Page 188 of Levi

Tex doesn’t let it become a problem. He steps in, takes the cane, and slides his free arm around Mickey’s back, under his arm, and takes the weight. All of it. He doesn’t miss a syllable. He just holds Mickey on his feet with one arm and keeps marrying him with the other, the cane tucked against his chest like it’s part of the ceremony now.

Mickey glances up at him.

“Hush,” Tex says, mid-ceremony, without looking away from the crowd. “Where were we? The rings.”

Mickey takes the ring from me and slides it onto Benji’s finger with a hand that’s finally free. Benji’s hands are shaking. Mickey steadies them until Benji is able to slide Mickey’s ring on him.

“Then by the power vested in me by the internet and the county of Bay,” Tex says, “you can both kiss your husband.”

Benji takes Mickey’s face in both hands and kisses him, and Mickey kisses him back held upright in his best friend’s arm, and the deck loses it.

Stormy is already moving. He rolls the chair in behind Mickey, sets the brake. Tex lowers Mickey into it. Benji folds himself into Mickey’s lap and buries his face in his neck, and Mickey wraps both arms around his new husband while they both cry.

Tex keeps the cane. He holds it in both hands in front of him and doesn’t wipe his face. Neither do I.

“May I now introduce you to Benji and Mickey Weaver,” he says, holding his arms wide. “Husband and husband.”

Chapter 72: Levi

I’ve played hundreds of rooms in eight years and I’ve never once been invited into one as myself. You come in the back. Somebody walks you down a corridor, you go out and do the ninety minutes, and they walk you back up the corridor and put you in a car. You can work a building for two hours and never learn where its front door is.

Tonight I’ve got a paper plate, a folding chair, and a place card with my name spelled right.

By the time the sun’s down, the first floor of the Roadhouse has turned into the party Benji wanted. Newspaper down the long tables. A shrimp boil steaming in the middle of every one of them. Gulf shrimp and corn and potatoes and sausage dumped straight out of the pot onto the paper. The brisket Big Bertha started in the dark this morning. Sheila’s slaw, Sheila’s beans, Stormy’s cornbread, Tex’s mama’s banana pudding. And over all of it the Christmas lights doing exactly what they do.

I find my seat. Table One, between Dante and Stormy. Levi, in Benji’s fancy calligraphy on the card.

Sheila’s margarita machine is whirring against the far wall. She hands the first one of the night to Benji, kisses his cheek, and doesn’t say a word. Benji takes it in both hands like a chalice.

The toasts start early, before anybody’s too far gone.

Tex declines his turn. “I said mine outside during the ceremony,” he says. “I’ll give someone else a turn.”

Then Dante stands with a glass and the room settles. He’s in the black tux and he shaved close for it, and I lose whatever Stormy is saying in my ear.

“At the engagement party, I promised Benji a seven-minute toast,” Dante says, and half the room groans. “I’ve decided to spare you.”

He lets the laugh roll by.

“Seven years ago, Benji told me what he does for a living. He said, ‘I plan love for other people and I make it look like it happened by accident.’ So let me tell you about the day I stopped believing him.

“The first time I ever met Mickey, Benji was on the floor of a hospital room rubbing cream into his feet. Feet Mickey couldn’t feel at the time. I recognized the cream jar. Two hundred dollars an ounce.” A sound moves through the room. “In seven years, I have never seen Benji go completely quiet and still. That day I saw him go still. On his knees, on a hospital floor, rubbing cream into Mickey’s feet. I knew in that moment that he was already gone.”

He looks at the two of them, the white tux and the black one, Benji’s hand already in Mickey’s.

“I told him something else that same night. I told him to stop waiting. That later was just another word for distance, and distance makes it easy to pretend none of it was ever real.” He lifts his glass. “Benji doesn’t do waiting. He drove two hundred miles a day until later ran out of road. Benji spends his whole life making love look like an accident. Tonight is the only one he never planned. To Benji and Mickey.”

Benji breaks down sobbing into Mickey’s neck. Mickey lifts his glass and gives one cop nod, and the room roars.

Dante sits back down beside me and takes my hand. “Seven years of material,” he says, low, just for me. “I used ninety seconds. Benji’s going to spend the honeymoon wondering what I’m holding.”

“What do you have?”

“Enough for the vow renewal. And the fiftieth. I’m a patient man.”

Stormy has appointed himself minister of music. He’s got a handwritten set list taped to the jukebox glass and he guards it like a man guarding a moonshine still. Both grooms handed him playlists. Neither one’s on that glass. When the plates are cleared, he doesn’t make an announcement. He thumbs something into the machine, the first song rolls out loud enough to end every conversation in the building, and the floor is open.

Benji pulls Mickey out into the middle of it. Mickey stays in the chair. Walking Benji down that deck this evening was the most his legs have given him since the shooting, and it emptied the tank. Stringing a few steps together on a cane is a different job than standing for six hours, and Mickey knows exactly where that line sits. He takes the reception from the chair and saves what’s left for what counts later.