common than Bart might think.
“I don’t know half of the songs you’ve been playing in your booth,” Aberlour said, intentionally steering the conversation back into safer territory.
“Pop music’s not your thing?”
“No.”
“What do you listen to?” he asked curiously.
“French songs. Old songs. Brel and Piaf, you know?” Aberlour asked, fully expecting Bart to shake his head in dismissal.
“Sure, Edith Piaf is an icon. Not very popular around these parts. I’d get called a hustler if I included her,” he said, his eyebrows drawn together in puzzlement. “She’s a—she’s really popular in the queer community,” he added, and even Aberlour—as daft and dumb as he was—could tell Bart was offering him an opportunity to open up. “Where do you know her from?” he asked innocently.
“My mother was French,” he replied, with a shrug that was lost on Bart.
“Hmm,” he replied, and although he still reminded Abe of Carlos, there was something about him. Something unbridled and emotionally dangerous that reminded him of Oliver as well.
“I love Brel, too. I cried my eyes out toNe me quitte pas, a few too many times,” Bart confessed with a rueful smile.
“Is that how you broke them?” Abe replied, the teasing question out of his mouth before he could think better of it.
Bart gave a loud boisterous laugh, and just like that, he reminded Aberlour of better, happier days.
Chapter 34
September 2015
Life became almost mundane. Every morning, Aberlour would wake up in his new digs—a dinky thing that reeked of cigarette smoke and was situated on the poor side of town—and he’d put away the gun he slept with before jumping in the shower and heading off to the fair. Most mornings, Bart would greet him with a smile and hand him a cup of hot black coffee, yapping about his latest adventure or the latest gossip.
Aberlour would listen, grateful for something to fill his perpetually silent world, as the fairground came to life around them. Then, for the next eight hours, he’d hustle people into trying their hand at winning a prize from his booth. No one succeeded in shooting all eight balloons, which he found tremendously gratifying, since each pop made him flinch and elicited unwanted memories. Too close to the sound of a gun being fired, each one of those goddamned pops made him edgy.
Then the fair would close, Aberlour would bid Bart good evening, and head to the same bar where he’d hustled people at darts with Betsy’s old owner. There, he’d shoot a few rounds by himself, nurse a scotch or a beer, and head home a couple of hours later.
And so it went.
It was mundane. Boring, pathetic, even, but it was better than endless sorrow and grief, so he took it and held onto it with everything he had.
If his voicemail sometimes flashed with a new message from Oliver, Aberlour quickly cleared it from his phone. He’d found an equilibrium. A routine, though boring, that he could live with. At least for now. Letting Oliver back in would only drudge up the past.
