B-side, Part Two

(Find Part One Here)

The screen door still doesn’t hang right. You have to lift it a half-inch on the pull or it drags on the frame, and I’ve watched Toby do the lift-and-pull so many times I do it now without thinking, which is a thing I try not to think about.

Inside, it’s the good hour. The dinner rush has burned itself down to two guys at the pool table and one woman nursing a beer at the bar with the deliberate slowness of someone waiting for a ride. The lamp over the booth is buzzing on its two-second cycle. Buzz. Not-buzz. Buzz. I’ve never mentioned it. Everyone would look up and stop hearing everything else, and then everyone would hear it from now on.

Toby is behind the bar wiping down the well. He looks up. He does not say hi.

“Hey,” I say. Too bright. Dial it down. “Okay, so—dumb thing, I think I left my sunglasses. On the table? Or the floor. I’ve been kind of everywhere today, honestly, so.”

He reaches under the bar without breaking eye contact and puts two pairs of sunglasses on the wood between us.

Mine. And mine.

The tortoiseshell ones I was wearing forty minutes ago and the black plastic aviators I stopped being able to find sometime around the second week of June and had privately given up on.

I look at them. I look at him. He goes back to wiping.

“Okay,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“That’s my whole— that’s the whole thing I came in for.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So.”

Toby tosses the rag over his shoulder. He is not a big talker, which I know, which is the entire reason I like coming in here on nights when the booth is loud, and which is not helpful to me right now.

“I’m due a break,” he says.

He doesn’t ask. He just walks out from behind the bar and goes toward the back, and I follow him, and I don’t fully notice I’ve decided to follow him until we’re through the second door and the deck air hits my face—salt, low tide, the wet-wood smell of the rail—and the string lights come on over our heads because they’re on a sensor that thinks it’s darker than it is.

He goes to the rail. I go to the rail.

There’s nobody else out here. There never is at this hour. I chose not to know that about six seconds ago.

The water’s low. You can see the mussels on the pilings, the exact black-purple crust of them, and one gull standing on the last post like it’s punching a clock.

Toby leans on his forearms. Waits.

Okay.

Okay, so. He is not going to ask me anything, is what I’m registering. He asked me one thing on Tuesday and it has been sitting on the inside of my head ever since—do you even like them—and I came here so he could ask it again and I could answer it correctly this time, and instead he’s leaning on the rail waiting for the tide to do something, and I am going to have to be the one to fill this.

Which is fine.

“Okay, so—” My hands are already up. I pull them down. They go back up. “The thing about LYRA—and I know what it sounds like when I talk about them, I do, I hear it, I promise I hear it—but the thing is that they’re not one thing. That’s the whole— people talk about them like they’re one thing and they’re three things. Little Sun is a debut EP, it’s a debut EP, it’s a group proving they can do the thing. Fine. Great. Everybody agrees. Then Nightglass is a completely different group, essentially—new label, they finally let Micah sing down in it, the parts drop like a fourth, they stop apologizing for the ballads, and the b-sides answer each other across tracks, which nobody talks about because nobody listens to b-sides, but anyway.”

Toby nods. Once. He is watching the gull.

I take a breath because I have to.

“And then Hollow Bright is a totally different problem, which is that it’s trying to make Nightglass twice, which you can’t do, you can’t, you can’t make Nightglass twice, Nightglass was—it dropped the January my mom moved and I listened to it on a bus for six hours and that’s—anyway, the point is Micah wrote the bridge on the fourth track—it’s in the credits, and you’d know anyway, the melody moves like him, it sits under the beat instead of on top of it—and the mixer this time buried it, which—that’s the crime, actually, the mix is the crime, not the songwriting—”

I stop. I have to. I’ve run out of air.

The gull looks at us. The gull looks away.

Toby is still leaning on his forearms. He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t nodded again. He’s just—here. Listening. Not waiting for his turn the way Dez does. Just listening.

It is unbearable.

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry, that was—that was a lot of words. That was a monologue. I’m—I can go. I actually should probably go, Bram’s probably wondering—”

“He isn’t.”

“He might be.”

“He isn’t.”

“Okay, well.”

I put both hands in the jacket pockets. The right one’s fine. The left one, the fingers go straight through and find the hem, and I start working the hole, which I know I’m doing and can’t stop.

“I do this thing,” I say, “where I talk, and—I know. I’m not being weird about it. I’m being the exact correct amount of weird about it, which is less weird than you think, but I know it’s still weird, is what I’m saying, so you don’t have to—you don’t have to sit here and—”

Toby takes his phone out of his back pocket.

He sets it on the rail between us, face up. He taps something. And Undertow starts playing, tinny, small, the intro guitar sounding like it’s coming from inside a can, and Micah’s voice comes in on the second bar and it’s so quiet against the tide that I can’t actually hear the words.

I lean in. I don’t decide to. I just do.

