Софи Келли: A Night's Tail

It gave me goose bumps. On the other side of the table Maggie was mesmerized. I saw her rub her hand over her arm as though maybe she had goose bumps, too.

A hand touched my shoulder. Marcus dropped into the chair beside me as Brady slid in next to Maggie. I linked my fingers with his but I couldn’t take my eyes off of my baby brother. Neither could anyone else.

I’d always known Ethan had talent. He was three when, after standing for the national anthem at a Red Sox game, his tiny hand over his heart, he’d turned to Dad and proclaimed emphatically, “Out tune!” about the off-key actress who’d been singing. And he’d been right. It made my big-sister heart swell with pride to look around and see so many other people recognizing Ethan’s talent.

They finished the song and for a few seconds silence hung in the air. Then someone began to clap. Someone else let out a long, sharp whistle. The crowd, as they say, went wild.

The scheduled band, the band we’d gone to The Brick to hear, showed up right after that. The Flaming Gerbils ended up sitting in for two songs with them. Someone found a guitar for Derek and once the crowd heard him play everyone seemed to forget about the earlier incident. He was good, I realized. Not Jake, but equally as talented. I leaned back against Marcus’s shoulder, enjoying the music and the company, relieved that everything was okay.

Derek came back to the table when they finished and sank onto the chair next to me. Brady and Maggie were up dancing. “Kathleen, I’m sorry,” he said, swiping a hand across his chin.

“You don’t owe me an apology,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But these are your friends and people you know and work with and that guy acted like an ass.”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. I glanced over at the table where Keith King, the man and his service dog and their friends were still sitting. “He kicked the dog, didn’t he?” I asked. “The drunk, I mean. And he was drunk.”

Derek nodded. “Yeah, he kicked the dog—he was going to do it again—and he was drunk. Then he said something about freakin’ animals being everywhere because guys have lost their . . .” He gestured with one hand and I was pretty sure I could guess how to finish the sentence. “I lost my cool. The guy’s a vet. I saw his cap on the table. How could anyone say that about a man who’s a hero and then kick his dog?”

“Your intentions were good,” Marcus said, “but maybe next time you could let the dog’s owner speak for himself first.”

Derek nodded, but I saw a flash of annoyance in his eyes. “Right, I get it,” he said. “It’s just that my dad’s a vet—Vietnam—and I walk dogs at a shelter back in Boston. I don’t think that that kind of behavior should be ignored. I think it should be called out.” There was a slight self-righteous edge to his voice.

Derek looked at Marcus. “I suppose there’s going to be some kind of fine.”

“No one was arrested,” Marcus said. “No charges. No fines.” I saw him glance at Brady. “The gentleman saw the error of his ways.”

I wondered what Marcus and Brady had said to the man. I glanced over at the nearby table again. Keith caught my eye, raised one hand and smiled. I smiled back at him then I turned my attention to Derek again. “Do you have any idea who that man was?” I asked.

“He doesn’t live around here?” Derek asked.

I shook my head. “No. But there was something familiar about him. It could just be that he’s a tourist who came into the library looking for directions.” Had the man been in the library? No, I was fairly certain I hadn’t seen him there. Maybe I’d noticed him at Eric’s Place when I was getting coffee. Or could he have been in the artists’ co-op store when I stopped in to talk to Maggie?

“His name is Lewis Wallace,” Marcus said.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Wait a minute. The businessman that the development committee has been talking to? The one who might set up his new supplement business in one of the empty warehouses down by the waterfront?”

Marcus nodded.

Now I knew why I’d thought I’d seen Wallace somewhere before. Maggie and I had gone to a meeting about his pitch to the town. He hadn’t been there, but there had been a photo of the man inside the information packet we’d received.

“Way to make a good impression,” Derek said with an offhand shrug.

Ethan came back to the table then, dropped into the chair across from me and grinned. “That was cool,” he said, his face flushed, eyes gleaming. “Man, those guys are good.” He looked at Derek. “That guitar is a Takamine?” It wasn’t really a question.

Derek leaned an elbow on the table and smiled. “It is. I did like the way it sounds.”

Ethan laughed. “So do I see one in your future?”

Derek shook his head. “Liam starts college in the fall, remember?” He glanced at Marcus and me. “I never went to college. Not gonna happen to my kid. So no new guitars for his old man until he makes it big. My old Gibson is good enough for me.”

Derek was a good enough musician that I felt certain he could have gotten music out of half a dozen rubber bands stretched over an empty cereal box. Ethan was watching me, I realized then, sprawled in his chair, a grin on his face.

“What?” I asked.

“Just waiting for you to say ‘I told you so.’ You’re getting slow in your old age, big sister.”

“I figured the ‘I told you so’ was self-evident.” I leaned back in my own seat, copying his body language.

Ethan laughed. “This calls for a beer,” he said.

The words were barely out of his mouth when our waiter appeared at the table with two pitchers of beer and a big basket heaped with spicy crispy fries.

“Thank you,” I said to Marcus. He must have stopped at the bar on his way back to the table. My fries and the drinks had been forgotten in the aftermath of Derek’s altercation with the drunken man.

“I didn’t order anything,” he said.

“I’m sorry. We didn’t order any of that,” I said to the waiter.

“This is from Mr. King,” he said as he set the two pitchers in the center of the table. He put the fries in front of me. I glanced over at the bar. Zach, Maggie’s bartender friend, lifted a hand in acknowledgment and smiled as though he’d been the one to send the fries and not Keith.

I snagged one French fry. They were crispy, hot and perfectly spiced. I could feel the heat on my tongue. I leaned sideways, caught Keith’s attention and mouthed a thank-you. That got me a warm smile in return. Keith wasn’t a demonstrative man. I realized the man with the service dog must be someone special to him.

Marcus and I got up to dance after I finished my basket of fries. He caught my hand and pulled me against him.

“Hey, this isn’t one of those middle school clinch songs,” I said, looking up into his gorgeous blue eyes. The band was doing their version of Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer.” I could see Maggie dancing with abandon, arms high over her head.

“Number one, I don’t care,” Marcus said, his warm breath tickling my hair. “Number two, what is a ‘middle school clinch song’?”

“One of those slow songs they’d play at school dances back in seventh grade. The girl would put her head on the guy’s shoulder and basically they’d just sway back and forth to the music.”

“I never did that.”

I tipped my head back to look at him. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he said. “In seventh grade I still hadn’t had my growth spurt and my mom cut my hair—bowl bangs. There wasn’t one girl in the seventh grade who would have gotten this close to me back then.”

I stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “Their loss,” I said. It was hard to imagine a short version of Marcus with hair that looked like his mother had stuck a dish on his head to cut it. This Marcus had a smile that made women take a second look, and an honest-to-goodness six-pack.