The buzzing in Dallas Glory’s pocket was starting to drive him insane. He was appreciative that his brothers wanted to get together, mostly for their dad’s sake, to memorialize the five years since their mother died, but he was busy. The hotel bar, La Biblioteca, was packed, thanks to the fact that it was hosting a large chunk of attendees for a conference that weekend, some annual gathering of writers and teachers of writing. Dallas was chuffing back and forth from the beer taps to the well bottles to the more expensive stuff to the wine glasses, mixing sazeracs, French 75s, pouring Busch pints alongside Stella and Yuengling and Guinness. His most recent request was for something called a Bijou, which Dallas had never heard of before, and he was scrambling through the bar’s drink bible, which was really a plastic box full of index cards onto which his decades of forebears had scribbled down recipes. They were, in theory, organized in alphabetical order, but that was theory, not practice.

He would have just looked it up on his phone, but Ramy, the bar manager, ruled with a strict moratorium on any technological devices being visible during working hours. Ramy had other ridiculous rules about the number of bathroom breaks his bartenders were allowed to take, how much ice to scoop into the shaker for each chilled drink, how he wanted guests addressed—“Welcome, Sir; Welcome, Ma’am,” always in that order—and which color ties were acceptable as part of the uniform (red, blue, white were a yes; green, orange, yellow, and pink were a no). Most of the time Dallas followed these rules, even if they were Ramy’s machinations and not, technically-speaking, things he’d lose his job for violating (the other bartender on shift tonight, Flix, always wore a pink tie; he had worked at La Biblioteca for fifteen years and was the reason people liked to order their daiquiris). He was about to cave, to pull out his phone to find out what the Bijou was, when there at the bottom of the stack was the recipe card he sought.

Dubiously, it was written in his mother’s handwriting.

Of this, Dallas was sure. Years of notes on the insides of birthday cards, on strips of paper tucked beneath sandwiches in home-made lunches, on the inner covers of paperback books given on birthdays and Christmas (Dallas loved Encyclopedia Brown, while each of his four brothers loved something else: Cal Clue, Nicky Goosebumps, Peter The Boxcar Children, Michael Animorphs), her grocery lists held up by magnets on the refrigerator, appointment reminders etched into the wall calendar next to the pantry, Post-its she placed on the bathroom mirrors the nights before tests and meets and recitals. All of these had etched a stone-certain knowledge of her handwriting in Dallas’s head, even though he hadn’t seen it freshly drawn across a page in half a decade.

Her writing had always reminded Dallas of baby teeth. Somehow, she made every letter blocky, even the bulbs of the bilabial b and p, the serpentine sibilant s, the ballooning vowels a and e and o. They were always the same height, which sometimes made reading her words into a code-breaking game, leaving Dallas uncertain as to when he was reading a proper noun. That her commas and periods were miniscule, specks on the page that could easily be mistaken for smudges, did not help. She never used semicolons, calling them a “flourish for those who feel the need to sound smarter than they are” (she did not particularly enjoy Joyce or Faulkner, it should be said).

La Biblioteca had been around long enough for her to have worked there, but Dallas knew his mother’s employment history; she had told many a story about working as a roller hop in her youth at what she called “one of the last drive-in movie theatres that took itself seriously,” followed by a life in education. He knew of all of her jobs, even those from her college days, when she managed to become a part-time teacher’s aide while still an undergraduate (“The upside,” she said, “of going to school in a small town in the Midwest. Lots of people willing to look the other way.”) before becoming a high school biology teacher, a job she held until the day she died.

Dallas combined one and a half ounces of gin, an ounce of sweet vermouth, three-quarters of an ounce of green Chartreuse (the bottle, shoved behind several others on a high shelf, was covered in dust), and two dashes of orange bitters into a shaker and then strained the concoction into a coupe glass. He added two maraschino cherries and then delivered it to the woman who’d ordered it. She gave it an appraising look, skin gathering in a frown behind her horn-rimmed glasses. The woman wore a shapeless purple sweater and a trio of wispy scarves, one pink, one green, the third the ochre color of her drink. She took a sip and nodded.

