So much for not telling anyone.
Verbal diarrhea is real, people. Thoughts and prayers for a cure.
Jacks set down the glass he was polishing and gave me his full attention. It was the quiet, steady focus that meant he’d cleared his internal schedule for however long this was going to take.
“Peter took you to the zoo?” he asked.
“Peter took me tothe back endof the zoo. He has a guy there, a Dr. Broadhurst. He’s head of veterinary services or something. They’ve worked together for years. Did you know that Peter once spent fourteen hours operating on a baby giraffe in their surgical suite? He did. The mother giraffe recognized him today, Jacks. She walked past the food and came straight to him and put her face against his chest because she remembered him from when he fixedher daughter.”
“That’s . . . remarkable.”
“Remarkable doesn’t begin to cover it. Peter had an itinerary written on a Post-it note. He’d timed everything, including my lateness, which he’s apparently been tracking. He referred to it as a ‘planning input.’ He even built an eleven-minute buffer into the schedule because he knows I’m never ready on time.”
Jacks crossed his arms and leaned against the counter by the cash register. “Were you on time?”
“I was eight minutes late, which he informed me was three minutes ahead of my historical average. Then he drove us to a staff parking lot and used an access card and walked me into the back end of a zoo like it was a completely normal Saturday morning activity.”
Finn emerged from the office, caught the tail end of this, and leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, exactly mirroring Jacks. He wore the expression of a man who knew he was about to hear something he’d been expecting.
“Zoo date?” Finn said.
“How did you know?”
“Peter texted me this morning asking if you had any animal allergies he might not know about. I told him you were allergic to cats when you were twelvebut grew out of it. He said, ‘Noted,’ and nothing else. It was a very Peter exchange.”
Without thinking, I began a recitation of the incredible things that had happened that day. “He texted Finn about my allergies. He did recon on my medical history for a zoo date. He planned our first date with the operational rigor of a military campaign. The result was the most romantic morning of my entire life. I need both of you to understand that when I sayromantic, I mean he explained potassium supplementation in elephant diets, and I found it attractive, hot even. That’s where I am. Mammal metabolism excites me. That’s my situation. Please send help.”
“Your situation sounds good,” Jacks said through a smothered laugh.
Finn covered his own mouth with a hand, though his fucking Irish eyes glittered in the light of the neon sign hanging next to where he stood.
“My situation is incredible, Jacks.” I beamed. “My situation involves a man who drove me to a zoo and introduced me to his colleague and held a giraffe’s face and then held my hand at a café table in front of families and a man in a flamingo costume. It was the first time he’d touched someone in public since David, and he did it like it was nothing.
“Except . . . it wasn’t nothing. It waseverything. I’m telling you this at work because I physically can’t contain it.”
Finn and Jacks exchanged a look. The look contained an entire conversation I wasn’t privy to. The conclusion was apparently mutual satisfaction, because Finn nodded once and Jacks smiled his real smile and neither of them said anything else about it, which was the Barbacks way of saying, “We’re happy for you and we’re done talking about it until you need us again.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m done. I’m professional now. I’m behind the bar making drinks.”
“There’s no one here to make drinks for,” Finn said, glancing at the empty room.
He was right. The bar was quiet, but not the slow-Tuesday quiet, which was expected and manageable, but a painfully slow-Saturday quiet, which was unusual and slightly concerning. By 4 p.m. on a Saturday, we typically had at least a dozen people scattered across the bar stools and booths. They were the early crowd that built the foundation for the evening rush. Today we had three customers, one of whom was already closing out his tab.
“Boat show,” Rod said from the kitchen pass-through. “Down in Sarasota. Runs all weekend and pulls half the bay area south.”
“The boat show steals our Saturday crowd?” Isaid.
“The boat show stealseveryone’sSaturday crowd,” Finn said. “It’s the biggest marine event on the Gulf Coast. Every bar and restaurant between here and St. Pete is going to feel it.”
By 6 p.m., the situation had not improved.
We had seven customers, which was approximately forty fewer than a normal Saturday at that hour. Dante was at the door reading what appeared to be Dostoyevsky (the author, not the dog). The lack of foot traffic had given him an uninterrupted reading experience that he seemed to be enjoying thoroughly, which was good for Dante’s literary progress and bad for Barbacks’s bank account.
Mark appeared at 7 p.m., assessed the room in three seconds, opened his laptop, and began running numbers. “We’re down sixty-eight percent from last Saturday,” he said.
“Boat show,” Finn, Rod, Jacks, and I said simultaneously. Dante didn’t look up from his book, but he grunted in agreement.
“I know it’s the boat show. I’m quantifying the impact.” He typed for another minute. “If the trend holds, tonight’s revenue will be our lowest Saturday since the week after Hurricane Milton.”
