“Pull up your big boy pants,” he’d said. “Leave Bea the fuck alone. You don’t want her here — fine. But Danny’s mother does. And that’s all that matters today.”
I’d kept to the far side of the grave after that. Hadn’t looked directly at her. Failed at that last part more than once.
Dark green dress. Not black. She’d been holding Lindsay’s hand.
The ride home is gone. I have no memory of it at all.
Now, I was standing at the bar in the main room with the lights low and nobody around, the glass already poured, the whiskey dark and steady. For three days, I’d been telling myself it was just going to be one drink — just enough to take the edge off the quiet. I stood there for a moment looking at it.
Then I drank it.
I needed to stay drunk. Not the blackout kind. This was just the maintenance kind, just enough to keep the volume down on everything I didn’t want to hear. A beer in the evening. Two beers. A glass of something harder when the evening got long.
I hadn’t left the clubhouse since the funeral.
Colt came and sat with me in the main room one evening and asked how I was doing. I said fine and he let it go, which meant he could see I wasn’t but knew I wasn’t ready. That was Colt. He knew you couldn’t force someone to surface before they were ready. He’d come straight from a scan — twelve weeks, he said, when I asked. He had his phone out and nearly showed me the image before he seemed to register where he was and who he was sitting with, and he put it away. I told him to show me. He did. Two small blurry shapes. I looked at them for a moment.
“The baby okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Both of them.”
Dutch tried next, which was less gentle. He sat across from me at the bar and didn’t bother with a preamble. “You’re going to talk to me.”
“I’m handling it.”
“You’re making it worse.” He picked up my glass, looked at it, set it back down. “Worse, Holden. Not better.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And breaking up with your woman in the middle of it,” he said. “Not one of your better moves.”
“It was the right call. She’s better off.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he stood up. “You’re an idiot,” he said, and left.
He wasn’t wrong.
Handful tried the way Handful did everything—sideways and with a beer in hand, sliding into the seat next to me and talking about nothing for an hour before circling around to the actual point.
“Look,” he said eventually, “I don’t know what happened. You don’t have to tell me. But you look like someone who needs to be somewhere that isn’t this bar stool.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“You’ve been on that bar stool for days.”
“It’s a good bar stool.”
He was quiet for a moment. “She’s going to be okay, you know. Bea. She’s tough. Whatever you did, she’ll be okay.”
“I know she will.” That was the easy part. I’d never doubted Bea’s ability to survive me. “It’s not her I’m worried about.”
Handful didn’t have anything to say to that. He sat with me for another hour anyway.
The women were a different story.
Indira didn’t come to me at all. She just looked at me across the main room one evening — one long, steady look that could have stripped paint — and when Dutch appeared at her shoulder and put his hand on her arm, she let herself be steered away without a word. Which was somehow worse than if she’d crossed the room and said whatever it was to my face. Dutch glanced back at me over his shoulder. The look wasn’t angry. Just tired.
Lilac didn’t look at me at all. Every time she saw me — the corridor, the kitchen, passing through the main room — she turned around and walked the other way. Not dramatically. No announcement. She just ceased to be in the same space as me, quietly and completely, every single time.