“Impressive,” she said.

He nodded. “Ma’am.”

“No one knows how to make them anymore. Kudos.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to say, and then found himself not thinking about it anymore, because his former teacher walked in.

Strajaz Markovitz taught modern dance at the St. Louis Arts Conservatory, or at least he had seven years ago, when Dallas graduated. Back then, his body curved with the hunchback of someone who spent their days hovering over a computer desk or working on a roof for hours at a time rather than a lithe dancer with years of stretching and conditioning coursing through his body. He had the tan of a Sicilian and the white hair of Albert Einstein and the forbearance of a drill sergeant. The voice that came out of his mouth, a brutal Eastern European accent, was enough to jolt anyone into perfect posture no matter how exhausted they might otherwise be.

He looked, now, precisely as he had when Dallas had been his student, the same scoliotic purl to his back. He wore the same kind of tight black t-shirt he always had, along with a pair of jeans torn at the knees in the same fashion as when he taught. His hands were laden with gold rings, his wrist an array of similarly-glitzy bracelets. He was accompanied by a woman Dallas found unfamiliar, at least thirty years his junior, with the same clambake skin and a lioness mane of platinum hair that had the texture of cotton candy. She wore tight jeans and absurd white high heel shoes that made her tower over Strajaz. Her jacket matched her pants and the plain t-shirt she wore matched the shoes. In her ears were gigantic hoop earrings. They were arm-in-arm and the woman led him right over to the bar, homing in on the only two empty stools, which happened to be right in front of Dallas, who was filling a pair of glasses with ice for rum and cokes.

Dallas watched them sit and nodded at the woman. Strajaz looked right through Dallas, no recognition in his eyes whatsoever. He’d been an asshole but a good teacher, a combination Dallas encountered more than once at the Conservatory. Strajaz would bark and shriek and nothing any of his students ever did was good enough, but Dallas left his class with a solid glissade and good form on his tendu and chassé. He was also in the best shape of his life thanks to the intense demands of each fifty-minute session with Strajaz, which took place mid-afternoon, three days a week for sixteen weeks; Dallas had a tighter core, more defined musculature in his legs and shoulders, than ever before. He sweat buckets every single day, was famished for the rice and bean and chicken dishes he made the center of his diet at the suggestion of some upperclassmen he met during that first semester.

Dallas asked what he could get them. The woman answered, her voice the gravel-smashed kind of a lifelong smoker. She requested a Tanqueray and tonic for her and a whiskey gimlet for Strajaz, whose gaze continued to whirl around and through Dallas, who poured her drink first, letting it languish on his side of the bar, just out of her reach, while he mixed whiskey—neither Strajaz nor the woman objected by barking out a request for something fancier—with lime juice and simple syrup. When he set the drinks in front of the woman, she reached into a pocket of her jeans and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, telling him, in her smoky growl, to keep the change.

On the few occasions Dallas had a chance to observe them as he rushed around to meet the needs of the pesky writers clogging the rest of the bar and taking up the servers’ tables, neither the woman nor Strajaz seemed to notice him. She took tiny sips of her drink, the level of liquid in her glass diminishing by barely-noticeable increments. As far as Dallas could tell, Strajaz hadn’t even noticed his beverage; the lime wheel perched on the edge remained in the precise spot it was, turned at the exact angle it had been, when Dallas set the drinks down. After a few passes, and noticing the way the woman spoke to Strajaz in short, declarative sentences, and in combination with the fact that Strajaz seemed to notice her no more or less than he registered his former student, Dallas realized that something was deeply wrong with the dance teacher.

This sent a shiver of sadness down Dallas’s spine. Ever since his mother’s unexpected death from a brain aneurysm, loss of any kind has struck him with a pinching pain. He used to be the kind of person, for better or worse, who was generally unattached to tragedy, having never really experienced it up close. He willed himself to feel sadness when he read up on mass murder and disasters striking on the other side of the globe, and he did his level best to sound heartbroken on behalf of his friends and co-workers whose grandparents or nieces or cousins died. Dallas felt bad that he was generally more likely to feel the wince of sorrow at the death of a beloved dog or cat than a father or girlfriend.

