A Reunion

In an alternate world, Andrew and Cal would be driving to a funeral. In another, they’d be sober, intervening. But there is only this world, and so they were slouched in Cal’s Lexus, headed toward the Midtown street where James—their best friend since school and a falling-down drunk—had bought a house. They were going to play music. They were going to enjoy themselves and have a couple beers. 

They were both so hung over, though, that they spoke, at first, only when necessary, and only in pained little grunts. 

The night before, they’d stayed up late, draining tallboys and chain-smoking. When they weren’t out on the patio, they were watching old Phish shows or playing guitars in Cal’s converted study. Andrew could remember the ridiculous volume at which Cal, eyes shut tight with Van Halenish abandon, had whinnied through his instrument. He remembered less well his drive back to his parents’ house, or texting his wife from the bed in their guest room, which had, years before, been his own. 

Just made it home, good night bug 

He’d sent her this text, his phone now informed him, at 2:52 in the morning. It was 3 p.m. now, and she hadn’t responded. 

“I hope he’s got his shit together,” Cal said. “Like, you haven’t seen him in a while. But I’ll go over on a Saturday, and he’ll be six beers deep by noon. And acting crazy—like, insane.” 

Cal, speaking freely now, had made seeming peace with his hangover. He blew out a cloud from his vape, which clashed with his golf shirt, his cowlick’s high sweep. The cloud thinned and spread, the sweet reek of vape juice now wafting through the cabin. 

It was true, Andrew thought, that he hadn’t seen James in a while. This was the first of his twice-yearly Memphis trips—the long Easter weekend, a chance to see his parents and to catch up with his friends. He wouldn’t have to teach until Tuesday. Meredith had been stuck at home with work. The circumstances seemed an invitation to debauchery. 

“I’m sure he’ll be all right.” Cal was smirking as he spoke. “Or at least I hope he will.” 

The truth was that James’s dramatics amused them, though under their smirks lay the motherly fear that one of his episodes—the fights, for instance, or the nights of drunk driving—would somehow end in death. The 4Runner crushed like a beer can. A right hook to the head, his skull cracked on a countertop. 

“Let me hit that,” Andrew said, as if a bit of nicotine might stave off these concerns. What it did, instead, was mingle with the residue of yesterday’s tobacco, a mucousy ghoul at the rear of his throat. He passed back the vape, looked out the window, focused every cell on feeling better. 

They’d made it, minutes later, out to Union, that thoroughfare of chicken joints and gas stations. Cal weaved, then turned, and in an instant they had slipped into the greener parts of Midtown, where the houses lay on long, sloped lawns and the smell of gas and grease did not intrude. 

A block or two from James’s place, Cal’s phone cut through the speakers. 

“Here we go,” Cal said, and then he took the call. 

“Cal,” James said in his usual style. He would bark your name hard, like a father rebuking a ne’er-do-well son—like James’s dad, in fact, a stubby financier who howled at his own jokes and was given, you could tell, to stiff rebukes. 

“James,” Cal said. 

“What’s the word, man? Y’all close?” 

“Just a couple blocks away.” 

“Come on with it then. We’ve been waiting all day.” 

“Well, shit, here we come. Keep your pants on.” 

“Who’s ‘we’?” Andrew asked, once Cal had hung up. 

“He’s got this new girlfriend. Or chick, as he calls her. Like it’s all casual or something.” 

“Is it?” 

“Is it what?” 

“Casual.” 

“When’s it ever casual?” 

“You meet her yet?” 

“Last time I was over there. She seemed kind of trashy. From Bartlett or some shit. And she’s green. She’s, like, twenty-three tops.” 

Andrew tried to picture it: the young white-shoe lawyer, the even younger country girl—a Braelynn with a back tat, a fan of Florida Georgia Line. 

“And where,” he asked, “did he meet this chick?” 

“Paralegal.” 

“What’s her name?” 

“Shannon.” 

“Sounds like someone’s aunt.” 

