Gift Curse

I believe God gives each of us a gift to offer the world. Not a talent, not a skill. A gift. Something meant for someone else.

The question, as it turns out, is whether you figure that out before or after it costs you everything.

Sydney had owned the diner since 1987, which made him a relatively new addition to a place that had been feeding people since the Eisenhower administration. The original owner, a man named Gus, had kept the stools, the counter, the layout, and even the pie case right where they were in 1952, and Sydney had respected that decision the way you respect a house that already knows what it is. You don't renovate a photograph.

He was a big man, Sydney. The kind of big that comes from decades of lifting and hauling and standing on your feet twelve hours at a stretch rather than from anything you do on purpose. He still wore his chef's hat out of habit even when he was just counting money, which he did at the kitchen doorway most nights, in plain sight of anyone who cared to look.

That was the generation he came from. A generation that trusted the world to behave itself.

A few years back Sydney had started selling state lottery tickets, mostly to keep the lights on during slow months. At first nobody was much interested. Then the jackpot sat unclaimed long enough to climb past two hundred million, then three hundred, and somewhere around four hundred it became a civic event. People who had never once eaten a meal at Sydney's diner were suddenly regulars. They'd buy their tickets, drop four dollars on a slice of pie, and feel like they'd earned something.

Tonight the jackpot was sitting at five hundred and eighty million dollars, which is a number that stops looking like money and starts looking like a misprint.

The drawing had been an hour ago. A man four cities over had won it. The crowd in Sydney's diner had taken the news the way crowds always do — a groan, a few crumpled tickets, and then people remembering they had somewhere to be. By ten o'clock the place was nearly empty.

Sydney was behind the counter with his apron on and his chef's hat slightly crooked, which he would have fixed if he'd known, counting the night's earnings the way he always did. The cash safe was open in the back kitchen, waiting for him.

He was having a good month.

Keegan Smalls had been watching Sydney count that money for three weeks.

He had come in originally for the lottery tickets, the same as everyone else. Keegan had always liked the idea of getting something for nothing. He had liked that idea so much and for so long that it had more or less organized his entire life around itself.

There are people who are dealt a bad hand and spend their lives working to overcome it. Then there are people who are dealt a perfectly average hand and spend their lives convinced someone cheated them. Keegan was firmly in the second category, though he would have argued otherwise with great passion.

His mother had kicked him out at seventeen after he cleaned out her jewelry box to fund what he privately called his business ventures. He still thought about that from time to time. Still couldn't understand why she hadn't believed in him. A mother was supposed to believe in you. If she'd just given him the money willingly, none of that ugliness would have happened.

There had been a woman outside a bus stop, years later, who hadn't wanted to hand over her purse. That one wasn't his fault either. You ask nicely and people just don't listen, and then what are you supposed to do.

His brother Marcus, who wore suits and carried a briefcase and had apparently decided to make something of himself through sheer grinding effort like some kind of sucker, had gotten Keegan out of county lockup after three days. Three days. And then stood there expecting gratitude. Keegan hadn't spoken to Marcus since, which he also considered Marcus's fault.

The point being: Keegan Smalls had arrived at his thirties with a pristine internal record and a long list of people who had wronged him, and he had learned from all of it the one lesson that had always made the most sense to him.

Take what is yours. Then take what is theirs.

He had a pistol in his lower left jacket pocket. He had been tapping it on and off all evening the way some people tap a pen. It had a reassuring weight to it, that gun. A kind of cold authority that made everything feel simpler than it was.

His plan was to wait until the diner emptied completely. Just Sydney and the money and the open safe. Simple math.

The sign in the window turned off at ten. The last customers had filtered out by ten-fifteen. And then there were three people left in Sydney's diner.

Sydney, counting money at the kitchen door.

Keegan, at the counter, watching.

And an old man sitting two stools down who had been there so quietly that Keegan had practically forgotten about him.

Keegan's fingers found the pistol again.

"Just be patient."

The old man said it without looking up from his iced tea. His voice had the particular quality of someone who had learned, through long experience, that most urgency is optional.

