“Or keep them from coming back.” Nora looks, more than anything, exhausted. “Fucking hell.”
“Yeah,” Omar agrees. “But listen—”
I would like to. Everyone would like to. Even Nora, if only out of desperation, would like to. But no one gets the opportunity because the door opens and in walks Nathan Templeton.
He stands inside the doorway for a moment, letting his eyes adjust, being seen, and my brain pulls up from its cloudy nethers the second half of that “Speak of the devil” saying. Both the rest of the aphorism and the man himself seem conjured not from thin air but from its opposite—thick opaque substances: mud, sludge, primordial stuffs—like they were there all along, only dormant, lying in wait to rise up at the merest suggestion. We conjured Nathan Templeton by speaking of him. As usual, it feels all our fault, never mind that, as usual, there was no avoiding it and nothing we could do.
We have not seen him before, any of us, but there is only one man he can be. I suppose that’s why the saying isn’t “Speak of the devil, and some dude shows up with goat feet and a flaming pitchfork, and you’re all, ‘Who the hell are you?’” He is a clean bright light in Norma’s sticky dankness, and I see what Mab means. There is something strong about him—something whole, something sure and neat and well rested—that no one else in Bourne possesses. Nora literally recoils, and all the blood drains from Frank’s face, and everyone falls silent as snow.
“Norma’s Bar.” Nathan Templeton opens his arms into the gloaming. “No wonder everyone speaks fondly of this place. I can see I’ll be a regular.”
His smile is a lightbulb in the gloom. He looks around quite pleased—with himself for discovering such a gem of an establishment, with all of us for being in the know, with Nora and Frank for doing a fine job running the place—and not at all bothered that everyone’s staring at him. He ambles from door to bar slowly, stopping to shake hands with the few bewildered people dotting the tables in the middle of the room—both of his soft ones grasping one of theirs, looking into their eyes—and inserts himself on the empty stool between Zach and Tom.
He reaches out and puts one hand on one man’s shoulder, one on the other’s.
“Great to meet you guys.” He looks and sounds like he means it. “I’m Nathan Templeton.”
They nod mutely. Nora hasn’t closed her mouth in minutes.
“So”—Nathan picks up a menu and looks it over—“what’s good here?”
Zach considers the lately frozen neon wings before him. “Nothing?”
“Hey!” says Frank.
Nathan winks at Frank and laughs with Zach. “Now, I’m sure that’s not true…”
“Zach,” Zach supplies.
“Zach.” Knowing. Proud of him. Like Zach is a perfect name. Like Nathan is certain Zach must be a wonderful man to have such a wonderful name. “Pleasure.” He turns the other way. “How about you…”
“Tom.” Tom looks surprised to hear his own voice.
“So, Tom, you seem like a man of taste. What’s the best thing on the menu?”
“Beer?” Tom guesses.
Nathan laughs, loud and warm. “Isn’t it always? You’re a wise man, Tom.” He turns to Nora. “Beers for everyone, if you please, Madam Barkeep. This round’s on me.”
She stands there, frozen, and Nathan’s smile wavers just slightly.
“Nora,” Frank’s voice warns.
She shakes her head, blinks, shakes, and starts pulling each of the guys’ favorite beer. As she puts them on the bar, she leans in and whispers, “On the house.”
“No, hey,” Nathan protests, “let a guy buy another guy a beer. I’ll buy you one too, pretty lady.”
She takes in a breath deep as a sea trench. I watch her brain flip through thousands of clamoring options in search of where to start her response, but Frank leaps in first. “Frank Fiedler. Owner. Very generous of you.” They shake.
“And look!” Nathan crows. “It’s my main man—and yours—the great Omar Radison.” He comes down the bar and shakes Omar’s hand. “Good to see you again, man.” So I was wrong. None of us have ever seen this man before except Omar.
“We were just talking about you,” Omar admits.
“All good things, I hope,” Nathan says in a tone that suggests he’s never in his life doubted it. But as he turns to make his way back to his beer, he trips over my footrest.
It is normal to regard something you’ve tripped over with surprise. After all, if you’d known it was there, you would have walked elsewhere. But the look he gives me is less surprise than shock, shock verging on horror.
Which, to be honest, is interesting. It is probably true that people who use wheelchairs in the rest of the world get appalled looks and disgusted stares, but not here. Here, no one looks at me twice.
But the look is fleeting. I catch it for only a moment before Nathan Templeton wrestles his smile back into place. “Well, hi, hello there.”
I give him a little wave. He waves back.
“I’m learning everybody’s name tonight.” He’s talking too loudly. Maybe he thinks I might be hard of hearing. Or maybe he wants to make sure everyone notices him talking to me. He needn’t worry about the latter. All eyes in the place are on him. “So tell me who you might be.”
I have to type in the first part: “I might be”—then tap my name—“Mirabel.”
He is dumbfounded at first by my Voice but recovers quickly. “You might be, eh?”
I nod.
“Are you one of the famed Mitchell sisters?”
I might look surprised he knows—I am—or he might just be showing off because he laughs too loudly, goes to clap me on the shoulder, changes his mind, and brags, “I keep my ear to the ground, don’t I?”
I don’t know what to do but nod.
“You look too young to be in a place like this, Mirabel,” he says. “Must be clean living.”
Frank watches Nora consider breaking a bottle over the edge of the bar and impaling this guy. He redirects. “So, Nathan, what brings you to town?”
Nora is so angry she’s shaking, but I see her take this question in, see how she wants this answer more, if only just more, than she wants to exsanguinate this man. She finds my eyes and shakes her head: No. No what? It could be anything. Then she finds emptied pint glasses to wash and pretends to turn away. Frank passes behind her and brushes lightly between her shoulder blades as if accidentally. She nods nearly imperceptibly and keeps her eyes on her dirty dishes.
“Many things, many things.” Nathan puts his hands back on Zach’s and Tom’s shoulders. “Among them, I’m here to offer these good men jobs.”
Nora looks up and blinks.
Omar drops his head into his hands.
I remind myself about slow deep breaths.
And no one says a thing.
“All of you, actually.” Nathan swings an arm out wide to take us all in. “If you’re a hard, honest worker—”
“Honest?” Nora chokes, but Nathan keeps right on as if he hasn’t heard her.
“—we’d love to have you on board. We’ve got jobs for all skill levels, all education levels, all”—the pause is infinitesimal—“ability levels.”