I have to come around the rail a step to hear it and I’m close enough now that I can see the little scar on the back of his hand from something he’s never told me about, and the phone is between our forearms on the wood, and Micah is singing the pre-chorus, the one where his voice does the fold-under thing, where he drops into the low register mid-line, that is the entire reason people care about this group, and Toby is looking at the water.

“I listened to all of it,” he says. Quiet. Under the song. “Since Tuesday. Twice.”

Oh.

“You did.”

“Yeah.”

The song keeps going. I keep not moving. My left hand is still in the hole in the pocket and I make it come out and hold onto the rail instead, and now there’s nothing between my hand and the wood and I can feel every soft spot in it.

I’m too warm. It comes on all at once the way it does, and the denim is suddenly a whole extra person standing where I am. I get it off one shoulder and then the other and I lay it over the rail beside his phone, sleeves down the outside, and the air off the water hits the backs of my arms and that’s better. That’s much better. I put my hand back on the wood.

“That’s—” I start. My voice goes up on the vowel and lands wrong. I try to laugh. “That’s a lot of homework for a Tuesday. You didn’t have to—I mean, you really didn’t have to, I wasn’t giving you an assignment, I was just—”

“I know.”

“I was just—”

“Wren.” He’s still looking at the water. “You don’t have to be the one who knows.”

There it is.

Just—right there. Right there on the rail next to the phone. No joke after it.

I don’t have a script for this. I had a script for defending Micah’s bridge. I had a script for being asked if I even like them. I had a script for going home. I do not have a script for someone saying that and then leaving it there without watching to see what I do with it.

The song is at the chorus now. Micah is singing about being pulled under and being fine with it, which is the part I usually have to sit down for, and it is playing out of a five-dollar phone speaker on a rail on a Tuesday—Thursday—I don’t actually know what day it is right now—and Toby’s forearm is maybe an inch from mine on the wood and neither of us has moved it.

I could say the thing.

I could. I can feel it sitting in my mouth. It’s a short sentence. It doesn’t have a qualifier stack in front of it. It’s the sentence I’ve been not saying since I was fifteen, and it would fit in the space between the chorus and the second verse, and Toby would not make a face about it.

“Toby, I—”

He turns his head. First time this whole rail. He doesn’t look at the phone. He looks at me, and he waits, and I know that he heard it, that he knows exactly how long that sentence is, that there is no version of this where he thinks I was about to say something about the mixing.

And I can’t. It’s right there, it’s in my mouth, and I can’t. My mouth does the thing it always does—it reaches for the softer sentence, the one with the exits built in. “—mean, this is—it’s a good song, right? Out of all of them. If you’re only gonna do the homework once, that’s the one, that’s—”

The bell rings inside. Cindy’s bell. The one she rings for last call and also for anytime she wants Toby back behind the bar, which is always, and which right now I am so grateful for that I could put my head down on the rail, which is the worst thing I have ever felt about a bell.

Toby doesn’t move for a second. He keeps looking at me. Then he picks up the phone. The song cuts.

“Break’s up,” he says.

“Yeah, of course, God, I’ve—I’ve kept you, I’m sorry, I’ve been out here—” I push off the rail. My hands come up. They’re back. My hands are back. “Oh my God, though—a third pair. That’s what we’re building to, right? You’ve got a whole drawer going. It’s a collection. You’re gonna have to start sorting them by season, honestly, I’m gonna leave a pair in October and you’re gonna have to file it under Fall Wren—”

He almost smiles. Almost. The corner of his mouth lifts and then flattens.

“Go on,” he says.

“Going. I’m going.”

I go.

Screen door—lift, pull. Through the bar. The woman at the counter has been picked up. The pool guys are gone. Cindy at the register raises one hand without looking up, which is her whole goodbye, which I appreciate. I raise one back.

Outside the air is colder than it was an hour ago. That happens fast up here in June, the sun goes and the water takes the warm with it. I turn left up the road toward the truck. Gravel. Then blacktop. My arms wrap around my ribs.

I stop walking.

I’m a hundred yards up from the Anchor. I can see the neon in the window from here, the R gone out the way it’s been out since April. I put my hand where the jacket should be and it isn’t. My left hand goes to where the hole in the pocket should be and there’s no pocket, there’s just my hip, and I stand there on the shoulder of the road with my hand on my hip like I’m about to give a speech, and I think—very clearly, the way I think when I’m cornered —

I left it on the rail.

And I didn’t leave it there by accident. I took it off. I remember taking it off, I remember the air on my arms and thinking that’s better, and then I stood there for another ten minutes and walked back through the bar and out the door and a hundred yards up a road in June at night without it, and did not notice. I have never in my life left anything anywhere. I have a system. I do not lose things. That is a thing about me. That is one of the main things about me.

The neon buzzes down the road. Not the lamp buzz. A different one. A bigger one.

I turn and start walking back.