Until his mom died. Then, he seemed to feel every loss, and not just death. When someone was fired, or robbed, or their car broke down, or a distant third cousin was diagnosed with stage one cancer, or someone learned they had diabetes. Or, now, in the case of his former dance instructor, who was obviously experiencing some kind of mental decline. He felt blown through the chest.

He almost didn’t notice their departure among the muck of poets and novelists and their ridiculous drink orders, changing minor ingredients in complicated cocktails, asking about gluten-free options. Strajaz and the woman were nearly out the door by the time Dallas processed that their seats had been swallowed up by one of the bulbous groups conglomerated at the bar like a blood clot in an artery. He stopped what he was doing—pouring two pints of a local pilsner for a duo of writers with matching pencil mustaches, beanies, and red suspenders—and watched them. Now, Dallas could see the way his teacher’s movements were particularly hitchy, the kind of clumsy walk of someone with some kind of muscular degeneration or brain connections gone fuzzy, the kind from which one couldn’t come back, couldn’t recover. Dallas gulped, watched them leave, and went back to pouring the beers. As soon as he set them down, someone else was waving for his attention. In his pocket, his phone vibrated again.

After graduating from the Conservatory, Dallas went on endless auditions. He continued to live at home with his parents as he had while in school, staying in his childhood bedroom. One by one, each of his brothers moved out, including his only younger brother Cal, who went on to Chicago for art school before moving back to the area but choosing a condominium in Soulard rather than saving cash by returning home. Dallas felt a splotch of shame sometimes when he thought about the fact that his brothers had all sprung free and he had stayed behind, but if he ever came close to articulating his feelings, his mother would immediately stanch them, telling him how glad she was that her home still felt full.

He was living there when she died. Dallas was teaching a class that day—he’d managed to secure part-time work at a small dance studio that paid him not even remotely enough to move out—and so it was his father who found his mother sprawled out on the sofa, eyes vacantly staring up at the skylight in the living room. No one had ever demanded more details from their father, letting the story lie that she suffered an undiagnosed and practically unforeseeable aneurysm while washing dishes, having only enough time to lie down in response to the crushing headache that would have overcome her shortly before she died. He spent four more years in that house, just him and his father, the two orbiting one another in an unsteady set of routines. While Dallas tried to act as if everything was the same, though of course it wasn’t, his father shrunk into himself, becoming more stoic and distant than he’d been the rest of Dallas’s life. Instead of watching television on the big screen in the living room, he retreated to the office off the front door, squinting into a tiny set perched next to his computer. The office doors were French, and Dallas regularly looked in on his father like an animal in a zoo exhibit, the glow of the TV washing his skin in weird colors that were somehow both sallow and neon.

A little over a year ago he moved out, finally. He’d been working at La Biblioteca for nearly a year, socking away his tip money, grateful that the hotel extended its insurance and benefits to anyone who worked full-time hours. Dallas had abandoned the mealy wages at the dance studio in favor of slinging drinks five nights each week, punishing shifts that went from four to midnight; despite his years of twists and stomping at the Conservatory, his feet hurt every single night, throbs pulsing in his heels and toes, his ankles feeling weaker and weaker each day, as though the stalks of his bones might snap if he took another step. But money was money, which included a share of his mother’s life insurance payout. Dallas’s parents had taken out sizable policies on themselves when they each hit fifty, and thanks to the relative austerity of her funerary arrangements—per her wishes, she’d been cremated, and so the only expenses were the funeral home’s charges for their services and the final ambulance trip to the hospital, where she was declared dead on arrival—the money was sizable. Their father bestowed all of it, except a small chunk that was donated to their mother’s favorite charities, on his five sons, insisting that they take it, that their mother would have frowned at anyone high-roading about gaining wealth as a result of her death. With only the normal amount of polite pushback that ended quickly in acquiescence, they each did.

