This decision has been a long time coming, she wrote in her note. A long time coming? How long is that? Weeks? Months? Years? I have known Meg since kindergarten. We have been best friends, sisters almost, ever since. How long has this decision been coming without her telling me? And more to the point, why didn’t she tell me?
x x x
After about ten minutes of sitting in sad polite silence, Scottie, Meg’s ten-year-old brother, comes up to me with their—or now his—dog, Samson, on a leash. “Walkies?” he says, to me as much as to Samson.
I nod and stand up. Scottie seems to be the only one who retains any semblance of his former self, which is maybe because he’s young, though he’s not that young, and he and Meg were close. When Sue would disappear into one of her moods and Joe would disappear to take care of her, Meg was the one to mother Scottie.
It’s late April, but no one has alerted the weather. The wind kicks up fierce and cold, with a mean grit. We walk toward the big empty field that everyone lets their dogs shit in, and Scottie unleashes Samson. He bounds off, jubilant, happy in his canine ignorance.
“How are you holding up, Runtmeyer?” I feel false using the old jocular nickname, and I already know how he’s doing. But with Meg no longer playing mother hen and Sue and Joe lost in their grief, someone has to at least ask.
“I’m up to level six on Fiend Finder,” he says. He shrugs. “I get to play all I want now.”
“A side benefit.” And then I clamp my hand over my mouth. My bitter gallows humor is not meant for public consumption.
But Scottie lets out a gruff laugh, way too old for his age. “Yeah. Right.” He stops and watches Samson sniff a collie’s butt.
On the way home, Samson straining at his leash because he knows food is next, Scottie asks me, “You know what I don’t get?”
I think we’re still taking about video games, so I’m not prepared for what he says next.
“I don’t get why she didn’t send me the note too.”
“Do you even have an email address?” I ask. Like this was her reason.
He rolls his eyes. “I’m ten, not two. I’ve had one since third grade. Meg emailed me stuff all the time.”
“Oh. Well, she probably, probably wanted to spare you.”
For a second, his eyes look just as hollowed out as his parents’. “Yeah, she spared me.”
x x x
Back at the house, the guests are leaving. I catch Sue dumping a tuna casserole into the garbage. She gives me a guilty look. When I go to hug her good-bye, she stops me. “Can you stay?” she asks in that voice of hers, so quiet, so different from Meg’s garrulous one. Meg’s voice that could make anyone do anything, anytime.
“Of course.”
She gestures toward the living room, where Joe is sitting on the couch, staring into space, ignoring Samson who is begging at his feet for the expected dinner. In the fading twilight, I look at Joe. Meg took after him, with his dark, Mexican looks. He seems like he’s aged a thousand years in the past month.
“Cody,” he says. One word. And it’s enough to make me cry.
“Hi, Joe.”
“Sue wants to talk to you; we both do.”