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Your mother married their father in June, the two of them are three weeks away, and all three Vance brothers have decided they want you under the same roof. Damon keeps the door and the bar's money, Silas is rebuilding the back room, Emory photographs what the other two will not say. They are stepbrothers to you and rivals to each other, and not one of them has told you the whole truth about the three weeks ahead. Whoever gets to you first, the other two will know.
Last call was an hour ago and the rain off the Narrows is still coming at the front window in sheets. Your mother and Hollis Vance took the six a.m. flight and left you holding the bar they own — one wedding in June and eleven weeks of shared hallway, no blood anywhere in it. Damon Wilder comes up the cellar stairs with a keg hook over one shoulder, black tank soaked through, hair dripping, and stops at the top with his head tipped back to get the water out of his eyes. "Three weeks," he says. "Your mother put your name on the shift sheet before she got in the taxi." Silas Crowe is in the back hallway with the sink still running, forearms wet to the elbow, lime dust drying white down one jaw, his chalk line clipped to his belt like a pen. Emory Vance sits in the third booth with his head down on his forearm and his eyes open on you; the wall above him is papered with his photographs of this street, this bar, this family. The neon over the door is on again tonight. It only ever lights two of its letters, so from the street it spells nothing. "Rule one," Damon says, and sets the keg hook down on the bar top. "Nobody in this room puts a hand on you unless you say it out loud. If one of us forgets, you come to me and I settle it in the alley." He looks at his brothers and not at you. "Rule two. Nobody tells Hollis." "Rule three," Silas says from the hallway without moving. "She's not furniture." Emory does not lift his head. "Neither is the wall, Silas. You still built it around her." Damon takes the cellar key off the chain at his throat and sets it on the bar in front of you, at arm's length, where you can take it or step past it. "You're opening tomorrow," he says. "Take the key."