“Doesn’t look like one.” 

“Shoot,” Andrew said. And for the first time since waking, his hangover lifted, and clarity, that angel, returned in little flutters of relief. 

This feeling was disrupted when they rolled up to the house. It looked like someone’s parents’ place: huge and wedding-white, with a presidential lawn and a front porch stocked with rocking chairs. That James had bought it, could afford it, seemed unfair, though if there was a comfort in first facing this estate—which dwarfed his rotting duplex on the wrong end of the Garden District—it was in knowing James’s burdens: his frustrations as an artist, his antipathy for lawyering, his status as the outcast (drunk and stoned and grossly single) in an old and august clan. But none of this could trump the fact that James was very rich, and Andrew craned his neck in mounting envy at the house, the bright, conceited windows glinting down upon the street. 

They walked, guitars in hand, up to the door, which Cal unlocked by tapping on a pad. 

The knob turned with a beep, and the first thing Andrew noticed was a shotgun in the foyer. A twelve-gauge, he assumed, camouflaged and propped against a wall. He wondered why it sat there—naked, maybe loaded—and remembered that evening a couple years back when James had called him sobbing, babbling of suicide. It was not, he knew, the only firearm in the house. 

Now the dog came trotting in, a bit delayed. A smallish black Lab, all tongue and kindly eyes. She licked at Cal’s hands before pivoting to Andrew, who set aside his case and started scratching at her head. 

“Hey, Lucy,” he heard himself baby-talk. “Good girl. Good girl.” 

He remembered James’s story from that night two years before—about why he’d purchased Lucy, and how he’d arrived at his theory of dog-rearing. 

James’s dad, he’d told him, had hit James as a boy. As a punishment, yes, in the old-fashioned way of the South, but far, far too often, and with far too much punitive zeal. Beatings was the word for it—beatings with a belt or with a switch. The dog, James had claimed, had been an experiment. What happens when you raise a thing with love and nothing else? 

“Jimbo!” Cal was yelling as he walked toward the back. “Yo, James!” 

There was stomping overhead, a muffled shout. They headed for the stairs and awaited the descent. In a second, Andrew mused, he would get to meet the girlfriend. The chick, that is. The trashy paralegal. 

James came down first, appearing by stocky degrees—feet, then torso, then broad, boyish face. He held a box between both arms, and Andrew stepped aside to let him pass, clasping, as he did, a cautious hand on James’s shoulder. 

“Jimbo,” he said, aware of the girlfriend, but taking in James for a moment, watching as he bent to drop the box and pet the dog. 

His hair had started thinning, revealing yet more of the prominent forehead, and his face and neck were dark, as if he’d been stuck in the sun. When he rose up from Lucy, it was with the abruptness that always ran through him, that made Andrew think of a different sort of dog—nervous and feral, ever ready to escape. 

“Andrew,” he said, “this is Shannon.” 

Andrew turned and smiled. She was tall—taller than James—and willowy and blonde. Her cheekbones were dramatic, like a model’s. 

“Hey,” Andrew said, “nice to meet you.” 

“You too,” she said. “James was talking all about you. And Calvin, too. The band’s back together.” 

“All we’re missing,” said Cal, “is a drummer. You in?” 

“Oh, no. Not me. I lack rhythm.” 

“Somehow I doubt that,” said Andrew. He grinned. 

“All right, all right,” said James. “Let’s move. We should play before dark, or my neighbors’ll freak.” 

He led them to the kitchen, where he started pulling twelve-packs from the box: one of Bud Light, another of White Claws. Both of them were open and were missing several cans. 

“Y’all want one?” Shannon asked, dangling a seltzer. 

“I think,” Andrew said, “I’ll start out with a beer. Then work my way up to the sweet stuff.” 

“Gentleman’s choice.” She popped it and drank. “James was just saying you came up from New Orleans?” 

“Yep, last night.” 

