WE’RE AT A BAR IN LAX and my friend Danny is showing me photographs of his life, pulling them one by one from a size-ten shoebox and laying them before us like playing cards. I’ve moved my beer up and away so we can have more room. Danny too.

It’s mid-afternoon and the lighting’s not bad. I can see each photograph clearly.

Here’s Danny in his grade four school picture with that long blonde California hair.

Here’s Danny’s dog, Loner, all black and tan, the night before he was hit by a truck.

And here’s Danny with his first girlfriend, 1979, the year Danny graduated high school. He’s leaning into her in his denim jacket and she’s smiling in her white summer dress with a blue wildflower tucked under the strap.

“Maria,” he says looking at her. “Died last year. Breast cancer.”

Danny is on his way home to Wisconsin. Some little town with a little college not far from Milwaukee. He’d come out here to San Bernardino to attend his father’s funeral and his stepmother had given him this box of photographs as he was leaving. She’d handed it to him on the porch of his father’s final residence. That was goodbye.

“She kept all the money,” he says, “but I got this.” And he slaps the box.

I can’t tell if he’s happy about that arrangement or not. I’m guessing Danny’s unsure himself. Maybe happy is not the right word. Maybe it never is. There’s a wistfulness about him. He’s enthused and reticent at the same time.

The bartender comes by.

“Well, brother,” Danny says, “bring us a half-wonder and twenty-four objectionables.”

The bartender is a tall lug, hale, with a smooth skull. He just looks at Danny. Then he looks at me.

“It’s Chekhov,” I say.

“Fries,” Danny says, “two whiskys.”

I haven’t seen Danny in a decade. I can’t get over how white his hair is now and how dramatic the widow’s peak. He’s about twenty pounds heavier. So am I. Mostly, he looks the same. Same twinkling blue eyes. Same doubting smile.

We’d been graduate students together at the University of Oregon when our girls were freshly walking and we’d spent hours drinking microbrews and following our kids around in the gentle Willamette Valley sun. He was a charmer then, a good-hearted rogue slogging through a dissertation on the politics of sports radio. One of those men who was too troubled to be worried.

He had a Jesus and Mary Chain poster on his office wall. And I was studying art. Some nights we’d get high on the back porch of my small apartment. When Clinton came to talk in the university quadrangle we drank Scotch and listened to the big man from Danny’s fifth-floor office until the secret service knocked on the door.

Now he’s an assistant professor of political science in the Midwest and I’m headed home from two weeks of writing in Brisbane to my little mountain village on the western shore of the Salish Sea. Danny was sitting at the bar when I walked in and sat down beside him. I didn’t even know it was him until he said my name.

”What a trip, Joe,” he says now, for the third or fourth time, and I don’t know if he means running into me like this or coming out here for the funeral or looking through these photographs. All three, I guess. It’s all a little hard to believe.

“Circa 1986,” he says examining another photo and laying it down on top of the others. This one features his wife, Penny. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. Thick dark hair. Freckles. That warm, truly decent smile I remember. That touch of trepidation in her eyes. She’s standing in front of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Goddamn golden California light. It breaks my heart.

“How’d he die?” I ask.

“Choked,” he says.

The bartender sets the two whiskies in front of us. They’re amber and they hold the artificial light like a fossil.

“Really?”

“Big piece of steak.”

“At home?”

“At home. Stepmom couldn’t do a thing.”

“Jesus,” I say. “That’s got to be a hard way to go.”

Danny shrugs. I get the impression he agrees. I get the impression he doesn’t care.

“I heard sometimes people choke because they leave the table,” I say. I don’t know why I’m saying this. But there’s some space to fill. I fill it. “They want to be alone while they try to cough up whatever’s stuck.” Danny doesn’t look like he’s buying it. “Save face, I guess. Keep a little dignity.”

Danny lifts his eyebrows. “That so?” he says.

“That’s what I heard,” I say.

Danny’s eyebrows settle back down over his eyes. “Well,” he says, “I don’t think that was the case with my old man.”

“No?” I say.

“No,” he says, shaking his head.

“I guess not then.”

“I guess not,” he says.

“Well,” I say. “I tried.”

“You did,” he says.

That’s the end of that. We both drink from our whiskies.

“Family didn’t come out with you?” I ask, meaning Penny and their daughter Ella who would be eleven now. Same age as my oldest girl.

Danny shakes his head. He’s already got another photograph in his hand and he’s looking at it with some intensity. I don’t know if he’s shaking his head at me or at the photograph and I give the lounge a quick look over the shoulder in case Penny is about to walk up and join us.

“No,” he says, but he draws the syllable out like it’s full of all kinds of consideration and nuance that can only be communicated through duration, through the length of time a word hangs in the ear.

“My old man was a piece of work,” Danny says by way of explanation. But he knows that’s not enough.

“Everyone’s old man is a piece of work,” I say, though it hardly needs to be said.

Danny laughs. “Fair enough.”

There’s a small pause. I’d live forever in the small pause in a conversation between old friends.

“He and Penny never did get along,” Danny says, still holding that photograph.

“And then we moved to Wisconsin,” he says laying down the photo. “My old man never came to visit. Not once.”

“Is this the house?” I ask, pointing at the light blue house in the photograph. It has a big porch skirting the length of it. A couple big trees lean out of one corner of the print. California redwoods. The tallest trees in the world. The house is on a hill and way out at the very top of the photograph floats a little tile of ocean. So blue. The wild grass at the edge of the driveway is green and the driveway is brown and grey gravel. All the plants are green. Green green green.

