Two

Mark didn’t buy a ring that day, after all. By nine o’clock in the morning his work voicemail had amassed several messages—emergency calls, clients panicked by the impending holiday—and he ended up spending too many hours trying to figure out why a website selling imported balsamic vinegars wouldn’t display any images of the bottles.

In the afternoon Allie called from work to tell him two of her college girlfriends were traveling through town, on their way east to New York. Did he want to go out with them tonight? He didn’t; he disliked most of Allie’s college friends, though he tried to keep that from her. He was relieved, in a way, to say no—if he stayed home to work he’d have no reason to feel guilty about ring shopping, either. He told Allie to have a good time.

But the prospect of the empty townhouse, with nothing but work and cold drafty air and his cowardice and footprints in the snow to think about, proved to be too much for him. He had been a hermit for far too long after Brendan’s death; even when he wanted to be alone, now, he often failed at it. So when he knocked off at five he called his old friend and college roommate Lewis, then drove out to the recording studio in the neighborhood of Grandview, fifteen minutes away, where Lew worked as an engineer.

He found Lew smoking a cigarette beside the studio’s side door, halfway down a slick and shadowed alley; the ice by Lew’s feet was littered with cigarette butts, each sunken into a tiny crater, like dud shells on a battlefield. Lew had shaved his massive head cue-ball-bald, and it glowed whitely beneath the security light. Mark exclaimed over it as he knew Lew wanted him to, as they walked inside, down a narrow hallway and into the booth. “I’m an old man,” Lew said. “This hair-growing business is for kids.” Lew eyed Mark’s own hair, made a face. “I’m glad you called, stranger. I’m bored to fucking tears in here.”

Mark had roomed with Lew at Ohio State for three years, first in the dorms and then in an apartment off-campus; Lew had, in fact, dragged Mark to the party where he had met Chloe, had doubled with them on their first date. Since moving in with Allison, though, Mark had barely seen him. He had been troubled by this without making much of an effort to rectify it. But in Lew’s presence now he felt an old, welcome comfort. Going through college with Lew had been, much of the time, just like this: happy, profane talk; access into secret places, cool places, where shy, quiet Mark could never have found entry on his own.

Lewis was, really, the only friend from his old life Mark had kept. The only friend from that life who’d ever truly been his. Lew came with his issues—he was an unrepentant drunkard, for one, and Mark wasn’t—he didn’t drink at all, anymore—but Lew had been Brendan’s godfather, and had loved Chloe nearly as much as Mark had. Lew, more than anyone except maybe Mark’s father, knew the depth of his grief. Lew had spent countless nights with Mark after Brendan’s death, after the divorce, bringing Mark food, making him play video games or watch movies instead of brooding alone. Lew knew the depth of the pit out of which Mark had climbed. He knew what Mark’s happiness had cost him.

Mark understood, now, why he’d called. He hadn’t simply wanted company; he’d come to tell Lew he was going to propose.

They sat side by side in the control booth. Lew laced his fingers behind his gleaming head, his big wedge of a torso barely contained by a torn Stooges T-shirt. He told Mark about the band whose record he was mixing (terrible, just terrible), about other music he did like; as usual, he made Mark surrender his iPod, and while he talked he loaded music onto it from his laptop. Then he told Mark about his new girlfriend, a mechanic. “Her hands are calloused like a man’s,” Lew said. “I’m really questioning myself, here.”

“We’ll have to double,” Mark said. “Allie would like that.”

Lew’s palm rasped over his skull. “How is Allie? I haven’t seen her in ages.”

Mark hesitated. When Lew had first met Allie, last year, she and Mark had been on the tail end of a fight. Lew, maybe sensing this, hadn’t liked her at all, and Allie had been sharp with him when he told a dirty joke. The next day Lew had emailed him: There’s plenty of people you can fuck, if fucking’s all you’re after. So why pick a mean one?

The two had warmed to each other since. Even so, he and Allie almost never invited Lew over for dinner, and Lew, for all his promises, almost never invited them out. Mark hadn’t sat with Lew like this in, what—two months? There’d once been a time when Lewis crashed two nights a week on Mark and Chloe’s couch; when Brendan had run eagerly down the stairs every morning to see if his uncle Lewis was there and needed waking up.