“I can’t believe people live there. I’d be down on Bourbon Street, like, twenty-four-seven. But I do love to visit.” She swiveled toward James. “We should do that sometime.” 

“Sure,” James said. “Sure, we could do that.” 

“All right,” she said, then bent and pecked his cheek. 

Was her enthusiasm real? Or was it, as she buzzed along, a symptom of her small talk, to be gradually replaced by a truer, fuller self? Andrew couldn’t tell, though she didn’t seem trashy. Just a little ditzy. And attractive, he decided, watching as she fished another seltzer from its box. 

“Cal,” she said. “Take this. You need a drink. You look like you ate chalk for lunch.” 

“It wasn’t what I ate, I can assure you.” 

“We doing this or what?” James said. He was leaning on the counter, kicking at the cabinet underneath. 

“We don’t have to,” Andrew said. “I wouldn’t want to bore anyone.” 

 “Oh, no!” Shannon said. “I want to hear. James is always bragging on his band.” 

“In that case,” Andrew said, ducking from the room to grab his instrument. 

When he came back to the kitchen, Cal had stepped outside, and Shannon was now leaning on her boyfriend, hanging on him slightly as she whispered in his ear. She was, in that pose, exceedingly pretty, though their forms did not align—the woman almost looming, the man stock-still, his arms pressed to his sides. Andrew met his eye, an abortive little glance from which they disengaged immediately. 

“All-righty,” Andrew said. 

He went out to join Cal, who was waiting with his vape. 

“Interesting chick.” 

“No shit,” said Cal. 

The clouds smeared up, were lost against the sky. 

*          *          *

They were standing on the driveway, waiting for the lovers to emerge, when he got a text from Meredith. No words, just a photo of Stan, their Chihuahua, standing on his perch above the couch. He was growling at the yard, the squirrels it was his instinct to attack. 

It seemed a missive from a different life entirely—a harsh one of alarm clocks and of crushing Sunday dread. As messages go, it was simple enough, but beneath its sweet surface, Andrew could detect a subtle tightening of the line. She was not going to question his 3 a.m. text or ask for his plans or location, yet she’d intruded just the same, had made herself felt as a buzz in his pocket. Part of him wished she would lecture him, light his ass up for the old, distant selfishness. But here was reproach in the guise of affection. The only fair answer was still further guile. He closed out the image and typed Stan the Man!, resenting his own punctuation. 

Now the couple stepped out with their twelve-packs, Lucy at their heels. 

“The supplies,” Cal said, finagling a beer from James’s box. “Couldn’t skip the supplies.” 

James, at their head, unlocked a door on the garage, then led them up a staircase to the studio, with its windows and drum kit and shining guitars. Among the old furniture—some dark cherry end-tables, a narrow yet stately buffet (all nicked, one presumed, from his parents’ spare dens)—stood the customary ranks of empty cans. Were it not for all the gear, they might almost have been standing in the annex of a country club, a space of hushed and manly rites and wicked yearly dues. The air, of course, was thick with stale beer. 

Andrew grabbed a chair and plugged his bass into an amp. When he picked his can back up, he was surprised to find it empty, the metal still cold in his hand. He rose to get another from the box, which James had placed, shrine-like, at the center of the room. There was an armchair in the corner, and Shannon took her place, posed in such a way that Andrew, now seated, was forced to make eye contact. He looked away fast, stared down at his bass as if considering a jigsaw. 

“What should we play?” James asked. 

Lucy sat beside him, her ears pulled back before the humming of the amps. Her eyes were little discs of apprehension. 

“Shit,” Andrew said, “something easy.” 

He looked at James again, though this time they smiled and did not turn away. It might have been the second beer diffusing through his veins, but he felt an urge to tell James that he loved him, that whatever careful silences they’d lodged between their hearts would have to end, to break into the full forthcoming music of the truth. That life is hard but good. That real, deep friends are never far away. 