“It is,” he says beaming. He still loves that place. It’s all over him.

We’re both quiet and looking at the photograph.

It’s the country house, about forty-five minutes north of Berkeley, California, where Danny and his older brother Lucas grew up in the seventies. I’m looking at the photograph half-expecting a young Danny, eleven or twelve, the age of our girls now, to come strolling up to the house barefoot in his overalls and long hair. The house is empty. Dad’s lecturing on economics down the coast. Mom’s recuperating from the sixties in a German psychiatric hospital. Young Danny goes in and finds his dad’s stash and rolls a spliff and sits on the porch with his feet hanging off the edge, looking out to sea. The print is discoloured with age and all that golden California light. I can’t help but think it must have been something growing up then and there.

“It must have been something,” I say.

Danny looks at me. “It was,” he says, but he’s still looking at the photograph. He shakes the shoebox a little and I can hear the photographs shuffle inside. “It was a nice idea,” he says with a grin.

“A dream,” I say.

“Better,” he says. “No one could have dreamed that place up in a million years.”

He’s right. I don’t know what to say. “When’s your flight?” I say, looking at my watch. I have another hour before mine, direct now to Vancouver.

“We almost bought that house,” he says. “Me and Penny. Would have needed some renos. But we were looking for a project.”

Clearly Danny’s not ready to go yet.

“When was that?” I say.

“Just before I met you, actually. Just before Oregon.”

I’m ready for more of my beer and I reach across the bar and grab it. There are big beads of sweat on it. Outside it’s warm. And humid. Maybe high eighties. In Brisbane winter was on its very last legs and some days were thick with subtropical heat. I’m going to miss that heat on northern Vancouver Island. I miss the heat in the Willamette Valley every spring and every fall. I miss the April pear blossoms and the late September swimming in the Row River. I miss being a foreigner. I miss America. I wasn’t done with it. My time was up and I had to leave. Had to get on with things. Danny’s part of that place. Part of the place I had to leave. We both had to leave, I guess. And neither of us ever got to go back.

“My Dad was going to sell us that house for a song,” Danny says.

“What song?” I ask.

“The song you sing to your baby boy to make it all better,” Danny laughs. “To help him go to sleep.”

“Can you hum a few bars?” I ask.

“Only if you’re good and let me finish.” Danny picks up his beer and drinks from it.

“Alright,” I say, “finish.”

Danny clears his throat.

“When you sing,” he says, “you really need to open your mouth. Really enunciate all the words.”

That’s Danny for you. Always with the advice. I still love him for it. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.

“You do that,” he says.

“So your dad didn’t sell you the house?” I say.

“No,” Danny says, “he did not.”

Danny’s story is an old one. It goes like this. Dad offers son a piece of his own family history and a leg up in the world. Son falls for it, quits his job and moves back to the northern California coast. Dad goes back on his word. Everyone blames the stepmother.

“Promises,” I say.

“You know,” Danny says, “I stopped caring.”

“Fuck family,” I say though I can’t stop thinking of mine. I’ve been away almost three weeks.

I lift my beer and Danny lifts his and we toast the absurdity of it all, the promises, the rites of family, the fucking insult of wanting to be cared for by your own flesh and blood. By your history.

There’s a story I want to tell him about my grandparents’ furniture business in London, Ontario, and how my grandmother was skimming money for years and how everyone hated each other after she was fingered for it. But it’s Danny’s trip down memory lane and I don’t want to backseat drive.

The shoebox is on the bar and he’s got one hand on either end like it might slide away. Like he might spill something. The box is long and skinny and mostly black. Chuck Taylors. I look down at the floor to see what kind of shoes Danny’s sporting these days. Red Wings. Earthy brown. Good Wisconsin boots. Same boots my dad wore.

“I had a pair of those” I say, nodding at the shoebox.

“Yeah,” Danny says, “we all did.”

“There was a time,” I say.

“There was a time,” he agrees.

I want to say something more to Danny. Like I’m sorry for his loss. Like I miss him. Like we made the right decisions. But I can’t.

“What’s that?” I say, nodding at a photograph he’s picked up and is holding between his fingers. It looks like a young Danny, early twenties maybe, naked and ripped. A real physical specimen. The shot’s framed so you can’t see anything real serious but it’s shocking nonetheless. It’s shocking because I can see in the lines of his chest and abdomen that Danny really was someone else once.

“That’s me,” he says.

“No shit?” I say, glancing at the man next to me, that white hair again, the soft belly, still beautiful.

“For a term,” he says, “I was the plaything of a girl in the art department.”

We both take a long look at the figure in the photograph. There is something artful about it, it’s true. Something that turns Danny’s body into a symbol or a metaphor. Something bigger than Danny. It erases him. It erases my friend. I wonder where that guy in the photograph went.

“I can see why she liked me,” he says, putting the photograph down with all the rest on the bar. There’s quite the pile there now. School-aged Danny stacked on top of married Danny on top of places from Danny’s past, people.

“You were smart,” I smile, “and sensitive.”

“I was,” he laughs, running his hand through his thinning hair. “I am.”

“You were an art project,” I say, but right away I regret it.

“I was,” he says, but he’s not smiling.

After a moment, Danny starts gathering up all the photos and putting them back in the shoebox in handfuls.

Then the fries come.

“I didn’t mean that,” I say.

Danny turns to look at me. He flashes that smile of his. He doesn’t believe me.