“I get it. Believe me. Awareness is not my problem.”
“Then what is?”
“Paralysis? Failure to act? Or, well, how did you put it? Generally being the biggest pussy you’ve ever met?”
Blood and snot had dried on my face, and I could feel it cracking and pulling at my skin. I walked to the kitchen, splashed my face with water and washed it with hand soap and a paper towel. Then I grabbed a clean T-shirt from my bedroom and changed into it. On my way back to the couch, Cal said, “How much more of your life can you waste moping around like this?”
“Fuck you. I’m fine here.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “This isn’t where you belong, and you know it.” Cal crossed his legs and leaned back. “Earlier you said you’d do anything to make things right with me. Here’s how to do that: Go back and make things right for yourself. Make things right with her. Tell her all the things you want to tell her. At the very least, tell her you’re sorry. Because what’s at stake? Literally nothing. You’ve already lost what you were afraid of losing.”
“Why do you care if I make things right with her or not?”
“I don’t care. You care.”
“Besides, she’d just tell me to go fuck myself.”
“You’re missing the point. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. There’s got to be a reckoning, Harp. It doesn’t matter if she tells you to go jump off the top of the Salesforce Tower with your fist up your ass. That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that you don’t die with all this stuff stuck inside of you, tearing you to pieces, making you less and less until there’s nothing left. And let me be blunt, if you think I wanna be hanging out at my big beach house when I’m eighty, shooting the shit and playing the Tam High setlist with a bitter old fool who’s still brooding over a girl he walked away from forty years earlier, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Our conversation was interrupted by Maggie shouting “Dinner!” and knocking on the door until I opened it.
She shrieked when she saw my face. “Yikes! What the heck happened to you?”
Maggie was sixteen and looked like a human version of the lanky coast lilies that pop up perennially on the Point Reyes Peninsula in West Marin. Imagine a bright orange flower with little brown dots, its petals curled backward like Maggie’s hair when she pulled it into a ponytail.
“I happened to him,” Cal announced from behind us.
I told Maggie to come in while I went to grab the beer and ice cream from the fridge. A second later she shrieked again.
I looked over my shoulder. Her eyes were wide, facing Cal. “Wait . . . You’re . . .”
“Chris Callahan,” he said, shaking her hand. “And you are?”
“Margaret Elizabeth Toltz,” she answered formally. “I like your shirt. Where’d you get it?”
“Saint Laurent,” he told her, ironing the front of it with his hands.
I liked Maggie a lot. Her favorite pastimes were chopping firewood and driving the snowplow in winter. Over the summer she worked as a camp counselor in Glacier and tipped me off to all the good trails. In return, I was teaching her how to play power chords.
Maggie looked at me, hand on her hip, hip jutted out to the side. “Joe, why is Chris Callahan in your house? And why did he beat you up?”
“Long story,” I mumbled.
I walked back over with the ice cream and beer. Cal tossed his arm playfully around Maggie’s shoulder and said, “But it’s a good story. I’ll tell you about it over dinner.”
Maggie looked up at him. “You’re staying for dinner?”
“My flight doesn’t leave until 6:00 a.m. tomorrow. So, yeah, I’m staying.”
A few days before it came to pass, I dreamed I was having dinner with Cal, Sid, and Maggie on Sid’s porch. I didn’t recall the dream until I was at the table, and then it hit me as hard as Cal’s fist in my face. Specifically, I remembered Cal sitting across from me with a bottle of Big Sky IPA in his hand, leaning back so far in the wrought-iron chair he was on that its two front legs were a foot off the ground, and I worried he was going to tumble backward. I remembered Sid cutting his steak into unusually small pieces like he always did, chewing slowly as he told Cal about the writing workshop, and Cal pointing at me with his beer, saying, “I better be a hot topic in this class, or we’re breaking up for good.” And before it happened, I knew Maggie was going to ask Cal to take a photo with her so that her friends would believe he was really there. But that’s where real life strayed from the dream, because instead of posing for a picture, Cal took Maggie’s phone, switched it from camera to video, and serenaded her with the entire first verse of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” while she giggled and blushed.
“Congratulations,” he said after he handed the phone back to her. “You just won Instagram for the day.”
After dinner we had huckleberry ice cream and played a board game called Taboo. The object was to get your teammate to guess a word on a card within a limited amount of time, but there were five other words on the card you couldn’t say to trigger them to guess the main word. Cal and I played against Sid and Maggie, and our ability to finish each other’s sentences, coupled with all the inside jokes we shared, made us unbeatable. For example, during the first round, Cal pulled the word “tofu.” He couldn’t say “meat,” “bean,” “curd,” “Japanese,” or “healthy.” He didn’t have to. Sophomore year there had been a kid in our class who played bass like a boss, and we let him join our band for three days. Everyone in school
