One Last Thing Before I Go

weekly basis just to piss on them.”
    He nods to himself for emphasis, then throws the car back into gear and starts driving again.
    “I’m sorry,” he says, as an afterthought.
    “Don’t be,” Oliver says.
    “It was a good speech,” Silver agrees.
    “Really? I thought maybe I took it a bit too far with the whole pissing-on-your-graves thing.”
    “Nah,” Silver says. “That was fine.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yeah. You’re good.”
    “It was really more of a metaphor,” Jack says, and something in the way he says it sends Casey into a fit of tearful laughter that lasts for a good half mile or so.

CHAPTER 49
    T onight feels complicated.
    For one thing, Silver is seeing stars. Not stars, really, but glimmers, like the air is wearing sequins, so from his seat at the bar between Oliver and Jack, everything in the room is glittering. For another, he is on his third glass of bourbon, neat.
    He has never been a beer drinker, has always found it to be a sluggish buzz. He sticks to bourbon, always neat, and has learned through trial and mostly error to start watering them down after his third. But still, three shots of Noah’s Mill can give him that warm flush, that sense of shifting, as if someone has been making minor adjustments to the gravity in the room.
    So there’s that.
    Also, Lily is sitting on a stool at the center of the small, jerry-rigged stage in the corner of the bar, strumming her guitar and singing a soulful, acoustic rendition of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong,” which he finds both beautiful and random. He is here at her invitation; it was the last thing she said to him as he clumsily backed away from her in the bookstore.
    “I’m singing at Dice tomorrow night. I don’t get much of a crowd. You should come by.”
    He had sensed and been moved by the forced nature of her seemingly casual invitation, tossed out there like it was of no consequence, and now here he is, simultaneously hopeful and angry at himself for being so. Hope has never been a friend to him.
    Tonight is also a little bit tricky because Miranda, the mother of Jack’s bastard son, Emilio, is tending bar, and she is clearly not happy to see Jack here. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Silver thinks. And Jack’s not making it any easier, staring her down over the lip of his beer mug.
    And Oliver has come along, not so much to provide Silver with much-needed moral support but because today he faced his son for the first time in a decade and met his grandsons for the first time, and he needs to drink his pain, hope, and fear into submission.
    And Denise will be getting married this weekend, and the date looms totemic in Silver’s mind. He doesn’t know if that will be the best or worst thing that could possibly happen to him, if it will save his life or be the thing that puts him over the edge.
    So, yeah, it’s complicated.
    Time is bending. It’s slowing down and speeding up with no rhyme or reason. Lily finishes the Pat Benatar and starts singing Chrissie Hynde, but suddenly she’s finishing that one and Silver can’t remember hearing the song through. Now she’s playing “She Talks to Angels,” by the Black Crowes—which for some reason is required in every acoustic set played in every bar across the country—and he’s hearing every note, seeing the chords as colors in the air around them, flashing and changing through the glittery air.
    She never mentions the word addiction, in certain company.
    Her hair is down tonight. It’s the first time he’s seen it like that, and she’s wearing a bit of makeup, and a dress and boots that stop just below her knees. Silver is entranced, in a way that makes him pray to God, to himself, to whomever might come through, that he find within himself some basic level of social competence tonight, and maybe, from some forgotten corner of his personality, just the faintest hint of charm. He doesn’t know that he was ever charming, but he suspects he may have once been at least a little bit.
    She’ll tell you she’s an orphan, after you meet her family.
    Lily’s voice, high and soft, pushes past the tin buzz in his ears to land softly in his head. The air shimmers, giving everything a dreamlike quality. Oliver tosses back another shot of Maker’s, and Jack curses at Miranda under his breath.
    “You got something to say?” Miranda says to him, her voice filled with the threat of violence. She is a short, coffee-colored woman with exquisite bone