And freedom was freedom. Even though he loved his father dearly, Dallas couldn’t stand being alone with him in the house anymore, a house whose imposing size was somehow worse than if they were trapped together in a tinier space, constantly bumping elbows or forced to eat their meals and watch television in the same room. The fact that they could disappear from one another, for days at a time if they really wanted, made Dallas feel haunted, and not by the specter of the parent who was dead.

When his shift finally ended, when he and the other bartender were able to announce last call, only the hardiest and drunkest of the conference attendees still slouching in booths and over their stools, after fresh citrus was cut for the next day, the swizzle sticks were restocked, the ice bins filled, the glasses washed, slip pads stacked and stored, did he finally glance at his phone.

The gathering had been planned, in its entirety, over the course of his shift, the only question whether Dallas was willing to serve as bartender for the gathering. Apparently, the scope had widened beyond immediate family to anyone who may have been invited to, aware of, or attended the brief memorial service five years ago; Peter, second oldest and most organized of the bunch, still had the list of who had come. Dallas signaled his affirmation and, despite the late hour, was immediately met with a thumbs up from two of his brothers. The affair would be at the house in two weeks.

More to come, Peter wrote, though when Dallas scrolled back through the chat, he couldn’t imagine what details might possibly still need ironing out.

Dallas dawdled until Ramy left the bar, locking the street-side door, turning down the lights, and departing through the exit into the hotel, which was never actually locked up. After waiting a minute, Dallas went to the drink bible. The recipe for the Bijou was sitting where he’d left it, right on top. He lifted it from the stack and took it with him.

Every day leading up to the gathering, Dallas practiced mixing a Bijou. He wasn’t entirely sure how they were meant to taste; he didn’t like the Christmas tree effervescence of gin, and he hadn’t ever had green Chartreuse, which was peppery and herbal, like something pulled up out of the ground by its roots. The drink was sweeter than he preferred, though the temper of the Chartreuse kept it from being mouth-puckering. While he sipped the cocktail, he stared at the recipe card and his mother’s handwriting. The night he brought it home, he rummaged through his apartment for something with his mother’s writing on it, finding, finally, the last birthday card she’d written to him, several months before she died, his twenty-ninth. Not one of the more important or special birthdays, twenty-one well in the rearview mirror and thirty looming, a moment she wouldn’t live to see. She’d done what she did every year, writing a full letter on the left side of the card, keeping the pre-printed, schmaltzy punch line (something to do with a cat) untouched. He read over it every night as he drank, comparing it to the words on the recipe card. Dallas wasn’t a handwriting expert by any means, but it was impossible that they hadn’t been written by the same person.

As he drank, he tried to recall and remaster some of the skills he’d learned at the Conservatory. His arches were feeble, his core not strong enough for his kicks to reach as high and straight as they had at his peak. Dallas repeated some chain isolations, re-refined his arabesque and grapevine. He woke up sore; Dallas had not danced in any meaningful way in several years, not since taking on the job at La Biblioteca, and he felt that time off in his core and legs and shoulders for several days. But despite the ignition of lactic acid in his muscle fibers, he kept at it, several moves for every sip, sweating onto his apartment floor and exhausted by the time he’d drunk the Bijou. When he wanted to stop, joints aching, feet pulsing with the beat that he heard only in his head, Dallas thought of Strajaz. Sometimes he pictured the sinewy, svelte man who could not be pleased, the one who dragged a hand through his hair at his moments of greatest frustration, breathing in so that the outline of his ribcage pressed against the taut fabric of his black shirts before barking out his criticisms, more often than not laced with profanities, sometimes in English and sometimes from a language Dallas never did identify, exhortations he slowly became convinced were just invented words, strings of meaningless, frustrated noise. And then sometimes he saw the man who had come into the bar with his vacant gaze, his untouched drink. A man who was Strajaz and not Strajaz. A man who had bifurcated in such a big way in what felt, to Dallas, like such a small period of time.

Two days before the gathering, as Peter was sending out instructions left and right for who was to order what from where and pick it up when, Dallas wrote into the chat: Does anyone know what Mom’s jobs were?

At first, no one replied. Then Peter wrote: Teacher?

