“But things are good between you and Brittany, right?”
I guess I’m about to find out. Things seem okay, but they often do just before the broken relationship roof falls in on me.
“We’ve got a seventeen-year-old, man,” Billy says. “Feel free to talk things through. I may have a useful insight or two.”
“Nah, you were right. Britts is a good kid. I was just thinking about the bullshit with her mother.”
“I’m glad you got her back from Europe.”
Let’s hope she doesn’t go right back. Shit, I’m in danger of starting to wallow in it all. I shrug, probably looking as miserable as I feel while doing so.
“Okay,” Billy says with a tight smile. “No more Brittany talk.”
“Thanks.” I pop a handful of peanuts into my mouth and signal our server for more.
“How about Pat O’Toole?” he asks, opening yet another raw topic. “You two seem to get along.”
“Yeah, we do, but she’s not interested in me that way.”
“Which sounds like you’re interested in her ‘that’ way?”
Am I? The distance she insists on imposing between us is starting to wear on me. Anyway, it’s not a topic to bore Billy with. I decide to steer the conversation to his late sister. Mel’s death had devastated me. I know it still haunts Billy, yet remembering her together seems to help both of us to shoulder the loss without sinking too deeply into melancholy. There are plenty of happy memories to sustain us, and we invariably get a few laughs out of remembering her wacky antics.
“Have you heard from any of Mel’s friends lately?” I ask.
He nods. “You know how people loved Mel. I still hear from a few of them now and then, and we get lots of Christmas cards. I ran into Pete Livingston at a ball game last summer, and we shot the shit over a couple of beers.”
I smile. Pete was a wild one who ran with our crowd. “How’s Pete?”
“Good. Still doing his firefighter shit, still telling cornball jokes, still stuck in adolescence. He was telling me about a time he and Mel and some other nuts drank a little too much and tried to paddle a dinghy by hand all the way across Lake Michigan in the middle of the night. I can’t believe they didn’t kill themselves!”
“When I think about some of the dumb shit we did, I’m surprised we didn’t kill ourselves several times over. That night we got it into our heads that we wanted to see Michigan,” I say with a chuckle.
Billy grins. “You were there?”
I nod. “Pete’s folks were out of town, so he suggested using his dad’s ‘little boat,’ which turned out to be an inflatable Zodiac with an outboard motor—not exactly a dinghy. We didn’t have a trailer hitch to take the whole thing, so we took the motor off and strapped the boat to the top of someone’s car—I forget whose. Anyway, Dipshit Livingston forgot to load the paddles, which we didn’t realize until we put the damned thing in the water. Mel, in particular, was disappointed about not getting to go to Michigan.”
“All her fault, huh?” Billy asks with a chuckle.
“Not entirely, but she was a babe, and no guy wanted to let her down.”
Billy laughs. “I still thought of girls as being gross back in those days—especially Big Sis.”
Mel was anything but gross. While not drop dead gorgeous in any traditional sense of the word, she was vivacious and inherently appealing. Everyone wanted to get close to her all through school. The glue of the special bond between her and me had been the abuse we suffered at home—mine at the fists and feet of my older brother ‘Fearsome’ Frankie, and Mel’s at the hands of her father, who was a twisted bastard of a child sexual abuser with his eldest daughter. Mel had suspected the truth about my brother by watching him interact with me at school and around the neighborhood. Her suspicions were confirmed one day when she arrived at our house while Frankie was pounding the crap out of me on the other side of the screen door. That particular beating had left me with a six-stitch scar on my right cheekbone that resurfaced when I tanned for years afterward. Things crystallized for me after school one day when she begged me not to go to volleyball practice and leave her alone in the house with her father. The fear in her eyes and her evident relief when her mother arrived sent my mind back to a number of other times when she’d exhibited uncharacteristic skittishness. Looking back on them, I’d realized that her father featured in every instance. She tearfully admitted to the truth when I pressed her for a definitive answer. Neither of us whispered a word of it to anyone else; we were friends, confidants, and a two-person, mutual-support network. I sometimes wonder if either of us would have made it through our teens without the other to lean on and love. Although the sexual tension between us was electric and we walked right up to the precipice of a full-blown relationship more times than I could count, the idea of going there and having it go sour terrified us, so we always backed away. The prospect of losing our best friend and one-person, emotional-support network was too terrifying to contemplate.
I pick up the story of the Lake Michigan escapade for Billy. “Anyway, we’ve got three sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boys spewing testosterone and the apple of our eyes is in distress, so, dumbasses that we were, someone came up with the bright idea of paddling across. The notion actually scared the shit out of us, but once it was out there, none of us were turning back. I mean, who wanted to risk looking like a chicken in front of the girls?”
“I guess no one thought about how stupid they’d look as bloated corpses washing ashore?” Billy asks with a wink.
“Hell no!” I chortle while flagging our server for
