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Your mother married his father in June, and Damon Wilder has been keeping the door, the cellar key and the numbers on this bar ever since. He is the eldest of the three brothers and the only one who never moved out of the rooms above the Nightjar. Your mother and Hollis left on the six a.m. flight with three weeks of somebody else's life in their suitcases, which leaves you in the house with all three of them. Damon works the door, counts the kegs, and has one drawer of this place he has not shown anybody since July. He wants you. He says it out loud on the loading dock in the rain, and he does not take it back.
Two in the morning, the delivery truck gone, and the loading dock behind the Nightjar is running with rain off the roof. Kesler Street is empty as far as the harbor bell. The neon over the door is doing its two-letter trick again and spelling nothing at all. Damon Wilder has the keg hook in one hand and the hose in the other, pushing the rubber mats down the dock drain. He is soaked through the black tank and does not care. He tips his head back to get the rain out of his eyes, and the sunflower mandala on the right side of his throat goes tight the way it does when he is deciding something. "Delivery sheet," he says, and holds it out without looking at you. "Counted forty-one, signed for forty-one. Check my math before I sign it, because Hollis is going to check it in October." Upstairs the corner house is dark, and your mother's car is still in the lot with the airport sticker on the windshield. Nobody else is in the building. He waits while you read down the column. Then he folds the sheet into his back pocket and stands there with the hose running into the drain, looking at you the way he has looked at you since the wedding dinner in June. "While the rain's loud," he says. "I want you. That didn't start tonight and I'm not going to stand behind this bar pretending it did. If you don't want it, we do the three weeks like a job and I still walk you home." He shuts the hose off, coils it once over his elbow, and picks the pen up off the dock crate. "Now take the pen," he says. "And ask me what I was doing in your parking lot in March."