Before that, Dallas wrote. Like, did she ever bartend? He paused before sending, then added LOL?

Each of his four brothers responded in the negative. None of them bothered to ask why Dallas was asking. In the five years since her death, they’d all stopped seeking explanations for anything the others did. When Peter quit his job to get certified as a personal trainer, a job with far worse hours and crappier pay than his remote payroll data work, no one asked questions. When Cal, artiste extraordinaire (to the point that Dallas had, when he graduated from the Conservatory and felt himself failing at his own art, experienced flares of horrible, hard jealousy), took a job teaching a heavy course load at a local community college, mostly art appreciation classes and the periodic studio, no one raised an eyebrow. When Nicky, the traveling nurse, decided to shift into a life of working as a home health aide, zero inquiries. Michael, eldest, left his long-time managerial position at a small grocery store with wonky hours but excellent benefits to shack up with a general contractor who lived several streets away and went back to school online to study medieval history with the goal of teaching high schoolers. No one wondered why.

No one asked Dallas about becoming a bartender. No one bothered him with questions about whether he would ever go back to dancing.

Dallas understood: for all of them, there was no going back. Not after their mother died.

When Dallas arrived at the house the day of the gathering, preparations were well underway. He found Peter directing traffic in the living room, holding an actual clipboard and marking tasks off a list. By way of greeting, he asked Dallas to take stock of the bar to determine if there was anything Dallas thought was missing. Dallas had, for no particularly good reason, brought along the ingredients for the Bijou, along with the recipe card, tucked in a box of bottles between the Chartreuse and vermouth.

The house was in pristine shape. Someone, presumably Peter, had taken cleaning supplies to every surface; the onyx of the bar top was freshly scrubbed to the shine of expensive leather. The carpets in the living room had recently been shampooed. Every light fixture twinkled through perfect, clear glass. The long row of windows looking out on the back deck—where someone, again presumably Peter, had installed a trio of standing tables with little sconces at the center of each—had been recently washed. Not a single dish or utensil was visible in the kitchen, the island cleared of all clutter: no unopened mail, no kitsch, just a glass vase containing a modest trio of calla lilies—their mother’s favorite—sat at the very center.

Dallas’s other brothers came in and out of the great room that comprised the main floor, where he assumed most guests would linger, perhaps going in and out onto the back porch, which he was pretty sure had been re-weatherproofed since his last visit. He was always struck by how similar they all looked in so many ways—same curled hair, same deep-set eyes that were of their mother’s lineage, same square jaws of their father’s—but how each had some distinctive difference: Michael’s broad swimmer’s shoulders and thick soccer-player legs, still in prime shape despite the fact that he’d crested forty; Peter’s glasses, his eyes the only ones that suffered myopic deterioration, matching the splotches of gray that had invaded his temples; Nicky’s lighter hair, sandied from weeks spent in the outdoors; Dallas, himself, with his narrow frame and shorter stature; and Cal, with his nose that looked as though it had been broken, the bridge pinched, nostrils perched slightly askew.

Michael was hauling in chairs, the white foldable kind used at weddings and reception halls; Dallas vaguely remembered talk of renting some. Nicky was fiddling with his laptop, in charge of playing background music, both selecting songs that wouldn’t be disruptive or distasteful (to whom, Dallas wasn’t sure) and choosing a volume that would be audible but conducive to conversations remaining at a normal level, voices not having to rise to compete with the sound. Cal was running a vacuum cleaner over the living room carpet one last time with one hand, holding a duster with another so that he could wipe the bamboo slats of the window blinds.

The first guests to arrive were the teachers. Dallas remembered most of them well enough, even though he’d not ever been any of their students. His mother had worked in a different district, his high school clogged with too many ancient male science teachers not ready to give up their posts for younger, more capable and vibrant teachers like her, and so she’d driven thirty minutes each morning out to a rural school where the lab equipment was rusty and unkempt; she regularly complained that trying to get sheep eyes or frogs to dissect was a battle with administration. She settled, sometimes, for asking the kids, who were eager to learn if undertrained in reading skills by the time they got to her, to imagine the animal interiors they were being asked to understand. She never, ever blamed them for the things adults around them managed to screw up.

