“What’ll it be, boss? The usual?”

“How about we say the usual and then some, Frankie?”

“The usual and then some? We can say that if you want to, but you should know I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about leave the bottle, Frankie. That’s what I’m talking about. Do you think you could do that?”

“I don’t generally love doing that kind of thing, kid, and I think you know that.”

“I do. Do you think you could do it anyway? For me? You’ve known me a long time. You and my dad—”

“Jesus, alright, okay? You got it. I’ll leave the bottle. You don’t gotta bring your old man into the mix. Thinking about your parents still makes me sad, you know it? Really does.”

“Me too, Frankie. Believe me. Me too.”

Weston watched as Frankie poured a glass of whiskey up to the brim, hesitated, and then poured a second one for himself. There were no more words spoken between the two of them, not for the moment, and there weren’t any words needed. They clinked their glasses and each drank deeply before Frankie took the bottle and set it on the bar between them.

“You know what, kid? This time it’s on the house. Drink the whole damn bottle if you want to; I don’t care.”

“No, man, you don’t need to do that. I’ve got plenty of cash on me.”

“I don’t give a shit if you robbed a bank before you got here and kept the whole take. I don’t want your money, not a single dime. You’re right about your pops. We went back a long way. I loved your parents; I had a crush on your mom when we were still just kids, kicking around in high school. I can see that you’re hurting, and that’s why you’re in here. There ain’t a whole lot I can do to help and probably putting a bottle in front of you isn’t a good idea, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m gonna do it, and then I’ll be right down the bar if you want to talk about it. The thing that brought you in here tonight.”

Weston nodded, and Frankie nodded back, and then he did exactly what he’d said he was going to do. Weston watched him go and saw a couple of guys sitting down at the end of the bar and looking in his direction with curiosity all over their faces. Weston glanced down at himself, wondering for a moment if he’d forgotten to change out of his uniform or something. That wasn’t it, of course, and he kind of knew it even before he did the looking. Weston was nothing if not meticulous, especially when it came to his job. He’d never been the kind of cop to drink on the job, not even once, unlike many of his fellow officers. He’d never taken a drink in his uniform, either, even when he was off duty. There was a level of superstition involved in that for him, a need to keep his position as an officer separate from the other parts of him that might not live up to the badge. There were parts of Weston Daniels that would have shocked his co-workers, parts of him that didn’t come anywhere close to syncing with their view of who he was. These parts were the dark parts, the parts that threatened to swallow him up whole when he wasn’t completely diligent. It was a part of him he wasn’t ever sure he could maintain control over, not completely, and so he worked hard to remove himself from anyone or anything that might look to him as a figure of authority and safety.

“Hey, Daniels! No shit, long time no see! What brings you here?”

“Hey! He don’t want to talk to nobody, got it? He’s down there on his own for a reason!”

It seemed that Frankie really had been keeping an eye on him from his post down at the opposite end of the bar because the moment he saw somebody start to approach Weston, he shouted out his warning for everyone to hear. The few people who were in there, his fellow patrons, looked up with mild, slightly intoxicated curiosity but almost immediately returned to their drinking. The man who’d tried to come say his hello, probably somebody who’d gone to high school with him and wanted to catch up on old times and relive glory days, looked at Frankie with a kind of a hurt question emblazoned across his face. When he saw that Frankie, who only stood at around five foot nine but who was beefy as hell and probably pushing two hundred and fifty pounds, was serious, he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. With slumped shoulders, he turned and walked back the way he’d come, headed back to the end of the bar where the rest of them sat, leaving Weston his section all to himself.