The acoustics in the booth made Mark’s every word immediate and echoless. “Funny you should ask. I think I’m going to pop the question.”

Lew sat up straight. “For real?”

“I’m buying a ring tomorrow.”

Lew didn’t hesitate. He rose from his chair and wrapped Mark in his arms, slapped Mark’s shoulders. Up close he smelled of sweated-out beer. When they separated, Lew’s eyes were moist.

Mark began to tell Lewis about all the thinking he’d been doing. How much sense his plans made.

Lew laughed, shook his head. “You’re whispering!”

“I—I guess I’m nervous.”

“Why? Allie’s not going to say no.”

“Probably not.”

“Cold feet?”

Mark shook his head.

Lewis smiled, sly. “You were nervous about Chloe, too.”

“Bullshit.”

“What bullshit? The week before you asked her, you were like some dude on his last three days in Vietnam.”

Mark wished Lew hadn’t brought up Chloe, not now. He remembered telling Lew, all those years ago, that he and Chloe were engaged; he remembered saying, I need a best man; he remembered how crazy these sentences had seemed—and yet, at the same time, how they had felt ancient and right, as though the words I am engaged to Chloe Ross had the power to transform his puppet-self into a real boy.

“Just ask,” Lew said. He regarded Mark seriously for a long second. “You have my blessing, if it matters.”

Mark felt himself grinning. Apparently it mattered a great deal.

Lew insisted they celebrate; he locked the studio and they walked two blocks down the street to his favorite bar. There Lew ordered a beer for himself, and a Coke for Mark, and when he had his drink in his hand he shouted to the room that his oldest buddy was getting married, and a dozen drunken strangers whooped and toasted. Mark turned and bowed, wishing, as he always did in bars, that he still drank, that he hadn’t promised his father—and Lew—that he wouldn’t, ever again.

An hour and several drinks later Lewis embraced him again, heavily. “I’m so fucking happy for you.”

Mark rubbed the prickly top of his head. “I’m happy you’re happy I’m happy.”

Lew looked at him for too long. “So you gonna tell Chloe?”

Mark only hesitated a moment before saying, “I’ll have to, Lew.”

Lew’s smile contained as much maudlin tragedy as joy. “What’ll she say?”

Chloe and Allison had only met twice. Chloe had a boyfriend, a serious one, but even so she’d done everything possible to avoid referring to Allie in Mark’s presence.

“She doesn’t get to say anything,” Mark said, suddenly angry, as though Chloe had already begun to make the protest he knew she wouldn’t. Lew offered another sad smile—he knew Chloe well enough to know exactly what Mark was imagining—then drank deeply from his beer, and for a moment Mark was close to ordering one for himself. Why shouldn’t he? He was a different man than he used to be, a different man entirely.

But he did not. If he was different—if he was happy—it was because of decisions just like this one: hundreds of them, one after the other. And because of his father, who’d made him promise not to drink again, and because of Lew, who never pressured him, no matter how many times the two of them had gotten happily drunk together before.

He grew silent at the bar. The appearance in his mind of his father’s face, stern and kind, had shamed him; Mark realized he had to tell him this news, too. He was shocked, really, that he hadn’t talked to his father first. Maybe he could sneak away over the weekend to Indiana, where his father still lived alone in the same rambling farmhouse where Mark had been raised. He tried to imagine the look on Sam Fife’s face when he told him the news, and was seized again by unreasonable fear.

Mark looked away from the television behind the bar—he’d been idly watching a Buckeyes basketball game—and found Lew gone. The noise in the room rose up, like flooding water, and his throat closed; he looked right and left, and finally—there—saw Lewis outside on the sidewalk, talking with a woman in a long leather coat, smoke streaming from his nostrils.

Mark sat back down on the stool, his heart beating too fast. For the second time that day, he wondered how on earth he’d managed to become the person he was: a man who felt like weeping whenever someone he loved left the room.