As the teachers milled about, a few of the intrepid young ones approaching him sheepishly with a request for a glass of wine or a gin and tonic, Dallas wondered where his father was. He had not yet made an appearance during the setup, and with the first guests arriving, Dallas was surprised by his absence: he was the consummate good host, or at least had been when the Glory household was open to guests, which, Dallas realized, had not been the case since before his mother’s death. In his youth, his mother and father loved to host weekend barbecues in the summer and roasts in the fall, filling coolers with cheap beer and wine coolers for the former and lining the kitchen island with expensive bottles of wine during the latter. Dallas liked to mill about in corners watching the adults drink and laugh and eat, imagining himself like his father, slipping between clots of people, offering refills or second helpings of sides, making witty remarks that elicited genuine bursts of laughter and appreciative notes of thanks.

To distract himself, Dallas mixed a Bijou no one asked for. The drink card with his mother’s handwriting was still in the box, which had been set at his feet behind the bar. Dallas no longer needed to consult it, but he kept glancing down toward the index card as he put the drink together. He set it on the bar next to the bottles of wine, the golden yellow liquid catching afternoon light coming in through the inset windows of the door to the back porch.

His brother Cal walked up to the bar.

“What’s this?” he said, poking at the glass.

“A Bijou,” Dallas said. He glanced down at the box, as though the card, coming to life, might flutter up and slip between wine bottles.

“Never heard of it,” Cal said.

“Take it.”

“Is it gonna taste like shit?”

“Maybe,” Dallas said.

This made Cal smile. He picked up the glass and took a drink, rolling his tongue over his upper lip. Cal closed his eyes and made a joke about notes of oak and fruit. “It’s good, actually.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Where did you find out about this?”

Dallas told him about the woman who ordered it.

“Ugh. Artists. Such weirdos.”

“Very much so.” Dallas didn’t mention the recipe card. Instead, he said, “Do you mind taking over here for a minute?”

“I’m not much of a mixologist.”

“No one’s asked for anything but wine,” Dallas said. “But I suspect you can manage a rum and coke if someone asks.”

“Remind me of the ingredients?”

Dallas bent down and pretended to tie his shoe before Cal came around the side of the bar. He grabbed the recipe card and curled it into his hand. It was too large to hide entirely, and Dallas couldn’t bring himself to fold it over, as though a crease would wither its authenticity, break whatever spell had brought his mother’s handwriting into the world. Cal didn’t notice, was already humming and snapping his fingers and dancing his hands over the various bottles, ready to experiment.

“Invent your own cocktail by the time I get back,” Dallas said.

“Want anything in particular?”

“Surprise me. Be an artiste.”

Cal waved him away.

Dallas slithered up the stairs to the second floor, the noise of conversation dying away below him. The upstairs hallway was dim, a line of mostly shut doors. His parents’ bedroom—he still thought of it that way, five years later, unable to give up his mother’s co-ownership—was at the end of the hall, and the door was the only one cracked open. Dallas approached, knocked twice, and pushed it open.

Shortly after their mother died, Peter installed blackout curtains because their father, who requested them, was struggling to sleep. All of the brothers understood that this was a regular product of deep grief, but their father blamed the light pollution that bled through the blinds, old Venetian ones that were, in his estimation, in need of replacement. The curtains were drawn and no lights were on, so it took Dallas’s vision a moment to adjust, to see that his father was perched on the end of the bed, dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a button-down white shirt that showed off his broad shoulders and trim torso. He had, heroically, kept up his regular exercise regimen even now, at sixty-seven, eligible for but having not yet retired from his job as a tax accountant. He retained the full head of Glory hair, although it had largely gone slate gray. He was sitting with his hands bunched in his lap.

“Hi, Dad,” Dallas said, slipping into the room. He left the door cracked for the little bit of light. When his father didn’t respond, he went to the bed and sat down next to him. “You okay?”

