I smiled back.
“This means I get nothin’ but the tip which means we didn’t take you two out for dinner at all which means,” Max was speaking to Deke and me but he turned to Nina and said his last, “your fish pie at our place and you and Jus can dress up all you want to sit at our table with our kids. But I’m not puttin’ on boots.”
“No. Next time our turn,” I butted in, thrilled by the possibility that I could actually take that turn. “At my soon-to-be-done house, that being soon thanks to Deke and Max.”
“We accept,” Nina said instantly.
“Can she cook?” Max asked Deke.
“Yup,” Deke answered Max, again curling his arm that was behind me on the booth around my shoulders and pulling me in close.
“Then we accept,” Max confirmed to me.
“Awesome,” I replied.
And it was awesome.
An embarrassment of riches.
But this time, the important kind.
* * * * *
“Grace.”
We were halfway home from the restaurant, this journey made in silence.
Content after a nice night with good food in our bellies, the silence was about that.
But it was more.
It was just the way of Deke and me.
“Sorry?” I asked, turning to look at his profile lit by the dashboard lights.
“Your dad see that?” he asked the road.
“See what?” I asked back.
He didn’t glance at me when he explained, “Way you were tonight with those folks. That grace you got in you.”
I felt my breath catch in my throat.
Deke’s obviously didn’t because he kept talking.
“For them, a nice night out turned into a memory they won’t forget. They’ll be tellin’ that shit to their grandkids. You made it that way, walkin’ up to them, givin’ ’em your time, givin’ ’em all the good you got in you. Watched you do it, Jussy. You just bein’ you lit up their worlds for as long as you were at their table.”
As I tried to regulate my breathing which had gone erratic at Deke’s compliment, Deke reached out, found my hand, curled his around it and pulled both to his thigh.
And his voice was lower, filled with sheer beauty when he continued.
“Don’t think I’ve ever been prouder in my life than watchin’ you handle those people. No way to describe it. ’Cept pure grace.”
I squeezed his hand and my voice was different too, lower, but husky when I replied, “Thank you, baby.”
“Your dad see that?” he asked.
I cleared my throat and looked to the dark road. “Kind of. Usually it was him giving that to people.”
Sweet memories filled my head of watching him do just that for as long as I could remember.
Memories that I noted were just sweet, without any of the sting that memories of Dad had been causing since he’d passed.
And that sweet was something else Deke had given me—keeping me together even as I fell apart, letting me get things out it was unhealthy to hold in, paving the way for me to move on, release the bitter, keep the sweet.
“He taught me how,” I finished.
“Born to it and still, both a’ you know what it means. Don’t take it for granted.”
“No, we both know what it means,” I confirmed.
Or Dad knew. And he’d taught me.
Deke was silent. This stretched and I let it.
Deke ended it.
“One album, Jussy. You say you like what you do but, baby, you haven’t explained to me what it is you’re gonna be doin’.”
This was noted conversationally. I felt no tension in the cab, heard none in his words.
He wasn’t asking to gather information, assess if our paths would down the road divide.
He was just asking.
“I write songs,” I answered. “Sometimes, if I like the artist, I produce. It’s rare, though, that I go in to do that. Produce, I mean. It takes a lot of time and,” I rubbed my thumb along the side of his hand, “until recently, I wasn’t big on staying in one place for very long.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, amusement and approval in his tone.
That was when I fell silent.
Deke didn’t fall into it with me.
“One album, babe.”
I looked to him. “What?”
“It’s been a while. When you gonna do another one?”
When my hand squeezed his that time, it was involuntary.
“I don’t record anymore,” I shared.
He shot a glance at me.
“Say again?” he asked the road when his eyes went back to it.
I looked back to the road too. “I don’t record. Like I said, I just write. And sometimes produce.”
“You don’t record.”
The way he said that made me turn my head his way again.