Page 179 of Levi

“See, here’s the trouble with what you just said. You think you crashed your way into a place you don’t belong. You think you’ve been sitting at somebody else’s table, eating somebody else’s food, and any minute now the bill’s gonna come due. You want to know how long that chair you’re sitting in has been yours?”

He doesn’t wait. Tex never waits.

“Since the start. We set it at this table a good while back. We left it open. We’ve been waiting on you. Now, I’ve only known Dante since he turned up here trailing after Benji like a worried mama hen. That’s not long, I grant you. But I’ll tell you what I learned about Dante inside the first week of it. That man does not let people in. That day he walked in here talking about some hungover singer he couldn’t quit fretting over, and lets slip he’s put that singer inside his apartment alone, well.” Tex spreads his big hands wide. “I looked at Sheila. Sheila looked at me. And we knew.”

He picks his fork back up and starts eating again.

I’m watching Levi while Tex talks and I watch a tension go out of him. He picks up his fork. He starts to eat like he believes there will be another meal at this table, with these people, for as long as he wants it.

Benji lets it sit a respectful minute, then he slides the binder down the table to Levi, open to a tab marked SEATING, and taps one square on the chart. “You’re at Table One. Between Dante and Stormy.” He pulls the binder back and flips to the florist tab like nothing happened.

If something God forbid ever happened to me, Levi would not be alone. He’d be at this table next Monday. Sheila would still fill his plate. Tex would still claim him.

He flies to Nashville Thursday. There’s a studio waiting, a stack of his own songs he’s never been allowed to cut, a lawyer’s worth of knots to untangle with Freddie. All of it ahead of us, none of it going away.

We’ve talked it over some. Hard logistics come easy when the hard part underneath is already settled. I’ll keep doing what I do, Miami to here and back, the business that pays for all of it. He’ll travel between Nashville and here. No one is moving into anyone’s high-rise condo or mansion. The Panhandle, this strip of sand, is the middle we both come back to.

Levi has somewhere to come back to now. A family that’ll be sitting right here, holding his chair, every single time he comes home. He gets to leave knowing there’s a home behind him.

The afternoon goes long and gold. Sheila and Stormy clear the plates, and on the second trip Stormy hands Levi a stack without asking, the way you hand things to family, and Levi carries them in like he’s been doing it for years.

Then he sits back down beside me. Under the table, where no one can see, where no one would care if they could, I find his hand and lace my fingers through it. He doesn’t look over. He just holds on tight and stays.

Chapter 69: Levi

Two months later in September…

The house closing only takes eleven minutes.

I know because I watched the clock on the wall, the way I used to watch clocks in green rooms. Eleven minutes, a stack of paper an inch thick, and a woman named Denise who slid each page across and turned it so it faced me right and put her finger where I signed.

Dante sat beside me and read every line before I put my name on it. He couldn’t help it. He’s read a thousand of these. Twice he stopped Denise mid-slide and asked her something in the pleasant voice he uses when he already knows the answer and wants to hear her say it out loud. Both times she checked, and both times he was right, and by the third stack she’d quit being irritated and started liking him, which is the Dante experience compressed down to eleven minutes.

Then she handed us two keys on a paper ring and said congratulations.

That was it. I’ve spent longer getting my picture taken.

Out in the lot I bounce my key off my palm. “So that’s what a twenty-million-dollar commission buys a fella,” I say. “Two stories on pilings and a fresh seafood shop on the corner.”

“The commission on the house wasn’t what paid for my half,” Dante says.

I stop bouncing the key. “Really? I thought it would be.”

“No.” He pulls his door open and stands there with his arm on it. “I’ve been selling real estate a long time, Levi. My half of this came out of the same place my money for everything comes out of.” A shrug. “The beach house money hasn’t been mine since the day it cleared the bank.”

“What do you mean?”

“Meaning it was already spoken for.”

“Spoken for by who?”

He takes long enough that I think I’ve asked something I shouldn’t have.

“There’s still a mortgage on my parents’ house,” he says. “In Coral Gables. My father took it the year he moved us from Hialeah and it should’ve been gone ten years ago, except he refinanced it twice. Once when my abuela got sick. Once for Mirta’s wedding.” He looks out the window. “He’s seventy-one and there’s still a payment book in that kitchen drawer. There won’t be soon.”

“Does he know you’re doing this?”

“No. He won’t take a check, so I’m not writing him one. I’m going to close it out and put the payoff letter on my mother’s table, on his side, under the platter. Then I’m going to eat dinner same as always.” He shrugs. “He’ll know who it was. Nobody else in the family sells real estate.”