“Sure,” his father said. He had a deep voice, but the bass was comforting rather than intimidating, curled at the end with an upward lilt, so he often sounded like he was unsure of himself, which made him less scary to talk to, although sometimes Dallas wasn’t sure when he was asking a question.

“Just needed some time?”

“I guess so. It’s funny.”

“Is it?”

“After all this time in an empty house, you’d think I’d be thrilled to have guests.”

“I don’t know that anyone would think that.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

Dallas looked around the room. His parents’ furniture was all heavy, overbearing, from the bed’s thick headboard to his father’s three-by-three-drawer bureau with its hand-carved flourishes. Atop the bureau sat a single large photo of Dallas’s mother, followed by smaller pictures of each Glory boy in heavy silver frames, ordered by age, like a line of ducklings waddling after her. Dallas couldn’t, at that moment, remember what the photo of him was, which bit of his life was frozen in time for his father to gaze at every day, and in the dark he couldn’t make it out.

Stuck in the space between the door to the master bathroom and the walk-in closet was a tall bookshelf made of real oak, the only one remaining in the house. For most of his life, Dallas’s home had been strewn with books, shelves pressed into every available space, crowding the upstairs hallway, the living room, the dining room. They managed to pile up on the kitchen island, even. Shortly after Dallas moved out his father decided it was time, finally, to pare them all down, and Peter had taken up the task of helping, cataloguing and boxing up everything, donating that which wasn’t worth more than a few cents and selling the few books that were actually of some value, running every title by their father, who selected about fifty books to keep.

The index card felt large in Dallas’s hand. He turned it over twice, then squinted down at the handwriting, as though the darkness might somehow reveal something new about it.

“Hey Dad,” Dallas said.

“Yep?”

“Random question.”

“The best kind.”

Dallas couldn’t help smiling as he said, “Did Mom ever work as a bartender?”

“No,” his father said. “But I did.”

“You did?”

“I was still in college. Your mom and I had just met.” His father went on to tell Dallas a story he’d never heard: that his father worked in a bar, no longer around, only a few blocks from where La Biblioteca now stood. That he wasn’t a great bartender, that the more complicated the drink, the worse it would taste. That Dallas’s mother started coming in regularly, offering up tests to his father by way of more and more complicated cocktails that he dutifully attempted and she then dutifully drank. Until the day she asked for something called a Bijou.

“I’d never heard of that one,” he said. “I made her write it down for me.”

Dallas could barely speak. He held up the card, though he wasn’t sure his father could see it. “On this.”

“Ah,” his father said. Dallas expected him to reach out for it, but he didn’t.

“How did it end up at the hotel bar?”

“Well, I could only guess.”

“Okay.”

His father had kept it in a box that he left behind for the other bartenders when he quit after graduation. “One of them must have changed jobs and taken it with him.” Finally, he reached out and plucked it from Dallas’s hand. “Imagine that.”

Dallas wanted to ask how he, and none of his siblings, knew this, but all he could think to say was, of the card, “You can keep it.”

“Oh, no. You should.” Dallas expected to hear something in his father’s voice, a break, a hitch, a wave of something he was holding back, but all was calm. He handed it back to Dallas. “You found it.”

“But it doesn’t belong to me.”

“Belonging,” Dallas’s father said, but then didn’t elaborate. Instead, he stood and moved through the dark room to the door, pulling it open and letting light from the hallway spill in. Dallas took him in: he still looked like the youthful father he remembered. He thought about Strajaz and his utter and total transformation. He thought of the people downstairs, whose voices he could now hear, a tinkle of collective talk and laughter, people drinking and chatting in celebration of his mother’s life. How quickly things could bend and change. But also how they could never bend back.

“I suppose we should join the fun,” his father said.

Dallas looked down at the card whose content he had memorized over the last two weeks, its mysteries unflowered before him. Dallas folded it in half and stuffed it into the pocket of his pants. He stood.

“I guess we should,” he said, and joined his father.

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Joe Baumann is the author of six collections of short fiction, most recently A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone, from University of Wisconsin Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction and currently directs the MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.

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