This wasn’t the neighborhood Weston lived in now. It wasn’t anywhere close to the neighborhood he lived in now, but it was the place where he grew up and the one he returned to when he needed to get away from the people and places who knew him well. Because those people who were a part of his life now, they knew parts of him well, the parts he allowed them to see, but there were whole pieces of him that those same people were completely blind to. They were blind because it was the way he wanted it, and because if everyone in the world understood everything that made him tick, he was sure he would have broken wide open. He came back to this bar, to Frankie’s bar, because it reminded him of the old days when he was still a boy and his parents had still been alive. They’d been alive until he was eighteen, alive the way that all children still sort of expected their parents to live forever. When his mother had gotten sick, he’d been away at his first year of college and he hadn’t understood that this sickness was her last sickness. It started with a bad cough, and as far as Weston had known, that had been all it was. One of those cold-weather New York coughs that settled itself deep in the lungs and hid out there until spring. What they hadn’t told him and what would haunt him for—he believed—the rest of his life, was that it was a good deal worse than a cough. It was cancer, and by the time she’d gone to the doctor, it had spread everywhere. She’d refused treatment, his mother had, and the last time Weston had seen her was when he came home his freshman year for Christmas break. He should have seen how sick she was then, but he didn’t. He didn’t notice how frail, or how gaunt she was. He didn’t see how pale his usually lively and vibrant mother had become, nor did he notice how easily she tired, or how frequently she had to go rest. By the time finals rolled around, she had been in the ground without him ever having the chance to tell her goodbye. His father insisted that it had been for her own good and that nobody should have to see somebody they loved stuck in a hospital bed while she wasted away. Take it from him, he’d said, he had been there and he should know.

As it turned out, the watching of his high school sweetheart wasting away had proved to be too much for his father in the end. When his father had died, it had been a cop who’d had to break the news because at that point Weston was plain out of family members to do the job. That cop had changed the course of Weston’s life in more ways than one. He’d told him as kindly as possible about how Mr. Daniels had chosen to eat his own gun, that was the first way the cop had changed his life, and it was a conversation Weston would both never forget and could hardly remember. The other way the cop had changed his life was that he’d given him a direction completely different than the one he’d chosen before. What he’d chosen before was not to choose at all, at least not yet. He had been like a lot of college freshman, unsure of what he wanted to be when he grew up and in no particular hurry to find out. After his father had done himself in though, he’d known exactly what he wanted to do, and he’d gone out and done it. He was still doing it, every damn day, and that was something he was grateful for. Still, there were days, days like this one, where the deep-down dark threatened to bubble up inside of him and swallow him whole. It helped to go back to the old neighborhood, to remember where he’d been back when there’d still been people around who loved him. Not people who loved part of him, but people who’d loved all of him, who had known him when he was too young to know how to hide himself.

“Care if an old man comes over and has another drink with you?”

Weston looked up, startled by the sudden intrusion of another voice into his thoughts, and found that Frankie had come back to stand right in front of him. He had his whiskey glass in one hand, the bottle in the other, and a question on his face. Truthfully, Weston had no desire to drink with anyone other than himself. He knew the risk of running into people he knew when he was out in the old neighborhood, but it was one he took because running into the old-time folks was better than running into anyone he knew in his present-day life. That didn’t necessarily mean he felt like shooting the shit with the old-time folks, not in any way, but Frankie was another matter. Frankie had known his folks well before he was born. He’d been their friend, come to family holidays, gotten too drunk with his pops watching a game, and gotten scolded by his mom. He was the closest thing Weston had left to family, and that was no small thing. Throwing a thing like that away was something he would never do. He wouldn’t allow himself to, even when he was feeling really down inside of himself. Even the idea of losing that last connection to the life he’d once had, made him feel like he had a hundred-pound weight sitting squarely on his chest.

“Hey, Frankie. You’re back.”

“I am. Like I said, old men like me don’t need to be drinking alone. Not good for our constitutions, you know? Makes us weepy. Start thinking about the past too much and that can be a dangerous thing once you get to be my age.”

“You’re not old, Frankie. Stop saying that. You’re the age my parents would have been, and they weren’t old.”

“You’re right, Weston, they weren’t. But they would’ve been, or at least getting there. If they were still kicking around with me, they’d be on their way to old, just the way I am. Sixty-two ain’t ancient, but I think we can both agree I ain’t no spring chicken anymore either.”

“Sixty-two? Are you really sixty-two, Frankie?”

“That’s the God’s awful truth.”

“Nah, no way. You’re just yanking my chain, man. No way are you sixty-two right now.”

“Scout’s honor, boy. I swear to you on my mother’s grave, that’s my age. Would've been your pops’ age, too. Your mamma was six months younger than us, I think, but she would’ve followed behind us soon enough.”