Keegan's hand moved away from the pistol like it had decided on its own.

"He'll be back with dessert in no time," the old man said.

"You don't understand." Keegan worked to keep his voice level. There was a lump of frustration in his throat that he was doing his best not to let out.

"The name is Barnabas." A warm hand extended across the stools.

Keegan reached for it and missed, the old man pulling the classic slip at the last second, a move so old it had its own grandchildren. Barnabas laughed at this the way you laugh at something that never stops being funny no matter how many times you do it.

"People always fall for that with me," he said, recovering through his own laughter. "Because they think I'm too slow."

Keegan glanced toward the kitchen. Sydney had disappeared toward the back, toward the safe. Keegan let a small smile happen.

Barnabas sipped his tea.

"You must be new to town. I haven't seen you before."

"Just passing through."

"I knew it. People from here know me by name." He raised his glass toward Sydney, who had reappeared at the kitchen doorway and nodded in that particular way of someone who has been the background of a hundred of this man's conversations.

"What are you," Keegan said, "the mayor?"

"Far from it." Barnabas set down his glass. "I just have a gift with people. Friendly like."

He asked Sydney for a refill and settled into his stool the way someone settles into something comfortable. Then he began to talk.

You have to understand that Barnabas was not a man who told stories for effect. He told them the way other people breathe. Not because he needed anyone to listen, but because something in him believed that the spoken word had weight, had presence, could land somewhere useful if it just got out into the air.

He had been born sixty-three years ago, he said, in a hospital room where his mother died a few days later from complications she had refused to let slow her down long enough for anyone to intervene. She had pushed him into the world on her own terms. His father had raised him on a farm, teaching him how to grow things and fix things and sit quietly with things that couldn't be fixed.

By eighteen, both parents were gone. He sold the land, put himself through a small biblical college on the proceeds, discovered he had a voice that could hold a room, and met a woman named Amadi whose laugh made it hard to remember what anything had been like before her.

They married two days after graduation, which people called impulsive and which Barnabas had always considered simply accurate.

They had a daughter named Jonina.

Keegan's eyes kept going to the kitchen. The safe was still open. Sydney had his back turned.

The car accident happened on a road trip, Barnabas said. The three of them in the car. Jonina driving, young and precise and proud of it. Amadi and Barnabas in the back, still looking at each other like people who had just met, which annoyed their daughter in the fond way that children are annoyed by their parents being happy.

She turned around to say so. Then she turned around again. The third time she looked back at them, the car crossed the center line.

Barnabas said he had held Amadi's hand afterward on the pavement.

He said that Jonina had died with a smile because he had told her her mother would be waiting.

He said he had gone to a very dark place after that, the kind of dark that swallows a man's faith whole if he lets it sit long enough. He had nearly let it.

Then his church had sent him on an emergency mission. A disease outbreak, planes loading fast, no time to sit with grief or doubt.

They crashed on the way.

He said he had stood in a meadow with smoke going up in columns and people in the trees above him and he had been, somehow, the only one standing.

Keegan snorted. "No way you survived a plane crash."

Barnabas pointed at the television in the back of the diner. A reporter stood in a charred field. Keegan caught the tail end of her sign-off.

...only one survivor.

Sydney gave a low chuckle from the kitchen doorway. "You almost had me, Barnabas. You really do have a gift for gab."

The open safe caught his eye then. He moved toward it to swing it shut.

Inside the safe, on top of the cash box, sat a pistol. A vagrant had been bothering customers outside the diner the week before, and Sydney, not wanting any trouble and not wanting to call the police over something that might not be anything, had taken the gun away from the man quietly and locked it in the safe and more or less forgotten about it. He was still moving toward the safe as Barnabas said, quietly, and with a kind of private amusement:

"Sydney, that's not my gift."

Keegan stood up fast.

The pistol was out of his pocket and leveled at Sydney before anyone in the room had finished processing the fact that the evening had just changed shape entirely.

