The number 40-something sat in the room and expanded. Leo thought about it. 40-something people sitting in 40-something different versions of this night in apartments and in cars and at kitchen tables adding up numbers that wouldn't add up, finding corners and coming up empty, weighing options that all felt like no option at all. 40-something people who would wake up tomorrow and not know why the pressure had lifted.
"He'll just start again," Corey said. He wasn't being contrary. He was being honest the way you're honest when you've seen enough to know how things tend to go. Guys like Toad, they don't stop.
They just adjust and start again. "You're probably right," Mike said. But he'll start slower and smaller and with a clearer understanding of where the edges are. He looked at Corey directly.
"That's not justice. I know it's not justice, but it's what's available tonight with what we have in the time we've got." He held the look. "Sometimes that's what you work with." Corey held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once slowly and it was a different kind of nod than the ones before, not submission, not gratitude exactly, but something more like recognition.
The recognition of a person who has been given a straight answer, honestly offered without pretense. Dave Pelman chose that moment to emerge from under the counter. He came up slowly straightening his tie, smoothing his jacket with the wounded dignity of a man reassembling himself. He looked around the room.
He looked at Leo and Corey. He looked at the four men in booth nine. He cleared his throat. "I would also like some coffee." Harold reached for the pot.
And Brenda Kowalski, for the first time since the glass door came in, almost smiled. Dave Pelman drank his coffee standing up. Both hands wrapped around the mug, elbows on the counter, watching the room the way a man watches something he knows he'll spend years trying to describe to people who weren't there. He had a wife in Albuquerque named Carol.
He had two kids, a boy 14 going through that particular variety of teenage sullenness that felt like a foreign language. And a girl 11 who still thought her father was funny. He sold commercial kitchen equipment for a living. He drove long stretches of desert highway alone at odd hours and listened to audiobooks and thought about whether he was living the life he'd meant to live or just the life that had accumulated around him while he wasn't paying attention.