But James’s smile was dim, opaque, and in an instant he had turned and started strumming. Andrew joined along, then Cal, the music trudging into motion. 

They’d played for girls before, a million times. Girlfriends back in high school. Others during college that they’d wanted to impress. The action was never not awkward, a performance of band practice, each of them striving, in his mild or antic way, to earn the girl’s attention. To look cool, and thus hot. To get laid. This dynamic hadn’t changed, though they were all so slow and rusty and hung over that the music felt clunky, too rickety and stiff. They cursed as they played, laughed without pleasure. 

“Jesus,” James said when they’d stopped. 

“Let’s try a song we know,” Andrew said, and they lurched into a Dead tune, a tired three-chord standard that dragged, for all its whimsy, like a dirge. 

Shannon had caught on to them. She was leaning forward now, frowning as she listened, her chin cupped in her hands. This, Andrew thought, was a sign of her intelligence. He had entire theories on the matter. You could assess someone’s smarts by playing music for them. An ecstatic response (either honest or fake) meant that they were stupid. Skepticism, though, revealed a canny mind, a heart that wouldn’t be bullied or bribed. They were playing total shit, and she could tell. 

They drank and played on, then went down for some air. 

James was on the deck with a seltzer and a cigarette, the White Claws on a table at his elbow. The others were arranged along the drive, where they squinted up at James like players at a coach. Andrew, for a moment, thought that James might make a speech, but then he just stood there, smoking, looking tired. 

Cal broke out the vape, which Andrew asked to hit, and which tasted, he now noticed, like blowtorched cotton candy. 

“Nice,” Shannon said. “Pass the goods.” 

She was standing next to Andrew, their hips almost touching. It would have been easy, had the others not been there, to place a hand upon her waist and pull her in. 

“All yours,” he said, handing her the vape.  

James turned and leaned and spat into the yard. Andrew, still attracted, felt observed, under suspicion. 

“So,” he said, “how’d you meet this handsome devil?” 

“Work,” she said. She rolled her eyes, blew out a cloud. 

“The real devils,” James said. “Schaffer Herring & Associates.” 

“Mr. Herring has a crush on me,” Shannon said. 

“Everyone has a crush on you,” James said. 

“We can’t fault her that,” Andrew said. 

His surprise at his own line was tempered by the compliment it paid. He felt himself not caring how he’d sounded. But then he glanced at James, who was looking at him coldly, frowning from the deck, and he felt, as he looked back down, the heated urge to take it back. 

“Her only fault,” said Cal, “is she babysits the vape. Pass that shit.” 

“While we’re on faults,” Shannon said. She stepped onto the porch and took a White Claw from the box, eyebrows arched at James. It was a playful, a flirtatious look, though Andrew sensed beneath it quiet histories of meaning. She turned to face the driveway, let her punchline hang, then fall away. 

“We’re out of beer,” she said. She was squared with Andrew now, though her eyes, he saw, were elsewhere. “Sweet stuff’s all we got.” 

Andrew almost answered, but then James snorted loudly, once, and turned and went inside. Lucy stood too late. She hurried to the door and started whining at the knob. 

“Nature calls?” asked Cal, though no one laughed. 

The dog, of course, whined on, crying like a child in an experiment, some heartless study of attachment, crying as if James were really gone. 

*          *          *

It was the two of them again, Andrew and Cal, waiting for the couple to return. That tight, stifling moment had ended when Shannon, her eyes rolling back (this rolling was their essence, realer than their early ditzy glow), hurried to the door and followed after him. The dog had rushed ahead, her whine pitched down to a gratified grunt, and then the door had fallen shut, and the two friends were alone. 

Andrew grabbed a White Claw and another one for Cal. The label read PINEAPPLE, and with more hits from the vape, which they passed to pass the time, Andrew’s tongue and gums became a site of fruity synthesis, of wild alchemical mixtures which, if they failed in wringing nature’s finer virtues from a vice, made him feel, at least, like a kid on Halloween, his appetite endless, his synapses snapping with innocent pleasure. 

