Page 72

“Then we find a lot of zeroes,” I said.

“How?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not saying I know how.” I looked around at them, at all of them, my whole ridiculous family. “All I’m saying is that I watched every one of you decide in the last four minutes that this was a funeral, and I’ve been to my share of funerals. This isn’t one. Nobody’s dead. The bar’s still standing. We’ve got four months and seven people.” I made myself say the rest of it, the part that was all mine. “I’ve never once in my life fought for a single thing, because I never let myself want anything badly enough to fight for it. I want this. So I’m asking, how much? I would rather spend the next four months trying and losing than spend them packing.”

The bar was so still.

Then Benji, wet-faced, wild-eyed, the funny coming back into him like blood into a limb that fell asleep, announced, “The wall talks and it’s a war speech. After two years, he opens with a war speech.”

“Somebody had to.” I shrugged.

Mark was staring at me the way he’d stared at me once before, in the dark, when I’d told him I’d opened a door with my father still talking. He looked at me like I’d handed him something he didn’t even know he was allowed to want.

“You really think there’s a version where we buy it?” he asked. He wasn’t arguing. He was asking, hoping, maybe hating how much he was hoping.

“I think I’d like to know the number before we decide there isn’t,” I said, crossing my arms.

Rod took his hands off the bar. “I have savings, for my own restaurant someday.” He shrugged, fierce and clipped. “Is not someday money anymore, maybe. Reina stays where I put my hand.”

“I’ve got some, too.” Jacks looked uncertain, then less uncertain. “It’s probably not a lot next to a building, but Skyler and me, we’ve got the down-payment thing saved. This is kind of our house, right? You don’t sell your house to some company who wants to tear it down.” He thought a moment longer, his eyes drifting to a banner hanging from the ceiling, fluttering near the air vent. “And the team, the guys have a ton of—”

“No,” Mark snapped, fast and firm, slamming the door shut before Jacks could finish walking through it. “Jacks, I love you. I really do. But we are not, and I mean this, we are not asking Skyler to pass a hat for us. That man would rather lose a tooth than ask his teammates for a dime, and I’m not going to be the reason he has to. That’s off the table. Anybody else’s savings, we’ll talk, but we’re not doing that.”

“Okay.” Jacks put his phone away, a little stung, a little relieved. “Okay, not that.”

“Oh, we are not—” Benji was crying and laughing at once now. “We are not doing the heist-movie thing where everybody stacks their sad little savings on the bar. We’re—” He stopped, looked around, and wiped his face. “Okay. Fine. We’re absolutely doing that. Cue the spy comedy music. I’ve got tip money and a jar. It’s a big jar. Don’t laugh at my jar. Size matters.”

“Nobody’s laughing at your jar,” Finn said. “I’m sure it’s impressive.”

He had his phone out, doing the thing Finn did, the quiet arithmetic behind his eyes. “But before this turns into a group hug, somebody with sense find out what we’re actually looking at. Mark, you’ve got Gerald’s number. He knows what Meridian paid. That’s where this starts, not with Benji’s most impressive and girthy jar. This starts with a real number on a real page.” He looked up. “I’m not saying I think this is possible. I’m saying I’ll do the math before I call it impossible. That’s as far as I’ll go today.”

“That’s further than we were four minutes ago,” Mark said.

Mark looked around the bar, at all of us pulled in close now, the funeral that turned into something else while nobody was watching. Then he looked at me. Last. Longest.

“Okay,” Mark said. “Okay, I’ll call Gerald back. Finn will run the numbers. Nobody empties an account today. Jacks, I mean it. We find out the number first. And then—” He blew out a breath, something that wasn’t quite hope but was in the family of it. “And then we figure out if seven people and a big jar can save a gay bar, which sounds more like the setup to a joke than a plan, but it’s what we’ve got.”

Benji pressed both hands over his mouth and nodded fast, too full to speak, which for Benji was its own kind of miracle. Rod put his hands back on the bar. Adrian stared blankly at some point across the bar. And I stood in the middle of a family I’d spent two years refusing to join, in a bar somebody wanted to take from us, and felt something I’d spent my whole careful life making sure I never felt.

I felt I had something to lose.

And I was glad of it.

We had four months before barbarians stormed our gates.

Let them come.

Chapter 24

Mark

Icouldn’t do it at the bar, and I couldn’t do it with an audience, so I told Benji he was in charge for an hour and took Finn back to my house.

“In charge?” Benji repeated, like I’d handed him a live grenade and a christening gown at the same time. “Of the whole bar. Me?”

“It’s four in the afternoon, Benji. Nobody’s here but Rod and the prep. Don’t let anybody in, don’t touch the schedule, don’t reorganize anything, and if the beer guy comes, the answer to every question is, ‘Ask Mark.’”

“What if it’s an emergency?”