Wager arrived in Denver just in time to take her to lunch at My Brother’s Bar, just up I-25 from Mile-Hi Stadium—Bears’ Stadium it was called before professional football caught on. The tavern was run by a quietly smiling Greek, and the music was classical stuff, which Wager liked because it was quiet and interesting even if he didn’t know what it was, and even if, with this crowd, you couldn’t hear it very well. The tavern spread through two large rooms filled with heavy tables and did not have a single fern. Despite the noon swarm of blow-dried salesmen and young lawyers wandering in from historically salvaged lower downtown, the place still gave Wager the sense of community he had enjoyed at the old Frontier Bar before it was torn down. He tried to explain that feeling to Jo and to apologize for the noise and people—it was a different place in mid-afternoon or later in the evening. But he saw that the only thing she was really interested in was the sound of his voice and not what it said.