There was, however, the issue of his friend. 

“Was that my fault?” he asked. “I mean, was that really my fault?” 

“Nah,” said Cal. “That’s normal. He stirs the pot, then gets all pissy. It’s in his DNA.” 

“Okay, then I’m not crazy.” 

“Not that I can tell. But maybe cool it on the flirting?” 

“Shit, if anything—” 

But then the door was swinging open, and the lovers stumbled out—James with a bottle, Shannon clutching glasses to her chest. Lucy, slow again, was stuck inside the house. She pressed her nose against the knob but didn’t whine or make a sound. 

“A drink,” James said. “A drink.” 

He led them to the music room, where he took the bottle—Tito’s, Andrew realized, the remnants of a liter—and poured them each a shot. They drank without a toast, and when Andrew got up, wobbling, to grab another can, his foot caught on a cable and he very nearly fell. 

“Whoa, there,” James said. “Getting sloppy on us, André?” 

Andrew tried to laugh, took a White Claw from the box. 

“Remember,” James said (he now addressed himself to Cal), “when we were taking shots backstage, and André had to hole up in the john? We’d done, like, five or six songs before he skulked out with his bass and tried to play like things were fine. Dude looked like a zombie, like he’d crawled back from the grave. Where was that? The Daisy? Weren’t y’all seniors?” 

“The Daisy.” Cal was laughing. “The Daisy, that was it.” 

“What happened?” Shannon asked. 

Her eyes were trained on Andrew, not on James. 

“Not much,” Andrew said. “Just a little overserved is all. Had to take a tiny detour to el baño. Back then I was possessed of a fragile constitution. I wasn’t raised on rotgut like these boys. But I caught up pretty quick. It just took a couple years.” 

“Spoken,” James said, “like a bona fide lightweight.” 

“We can’t all be alcoholics,” Andrew said. 

“We can’t all black out and piss ourselves on Calvin’s parents’ couch,” James said. “We can’t all drink seven beers and land our Volvo in a ditch.” 

These were separate incidents of Andrew’s, from the past. Cal was cracking up, his eyes pinched shut with memory and mirth. James was laughing, too. Andrew felt like hitting him. 

“Well, damn,” Shannon said. “You ran the kid ragged.” 

“Oh, please,” James said. “It’s all love with me and André. Always has been. He knows that.” 

“Of course,” Andrew said. 

“By the way, how’s the family? How’s the wife and kids?” 

“No kids, Jimbo. Just Meredith. And she’s fine.” 

“A family man, folks. Our young associate’s a family man.” 

“You’ll get there,” Andrew said. “Don’t worry, man, you’ll get there.” He turned and smiled at Shannon. “But that’s enough of that. You got any requests? Any tunes you’d like to hear?” 

“Nope,” she said, “I’m a pretty easy crowd.” 

“It’s true,” James said. “She’s easy as they come.” 

There was venom in his eyes: the pink and veiny whites, the irises aflame with their derision. It was best, Andrew knew, not to answer. 

He was looking at him, mute, when James leaned back and played a riff he didn’t recognize, then Cal fell in behind. Several measures passed before he joined them, the tune unknown and the changes all a mystery. 

He didn’t know how long they’d played. Only that they’d jelled, and that somewhere in the music he had braved a glance at Shannon, who seemed anything but bored. She was moving in her chair, a subtle grind against the cushion. (She did not, in fact, lack rhythm.) Suddenly she looked at him. He smiled, then looked away. 

When at last they took a break, it was fully dark outside, the many windows turned to mirrors. James got up first, wobbling himself, and peered down at the box. 

“Well, what do ya know. The well’s gone dry.” 

Was he slurring, at this juncture? Or was Andrew’s hearing slurred? 

“Shan,” James said, “let’s make a run.” 

“Hell, no,” she said. “I’m not getting in that car. And neither should you, Tiger Woods.” 

