I was looking out the window at the birds. There were some birds—I think they were swallows—that had been making nests in the eaves right over my bedroom window. I like to watch them swoop and dive.
“I didn’t figure it was any big secret,” I said.
I mean, I knew his life. And what I knew felt bad enough. Then again, it didn’t seem much worse than mine. But I guess you never can tell. You know. From the outside like that.
I remembered something Darren Weller had said to me. Different people have different reactions to things. That’s all.
“You seem like you feel better,” I said after a time, when I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to answer. “I mean, I see you outside your house and everything. Do you feel better?”
“Kind of yes and kind of no,” he said. “You put all that stuff out, and then it’s not really very different. But I guess at least it’s out. I’m not entirely sure what that does, just getting it on the outside of you like that, but it seems like it does something. But I did figure out one thing for sure.”
He fell silent for a minute. I watched him fingering the loose threads around the hole in his jeans, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t dare ask what was the one thing he’d figured out.
“It’s like . . . ,” he began. Then he faded, and I thought I might never know. “Zoe almost died. Well, you know that. You know it better than anybody. I guess she felt like nobody needed her around. But I do. I need her around. But she didn’t know it yet because she hadn’t even met me. But she was just about to meet me. All those years thinking nobody needed her or wanted her around, and she was just about to meet me and she didn’t know it. You get what I’m driving at?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Well . . . now I’m starting to think . . . you don’t know what might be coming next. And it might even be something nice. Something good, even though everything before it wasn’t good at all. You see where I’m going with this?”
“You’re saying you have to stick around to see what happens next.”
I watched his face light up, and I knew I had hit it.
“I knew you’d get it,” he said.
It was a moment the likes of which we hadn’t had in a very long time. If we had ever had a moment like that one.
He seemed satisfied that we had covered that topic, so he flew in an entirely new direction.
“I’m trying to talk my mom into getting me a dog. Wouldn’t that be good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It would be great. Think she’ll do it?”
“Not sure. She’s trying to talk me into a cat instead. She’s really paranoid about a dog doing something nasty on the rugs. She figures a cat would be trained to a litter box. I guess a cat would be okay, but . . . you can run with a dog.”
“You’re thinking about taking up running?”
“Yeah. Maybe. It sure did you a lot of good.”
I took a deep breath and said something I really wanted badly not to say. But here’s the way I looked at it, and I still see it the same way now: you’re either a guy’s friend or you’re not.
“You could always try running with Zoe’s dogs.”
It actually hurt coming out. But I don’t think that mattered. I think what mattered is that I said it. No matter how it felt.
“Nah,” he said. “That wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t do that to you. It’s enough that you shared Zoe with me. Running with those dogs, that’s your thing. I couldn’t horn in on that.”
“Thanks,” I said, and didn’t elaborate. Or need to.
“I’m going to go out there now,” he said. “But I figured it was high time I came by and talked.”
Speaking of talking, I think by then we had forgotten to whisper and had begun to talk in our natural voices. Because my bedroom door flew open. Suddenly and almost violently. My mother stuck her head into the room as if she could catch me in some dastardly act. What act, I still don’t know. Did she think I had a girl in there?
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you, Connor.”
“I was just leaving,” Connor said.
“Probably just as well,” she said. “Not that you’re not welcome here. But everybody else is asleep.” Of course, she said it pretty loudly. That was my mom for you.
So that was the end of that talk. But it was okay, because we’d said enough. Really, we’d said everything we needed to say. At least for the moment.
When Wednesday came around, I walked up to my brother Roy’s room to ask if he wanted me to go with him on the bus to the meeting. It was really a polite way of letting him know that I was pushing him to go, whether I was welcome in the Wednesday meeting or not.
“You said you couldn’t go on Wednesdays,” he said. “You told me the Wednesday one was a closed meeting.”
He was lying on his bed, bare chested, on his back. Curtains drawn closed. Hands linked behind his head. He seemed to be keeping himself busy by staring at the ceiling in the strangely dim room.
“I’d still go with you,” I said. “I just wouldn’t come in. I could just sit outside and wait for you.”
Speaking of waiting, I waited for him to tell me all about how it was an utterly ridiculous idea. I waited for him to say, “Why on earth would I need you to go back and forth on the bus with me just to sit outside?”
He didn’t.
“Yeah,” he said. “That would be good.”
I was surprised, of course. But I didn’t argue.
The first time we’d ridden the bus to the meeting together, we hadn’t talked much. This time was a slight improvement, because this time at least I talked.
I told him
