One Last Thing Before I Go

structure and thick dark hair that falls around her like a mane, and she moves behind the bar with a liquid grace, ducking the lame attempts at protracted flirtation from her patrons, ensuring tips with her easy laugh and the low-cut sleeveless T-shirt proclaiming the name of the bar in bright pink letters. It’s easy to see what it was that pulled Jack in.
    “No. Nothing,” Jack says, slapping down an excessive tip onto the bar. “Another beer, please.”
    “That guy giving you a problem?” someone says from farther on down the bar. They all look down to see the guy, late twenties, hair locked into place with pomade like it’s the ’50s, shoulders and biceps rolling off each other beneath his tight T-shirt.
    “She’s my baby mama,” Jack calls down to him.
    Silver watches Lily sing, transfixed. It’s ridiculous, the love and tenderness he feels filling him up. He wonders if it might be yet another stroke, but then reminds himself that there’s been something about her since he first saw her, more than a year ago, singing in the bookstore. He’s been around long enough to know that men, or at least men like him, can fall in love like that. He sees something in her, senses it from her crooked smile, from the way she opens her eyes between verses to look out at the back of the room, from the soft uncertainty of her voice, from the songs she chooses. He knows her without knowing her.
    “Shut the fuck up,” Jack says, although Silver’s pretty sure no one has said anything.
    “Take it easy,” he hears himself saying.
    “Peter and Max,” Oliver says, naming his two grandsons. “Max looks just like Tobey did at that age.”
    The conversations have all started to blend together.
    “I’m just trying to talk to you.” Jack.
    “Really, the spitting image.” Oliver.
    “Back off, Jack. I’m not playing.” Miranda.
    “Tobey looked older than I thought. Did he seem old to you?” Oliver.
    “You used to like playing with me.” Jack.
    “Go easy, man.” Silver.
    And all the while, Lily’s voice is filling his ears as she sings about talking to angels. It is, he thinks for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, the perfect song for her to sing.
    “Shut up.”
    “Two boys. Nice-looking kids.”
    “Fuck you.
    “Whatever.”
    Silver can’t follow the various threads of these conversations anymore. He’s always been something of a lightweight when it comes to drinking, has often thought of alcoholics with a certain wistful admiration. He could never get there. Dizzy after three drinks wouldn’t really bode well for binge drinking. Whatever problems alcoholics might have, commitment isn’t one of them. And in this respect, he feels inferior.
    Up onstage, Lily starts to play something that he can’t place right away. A light, dragging bass line is integrated into her strumming. It’s only once she starts to sing that he realizes she’s playing “Rest in Pieces.” He has never imagined the song this way, and he is stunned by the simple elegance she has brought to the silly pop song he wrote. Was it always there, waiting to be discovered, or has she imbued it with new properties it never before possessed? It seems to him that this is a profoundly important question, one with far-reaching implications, but he is too addled and buzzed and keyed up and lost and found and in love and terrified and tired to figure it out just now.
    Lily finishes playing and stands up to a warm round of applause. It was the last song of her set. He wonders what, if anything, that means. He is waiting for her when she comes down from the stage, carrying her guitar. She doesn’t seem surprised to see him waiting for her, which he decides he will take to be a positive sign.
    “That was really beautiful,” he says.
    She smiles and looks down at her boots for a second. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.”
    “So, you know who I am, then.” For some reason, he is momentarily thrown by this idea.
    She looks at him like he might be joking, sees that he isn’t, and she smiles. “You’re humble,” she says. “I didn’t see that coming.”
    “Not really.”
    “That’s exactly what a humble person would say.”
    He looks at her and thinks she is beautiful in a way that goes beyond her looks. She is weathered but somehow unbowed, or barely bowed, or maybe she is bowed, but has a sense of humor about it. Time will tell. But she is possessed of an innate kindness that he sees almost like a color coming off