“Well, what the fuck.” He stamped his foot. “Let’s saddle up.” 

He turned toward Cal, then Andrew, looking lost. He seemed, in other words, a little scared, a little feral, though as he reeled and kicked within a dusk of private cravings, he resembled more than anything a sticky-handed child. The brat, Andrew thought, is father of the man. 

“Which one?” James was saying. “Which one of you’ll go?” 

Andrew scanned the floor, eyed the seltzer at his feet. 

“All right,” said Cal, “I’ll go. But you’re not driving.” 

“What,” said James, “do I appear to be intoxicated? Am I, good sirs, some kind of pitiful inebriate?” 

He minced toward the stairs and faked a bow. His eyes were fierce and slitted. 

“Fuck it,” he said. “I don’t give a shit who drives. Just take me to the beer store.” 

And with that he turned and started down the stairs. 

*          *          *

They were sitting there, sighing and clearing their throats. The other two had left in James’s car, though it wasn’t clear to Andrew who had driven. 

“So,” Shannon said. She leaned back in her chair, the hiring party at an interview. “How long you known James?” 

“Since middle school, I guess. So, eighteen, nineteen years?” 

“And has he always been like this?” 

“Like what?” 

“You know.” 

“Handsome? Charming? Crazy as a shithouse rat?” 

“And y’all are what, best friends?” 

“Yeah. Sure. James and me. And Cal.” 

“And he’s always been like this.” 

“Well,” he said. She looked at him, chin cocked. She was alarmingly attractive. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but there’s a sort of explanation. For, you know—for why he acts the way he does.” 

“Okay.” 

“When James was little,” he began, his tongue gone automatic, “his dad would beat him up. And I’m not talking spanking or ‘the belt’ or stuff like that. I’m talking full-on child abuse. I didn’t know about it either till he called one night and told me—couple years ago, I guess. He was really broken up. He was saying he might shoot himself. But I stayed there on the phone, talked him off the ledge, you know. Compared to that, I’d say he’s fine.” 

“Jesus,” Shannon said. 

The sentences had come to him in full, as if composed. He could hear his own voice, the condescending cheer with which we spill another’s secrets. 

“So maybe we cut him some slack,” he said. “At least he’s got a reason.” 

“Jesus,” she repeated. “A reason. Okay.” She was leaning forward now, her employer pose abandoned. 

“Anyway,” he said, “I thought I’d better tell you. Seeing as you’re close.” 

“No, no. I understand.” She picked her seltzer from the floor, smiled demurely, tipped it back. “It’s good to know who you’re in bed with.” 

She was taking all this better than he ever could have hoped. Not that he’d expected to betray this information, not to her. But now that he had, and now that she was seated there, alert and unaccompanied, he saw this first betrayal as the necessary prelude to a second, and a third, to a string of small betrayals that might never have to end. Her chin was tilted still, ever patient, ever skeptical. She did not, just then, seem young. She had a timeless kind of beauty, like some cinematic goddess, or the older girls in even older yearbooks, the ones three grades ahead of him, the tennis stars and big-haired, gleaming cheerleaders. He felt his own dimness before her, his smallness. He would only have to stand and step across and take her hands, and then the changes would be wrought, and a new life might begin. Not with her, of course. But a new life all the same. 

He had almost stood, in fact, when Lucy howled. It was odd that they could hear her even there, that high coyote keening from the kitchen down below. He could almost see her do it. Her nose pressed to the glass. Her head thrown back when the waiting overcame her. 

“Poor Lucy,” Shannon said. 

“Poor Lucy,” he agreed. 

She smiled at him now, her skepticism gone, melted into kindness unperturbed by any doubt. He would stand here in a second, when he wasn’t so transfixed. 

The dog cried out again. 

He would stand here in a second, just as soon as he could move. 

S.C. FERGUSON

S.C. Ferguson lives with his wife in New Orleans, where he works as a high-school teacher. He was born and raised in Memphis.