WE LEFT HARRY’S around 11:30 p.m., shortly after he and Sarah took off. There really wasn’t anything else we could do by that point. Harry’s house was still on fire; the firefighters were letting it burn and trying to keep the fire from spreading to the other houses. When Amanda hopped in the car, she grabbed the steering wheel, took some deep breaths, closed her eyes, and started muttering to herself. I don’t know what she was saying, but she’d told me the theory behind it a while back. Whenever she got frustrated, she’d try to release all the anger she was feeling and return to a calm state. Sometimes it worked; most of the time, it didn’t.

Finally, after about a minute of heavy breathing, she turned to me and said, “Thank you for coming out here with me.”

“Sure.” I chugged the rest of my beer and set the empty can in the door’s cup holder.

“It really means a lot to me.” We were driving home at this point. “When Sarah and Harry gang up on me, it makes me glad to have you here.”

“You know me—doing whatever I can.”

Amanda kept talking, turning toward me every now and then, but I didn’t really hear what she was saying. My mind was elsewhere.

Last month, back in January, I had done something drastic. Some would call it reckless; others might call it stupid. They’d all be right. It happened on a Saturday when all I wanted to do was watch the Ohio-Indiana game. That’s it. Just sit on the couch, drink a beer or three, and watch the game. Followed by a nap, of course. Our team wasn’t expected to win. Ohio had been a powerhouse in our division for years. In college sports, the underdogs don’t stand much of a chance. But it was my day off.

Amanda decided to come home during the pregame stuff—all the highlights from other games, the announcers picking who’d win. The first guy—a former pro basketball player who washed out of the league after one season, then won some dancing show—was saying Ohio was going to win by twenty points. That was reasonable. When the second guy—a former coach who was fired for sexually harassing his school’s mascot—started to give his pick, Amanda started talking.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.

“Something about lunch meat, right?”

“No, sweetie. I was talking about my open house tomorrow. It’s that four-bed, six-bath on East Guinness Court.”

“That’s a nice place.” I squeezed my beer can and placed it next to another empty. I kept the cans out, because I liked to keep track of how much I’d had to drink. If I didn’t, I tended to drink too much and say things I didn’t mean.

I got up from the couch to get another beer. I couldn’t believe Amanda was being like this. All I wanted was a peaceful afternoon, and she had to make it all about houses. She always did this. She always turned everything into something about houses. It didn’t matter what it was; we could be at the Burt’s Big Beef drive-through, and she’d bring up houses. It was like her life revolved around them or something.

“Do we have any lunch meat?” I asked, looking in the fridge.

Amanda leaned against the marble countertop, her arms folded. We’d put the marble in a few years back in an attempt to raise the value of the house. My house wasn’t that expensive, not like the places on East Guinness Court. I lived on the south side of town in the Meadow Creek area on Claybridge Drive, in a two-story house with a three-car garage and a basement I’d turned into my man cave. Amanda hated that phrase; she said it implied men were Neanderthals, but she used it in all her postings to describe the basements: potential man cave. The house was half-brick, half-white siding with some posts and an awning over the front door. Amanda said it was called “ranch style.” The house had three guest bedrooms. One was Sarah’s old room; it still had all her old stuff in it. We also had a guesthouse over the garage that was never used. Amanda grabbed her keys off the counter.

“I need to go to the store today,” she said. “Want to come with me?”

“Sure.”

Of course I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay home and watch the game. But it was already 22–3 and still in the first half, so I figured I might as well go with her. Besides, if we went, then maybe I could make it back by halftime.

I wasn’t interested in the highlights from the other games or the commentary from the announcers, all their clichéd phrases: the defense needs to buckle down, the offense needs to make some shots—the same bullshit every game. Halftime was my chance to check my phone.

Recently, I’d come to the conclusion I spent too much time on my cell phone. I was at the dealership trying to get some work done, processing some paperwork for ordering next year’s models, but by the end of the day, I had only made it through about 10 percent of what I needed to do. I’d wasted five hours, and I realized it was because every five minutes, I was checking my personal social media accounts, then the accounts for all three dealerships. We’d had this kid come in a few years back and school us on the need for a social media presence. We never really saw an uptick in sales, but we were still out there posting away. When I clocked out at three, I decided I needed to take a cell phone time-out.

One thing I learned playing ball in high school was discipline. If you’re not self-motivated, you’re not going to get up at five in the morning to go run laps with thirty other guys. It’s just not going to happen. I was still just as disciplined as an adult. I didn’t build central Indiana’s largest car dealership empire by being lazy. It took a lot of hard work. And yeah, I might have inherited the business from my dad, but I expanded it. So believe me when I say I knew I could limit my phone time. When social media came along, I was like, “What’s this shit? Why would I want to know what someone from high school had for dinner?” Then it turned into this political shit, where everyone shared these conspiracy theories like they’re news. Now everyone on there just hates on each other. Getting away from all that just sounded like a good idea.

