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"They'll try again, that's for sure."
"Reckon so."
"And that doesn't bother you?"
"No, not really."
"I'm curious. Is there anything that does? Bother you, I mean?"
"That girl out there," he said, pointing at Tracy, waiting outside in the corridor. "She does something with her finger...well, that bothers the hell out of me."
+++++
She walked down to the café a little earlier than usual the next morning, wrote Darren's specials on the board - in pink and blue chalk, just to spice things up a little bit - and she stuck her head out back, looked at all the progress the carpenters and plumbers and electricians had made over the past four weeks, but Dooley wasn't out there. "Hasn't been here for a few," the contractor said, shrugging his shoulders, but she saw Vance walk by a little before noon, a few minutes after Jim and Jimmie came down for lunch, and he looked in the window as he passed, then looked down at the ground. Other eyes took note of his passage, however, and Jim smiled.
"This could be fun," he sighed.
A massive Russian submarine slipped into the Bay of Fundy two nights later, and Russian commandos dove into the water and mounted electric sleds, took off past North Head and crossed Owen Basin under the dark moon, though other men, unseen 'til that moment, boarded the submarine, and a half hour later the submarine was under tow, on the surface, bound for the Penobscot narrows.
He sat in his study that night and watch his plan unfold. The commandos, captured on the rocky beach a little before sunrise, never got a message off, while a billion ruble submarine - stripped of all it's secrets, was towed out to sea and set adrift, months later. Spies were caught that night and would be tried in courts, sent to prisons, but all that was for tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow to deal with.
When morning came he walked down to the café and went out back, looked over the addition. The drywall was finished and carpenters were trimming the doors and windows, and Bruce pointed out where the piano would go. Jim pulled a sawhorse over and put it where the piano bench would go, and he sat there looking out all that glass for a long time, wondering what it would feel like. The sun setting over the world, all that pink water.
He walked back to the house, found Tracy just getting out of bed, and the smile on his face was not lost on her - yet like everything these days she wondered how long it would last.
+++++
A few weeks later, the addition complete, the truck from a music store in Boston pulled up to the café and four men muscled a huge box out the back and carried it inside. They carefully unboxed the Clavinova and set it on the wood floor in the indicated corner, and Jim beamed while Bruce stood behind his new bar, mixing old fashioneds. The men hook up the concealed speakers that were already in the walls and ceiling and, when everything was ready, they powered up the full-sized concert grand.
"Well?" Bruce and Darren sighed, looking at Jim - and pointing to the piano.
"Reckon I ought to," he said, grinning. "Just to try it out."
And everyone laughed. Everyone watched.
He sat behind the keys and played a few disjoined notes, then riffed along warming up, his eyes closed as he remembered nights with his wife so long ago, so far away, rocking back and forth in the music of another night, in other arms - as he drifted into Gershwin's Prelude Number 2. He felt hands on his shoulders just then, in the here and now, and when he finished the piece he looked up, saw Darren crying by his side, Tracy too, her arms wrapped around Darren.
He drifted into Summertime, looked out the window into the distance, and he watched the sun slipping towards the far horizon behind lozenge-shaped clouds drifting by. The sky turned orange, then pink, and the water turned with the sky - orange to pink - and he felt their love all around him. In the air, all around this new space.
He heard the bell on the front door twinkle as it opened and he turned, saw Vance and three other men walking in, silenced pistols coming out of shoulder holsters and he laughed, then he smiled.
"Oh," he sighed as he soared, "this is going to be so much fun..."
© 2017 Adrian Leverkühn | abw | a little work of fiction, every syllable of it.
