The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(127)

“You said all right but they still had to peel your hand out of your girl’s. Typical, right? We think we’re men and then a woman brings us to our knees.” Stan’s laugh started as a wheeze and then burst in a bubbling guffaw.

“She make it?” Charlie asked under the chortling.

Erik nodded at him. “She made it. She’s all right.” He turned back to Stan. “Talking to the police first definitely was the right choice to make. I don’t remember you steering me, but thank you.”

Stan dismissed it with a wave.

“No, really,” Erik said. “I came back today to face some ghosts, so it means a lot to find this out. Thank you.“

Stan cleared his throat. “Good to see you again, Erik,” he said, and offered a hand across the counter. “Welcome back.”

Erik shook his hand. Then took his license and the completed visitor’s badge from Charlie and shook his hand, too. He left Wayne Hall oddly touched.

In the lobby of Mallory Hall, he stood before the bronze plaque outside the auditorium doors, tracing a finger over the raised letters:



Del’Amici Memorial Auditorium

In memory of our friend and colleague

Marie Giulia Del’Amici

Professor of Dance

May 27, 1943 - April 19, 1992



He breathed in, his heart pounding. The smell in the lobby alone was an engulfing wave of nostalgia. The smell of the past. The smell of production. It was more intense than he’d imagined.

The doors to the theater were open, and music played within. Erik hesitated. He could skip the theater and head down to the shops, look for Leo. He did come to see Leo, after all.

“We’re going in,” David had said, one long-ago summer. “Fuck the f*cking f*ckers, this is our theater. We own this place…”

Erik glanced again at Marie’s plaque, then he walked through the auditorium doors.

Here the smell of the past was stronger. He paused by the lighting booth, dark and empty. The door was ajar, beckoning. Erik put his hand on the glass pane, as if to soothe a sorrowful dog. Not now. It’s all right, I’ll come back.

A half-dozen girls were on the stage in practice clothes, flushed, panting, gulping water. One or two glanced back to where Erik stood. He kept his badge and his hands in plain sight, made his body language neutral.

Standing in the middle of the third row, talking to the girls, a familiar figure. Tall and broad-shouldered, a little thicker in the waist now, but exuding the same charisma and magnetism. And the voice—deep and full, rising up out of his chest and filling the theater.

“All right then, ladies. Go cool down. Thank you. If I don’t see you, enjoy your Thanksgiving.”

The girls dispersed through the wings. Erik moved further down the aisle. Kees was looking at a notebook, a pair of reading glasses on his nose, held by a chain. His bald pate shone under the lights.

Erik cleared his throat. “Keesja.”

Kees looked up like a bird, then back over his shoulder. His mouth fell open. “Holy. Shit.”

“We meet again, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Kees tossed the notebook over his shoulder and fumbled at his glasses. “Will you look what the good Lord hath brought to me?”

“The return of the prodigal son,” Erik said, his voice husky as it passed his tight throat.

“I don’t believe what I’m seeing.” Kees made his way down the row.

“Believe it.”

“You still haven’t kissed a man in your life but I can tell you’re pretty damn close right now.” Kees came up the aisle, throwing his arms out into their full, magnificent span. Erik went straight into them and was crushed in muscle and bone. Kees’s hands pummeled and patted him, he kissed Erik’s head, rocked him back and forth, crooning. “Good to see you. So good to see you.”

“Good to be seen,” Erik said.

Kees held him away. “How are you, my man? Let me look at you. No, wait, let me finish feeling you up.” He hugged Erik again.

“Keep your hands off my ass.”

“You wish.” Kees swatted said posterior anyway. “Now let me look at you. Sit down, come, sit down. Goddamn, I can’t believe it. All these years, Fish. What the hell are you doing here?”

Erik could have made up any number of things, but this supernatural weariness he could not seem to shake left him with only enough energy for the truth. “It was time,” he said.

Kees seemed satisfied, and leaned back, putting one ankle on the other knee. He was now sporting a goatee, shot through with grey. So were his eyebrows.

“So tell me, what have you been doing with yourself since you ran away?”

“Interesting choice of words.”

“I call things what they are. Where did you go?”

Erik gave him the short version, a resume of Geneseo and Brockport.

“Are you married? Any little fishies of your own?”

“Just divorced. No guppies.”

“No wonder you look terrible.”

“Do I?”

“Well you’re beautiful to me but yeah, you look a little beat up, my friend.”

“I feel beat up.”

Kees clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Let me buy you a beer. And a sandwich. Good Lord, you look gaunt.”