Sydney was a big man who had once been a college football player, which is to say he understood how to take a hit. But he had never been pointed at before. It turned out that made a person feel very small.

"All the cash," Keegan said. "Old man."

Barnabas's voice, when it came, had a different quality than it had all evening. Not pleading. Not afraid. Something more like a doctor reading a chart.

"My friend. It would be wise to put the weapon down."

Keegan looked at him the way you look at someone who has just said something that doesn't connect to the situation at hand. "Think of this as another chapter for your story," he said. And then he pulled the trigger.

What happened next took less than a second and would take considerably longer than that to explain to the detective who arrived forty minutes later.

The bullet entered the open mouth of the safe at an angle, caught the flat interior back wall, deflected hard sideways, and struck the vagrant's confiscated pistol lying on top of the cash box. The impact drove the hammer back against a chambered round. That gun fired. The shot came out low and sideways.

It hit Keegan in the chest.

Two guns. One bullet each. The math of an unlikely evening.

Keegan went down. Sydney ran for the phone. And Barnabas, moving with a steadiness that did not belong to the pace of the room, crossed to where Keegan had fallen and knelt beside him.

He pressed his hands gently against the wound.

Keegan's body was doing what bodies do when they begin to understand what is happening to them. He was shaking in a way he could not control, and his eyes, which had spent most of the evening calculating angles and timing and distances, were now moving without purpose, looking for something to hold onto.

They found Barnabas.

"Ease yourself to it," Barnabas said.

It was not clear what he meant. It was also, somehow, exactly the right thing to say. The shaking slowed.

"He gives mercy on those who confess to being a sinner." Barnabas's voice was very low. "Confess, Keegan Smalls. Confess before you die."

Something in Keegan's face shifted. It had been a face that had spent a long time maintaining a particular expression — watchful, certain, slightly contemptuous. That expression left it now.

What replaced it was younger.

"I'm sorry." The words came out uneven and then came apart completely. "I'm not ready to die. I've done so much wrong. I'm not ready to die."

Barnabas put a hand on his cheek.

"None of us are ever ready," he said.

He leaned close to Keegan's ear. Keegan's breathing was fast and then very fast and then it stopped.

Whatever Barnabas said in those last few seconds, only Keegan heard it.

The ambulance arrived at ten forty-seven.

The diner windows turned red and white and red and white with the slow pulse of the lights, which is a rhythm that has nothing urgent in it, which means that everyone already knew.

Sydney stood by the phone, still holding the receiver. He was a large man but he had rounded somehow, like something had let out of him. The detective who arrived spoke to him in low tones and wrote things on a notepad without looking up.

"He just..." Sydney tried to find the construction for it. "The bullet came back."

"These things happen," the detective said.

Sydney did not believe that. He had seen a lot of things in his years running the diner and he did not believe this was a thing that simply happened.

He turned to the counter.

The stool where Barnabas had been sitting was empty. The iced tea glass sat on the rubber mat behind the counter, rinsed clean and turned upside down. The way a considerate patron leaves things when they don't want to cause anyone extra work.

Sydney moved to the stool.

He put his hand on the back of it.

"Where did the old man go?"

The detective looked up. Looked around the diner.

"What old man?"

Sydney didn't answer him. He reached down and picked up the iced tea glass and turned it right-side up in his hands. He set it back on the counter that way. He did not entirely know why he did that. It felt like the right thing to do. Like honoring something without knowing its name.

The detective kept writing. Neither man spoke.

The street outside the diner was quiet in the way that streets go quiet after something has passed through them.

Barnabas walked without hurrying, hands clasped behind his back, the way a man walks when he has nowhere specific to be because the work of the night has been done and wherever he goes next, that work will find him there.

He did not look back at the diner.

The ambulance pulled away without its siren running.

He stopped under a streetlight and stood in it for a moment, face tilted up toward the bulb. Just a man standing in the light. Nothing that would make you look twice.

Then he moved on down the empty sidewalk, and the night closed in behind him the way water closes behind a hand.

The streetlight above the empty spot where he had stood flickered once.

Then held.