While I was on this cell phone break, something interesting happened. I suddenly found I had large chunks of time with nothing to do but think about my life. I started thinking about why I’d been on my phone all the time, what made me check it so often. Well, I figured out what it was: I wasn’t happy. I should have been. On paper, I had everything—a big house, new cars whenever I wanted, a pretty girlfriend, but the whole thing just felt empty.

I gave it some more thought and knew why I wasn’t happy. Things between me and Amanda hadn’t been good for a while. We hadn’t been communicating very well. We weren’t on the same page about things most of the time. We were just kind of stuck.

So back to this Saturday in January. We were at the grocery store buying everything we needed, including lunch meat. We were in the produce aisle, when one of Amanda’s friends—this woman named Sandy; they used to teach together or something—came up to us.

“Amanda Erickson,” Sandy said, “I haven’t seen you since you left Harper Elementary. How’ve you been?”

Sandy was this old, hippie teacher with gray hair. She was wearing sandals in the winter, and she smelled like cats and incense. I was also pretty sure she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“Oh, you know,” Amanda said, “just staying busy.” Amanda had this habit of being vague when she started to get uncomfortable.

“I heard you’re into real estate now,” Sandy said. “Selling houses to the one percent.”

“Everyone needs a place to live.”

“But really, these are people who would never send their kids to public school, never reinvest in the community. How can you justify that?”

“Everyone has to make a living somehow.” Amanda gripped the shopping cart handle. I could tell she was thinking about ramming it into Sandy’s shins.

“Well, if that’s how you want to earn a living…” Sandy turned to me. “And you—I recognize you from your television commercials.” People always recognized me from those commercials. It was kind of embarrassing, but not really.

Amanda stared awkwardly, so I took the initiative.

“I’m Dennis Drysdale.” I handed her one of my business cards. I always kept a bunch in my pocket. Never know when you might make a sale. “We got a whole bunch of electric vehicles on the lot you might be interested in. Come on down, and I’ll give you a real good deal.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Well, I need to get back to my shopping. There’s a special on gluten-free bagels. Amanda, it was so nice to see you again.”

“Yes,” Amanda said, pouring it on thick, “so nice.”

Once we were outside and walking to the Dodge Journey Crossroad I bought her with my dealership discount, Amanda said to me, “Can you believe her? What nerve.”

“Oh, she’s just a harmless old woman.”

“She’s going to go back to Harper and tell everyone there all about this. Who knows what she’ll say about me to them.”

“Why are you even worried about her? You left that school behind because you wanted to make more money. And that’s what you’re doing.”

“You’re right.” She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. My life is better now than it was when I was teaching at Harper. All because I met you.”

Amanda grabbed my arm, squeezed, and kissed me on the cheek. But when she did, it felt like something was missing. Not missing from her—I knew she loved me—more like something was missing on my end, like there wasn’t any feeling in my cheek, like I was being kissed by a stranger. That’s when it really hit me: Amanda was happy with her life the way it was, and I felt mine was missing something.

That was why I’d been on my phone so much, because I got something there I couldn’t get from Amanda. I would look at other peoples’ lives online, people I knew when I was sixteen, and wish I were still spending time with them, having fun in Mexico or someplace like that, living on high cotton, as Granddad used to say. Comparing the life I wanted to the one I had made the one I had not seem so great. The whole thing made me envious of those folks. And because I was envious of them, I got lonely.

And because I was lonely, when we got home, I did something reckless and stupid.

There was this girl I had a crush on in high school, Jennifer Tejada. She was stunning, a real knockout. She could have been a model or something—not the kind who leaned against cars at trade shows, but the kind who walked down runways in Milan. She was that fine. Well, a friend of a friend started following me on social media, and one day, I noticed she had posted some pictures with Jennifer—now a woman and still fine. When we got home, while Amanda was putting away all the groceries, I looked at my phone—at this picture of Jennifer wearing a black dress at some fancy party, a glass of champagne in her hand. I started thinking about when we were in high school and how I had this massive crush on her but never did anything about it because I thought she was out of my league. Then Amanda asked me if I wanted a snack; her voice was like a linebacker tackling me and tearing my ACL. I knew right then and there I had to change something in my life. So I figured, why not give it a shot?

I grabbed a beer, made myself a ham sandwich, went downstairs, and sent Jennifer a friend request. I added on a little message, a simple, Hey, it’s been a long time. What have you been up to?

I was nervous as shit doing this, sitting in my recliner, my armpits getting all sweaty. I thought there was no way she’d accept my friend request. It was too ridiculous. We hadn’t spoken in twenty years, hadn’t seen each other in that long. But pretty much right away, I got a notification on my phone saying she’d accepted my request. Never in my wildest imagination did I think she’d do that. But that wasn’t the end of it. Not only did she accept my friend request, she messaged me back.