Weston sat back against the back of his barstool, watching Frankie fill his glass with a hefty pour and feeling, frankly, stunned. As messed up and painful as things had turned out with his folks, they weren’t the thing he’d had on his mind that day. It wasn’t their loss that had been eating at the insides of his heart but thinking about it now made him ache with another kind of pain. This was a pain that was almost sweet, one that was riddled with nostalgia and false memories he’d created for himself over the years, daydreams about what his life would be like if he was able to see his folks once a week for Sunday dinners the way they’d always planned. It had come on with Frankie’s mentioning of them and had grown with his declaration of what their ages would have been if they’d both stuck around. He clinked glasses with Frankie again when the bartender’s hand extended for him to do so, but he felt like he was doing it through a fog. He didn’t know whether to be grateful for the distraction or not. He didn’t know what to feel about any of it. He only knew that he had the feeling that life was moving too fast and standing still all at the same time

“Shit,” Frankie winced, swallowing hard as the whiskey went down. “I just remembered.”

“Just remembered what, Frankie?” Weston asked around his own sip, feeling dread seep into his blood like a slow leak. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just remembered what today was. I can’t believe I forgot. Christ, Weston, I’m so sorry. And here I am going on and on about your parents like some fucking chump.”

“You’re not a chump, Frankie. Just forget about it, alright?”

“Nah, it’s not alright. It’s not alright, and I can’t forget about it. I’m being a grade-a asshole over here. The last thing you need on a day like this is a reminder of your parents, on top of everything else. Shit, I’d be on the floor if I were you. You’re a stronger man than I am, and there ain’t two ways around it. You deserve a medal, if you ask me.”

“Nope. No medals. I didn’t do anything special, nothing worth having a medal for. All I did was the grieve, and that’s something all kinds of people do every day.”

“That may be so, but any person on this planet would fucking fall apart with the things you’ve been through. You know that, right? I want to make sure you know that, and I have a feeling you don’t fucking hear that.”

“Frankie, you gotta stop now.”

“You’re like my own son, alright? I don’t got any; God saw fit to bless me with five fucking daughters for some reason I can’t begin to understand. Not that I don’t love ‘em because I fucking do. But if I had a son? If I had a son, I would choose you. I would always choose you.”

“Frankie. Please. You gotta stop. You gotta stop now, okay? I love you like you’re family, and you know it, but you gotta stop now. I can’t do this with you. I can’t do this with anyone.”

Frankie looked like he was going to say something else, in fact he had the look of a man who wasn’t going to be able to stop saying things no matter what, no matter how badly he wanted to or how badly Weston needed him to. Weston knew that look. He’d seen it in the perps he’d interrogated enough to know a person who couldn’t stop talking. He knew that one of them had to put an end to it or else he wouldn’t survive the night. He stood on legs that felt like they were filled with water instead of muscle. He didn’t say anything; he just fished his wallet out of his pocket and smacked money down on the old wooden bar without looking to see how much it was. He turned and walked out then. He walked out into a night so hot and sticky it felt like something solid. Even that was better than being in the bar because being in there felt the way he imagined death might feel. He walked outside, and he thought of Brianna.

Brianna had been the name burned across his brain all day. It had been the name ringing in his ears in the car with Vick when he’d done his best to convince them both that he was basically okay. It had been the name carving out his heart when he’d sat in one of the captain’s chairs and told the flabbergasted man in no uncertain terms that he wanted no part in anything even vaguely resembling a promotion. Brianna. Brianna was the name he could taste on his lips and the one he wouldn’t ever say again because if he couldn’t see her again he wasn’t going to say her name. If the only way he was ever going to get near her again was under a fucking slab of stone, he wasn’t going to say her name and he wasn’t going to listen to anyone else do it either. He’d been happy once, as happy as he thought a person could be, but that had been years ago, going on seven years ago when some punk got behind the wheel of his car with a bottle of vodka and took her away. It was on this day seven years ago, and so he drank, and when he got home, he would drink some more. It was the way he dealt with it and that, as they say, was that.