“It’s fine,” he muttered. “Hope she has a safe flight. I’m going to go help Davo.” Without waiting for Heather’s reply, he strode across the kitchen and yanked the back door open.
The backyard was strewn with the remnants of last night: A napkin had blown into the bushes, and there were a few wine glasses lying on the grass. The white linen tablecloths had been left out overnight and bore scattered wet patches where the dew hadn’t dried yet. In the corner of the garden, Davo was on a large stepladder, pulling the fairy lights down from where they’d been fastened to a pole lashed to the fence.
“G’day,” Davo grunted, giving Nick a curt nod before returning to the string of lights.
“You want a hand?” Nick asked. Moving would help. Doing something, completing a task, would make it feel less like his chest was cracking in two. He remembered this feeling, from when Delphine had dumped him, but he didn’t remember it being this disorienting, like he could barely remember his own name.
“Nah, I’m right. Can you pull up the dance floor, though?”
Nick nodded and got to work.
Half an hour later, he’d pulled the three heavy sheets of painted plywood off the grass and carried them over to the back gate, ready for loading onto Davo’s ute. He’d folded the tablecloths and collapsed the tables and had just started collecting the abandoned napkins and glasses when the back door slid open and Marcus appeared with a glass of water in each hand.
“Finally, the married man emerges,” Davo called, his arms full of tangled fairy lights. “How does it feel? You miss your freedom yet?”
Marcus looked at Nick and rolled his eyes, then did a double take and frowned. He elbowed the back door shut, walked over to Davo and handed him a glass, then crossed the garden to talk to Nick.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, quiet enough that Davo couldn’t hear.
“I’m fine,” Nick said, taking the water from his friend’s hand.
“You’re full of it,” Marcus said, looking at him closely. “Heather said something about Carly leaving in a hurry? Do you know anything about that?”
Nick took a big gulp of water and took his time swallowing it. Marcus watched him patiently, with an expression that clearly said he wasn’t having it. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Nick lied.
Marcus watched him for another moment, then seemed to decide something.
“Oi, Davo, we’re going on a coffee run. You want your usual?”
Davo grunted in response, and Marcus gave Nick a decisive nod. “Let’s go.”
They were around the block before Marcus tried again.
“What happened with Carly? She disappeared last night, and now she’s on the first flight back to New York?”
Nick sighed. He needed to tell his friend the truth, at last.
“Things haven’t been going that well for me lately. With Delphine, and with retirement, it’s been a hard year. And, well, the photography thing wasn’t going that well, either,” he said to the concrete three feet in front of them. “I know it looked like I was doing okay, and I didn’t say anything when you all thought I was making it work, but the truth is I wasn’t. I was floundering. And when I came home from Paris, I had no idea what I was going to do next. If I’d have to figure out something else entirely, because dance photography wasn’t working out.”
“I’m sorry, mate. Why didn’t you just tell us that? Or tell me, at least?”
“Because you were handling retirement so well. You have a new career lined up, you’re married now, you’re … You’re moving forward, and I was just flailing.”
Marcus didn’t stop walking, but he did turn to stare at Nick. “I got fired. After a year of recovering from surgery, and right after my dad died. You think I don’t know what flailing feels like?”
“Right,” Nick agreed, “but then you figured it out.”
“Yeah, mate, I figured it out with help. From Shaz and the physio team at the company, from Alice, from Heather, even from Davo in a weird way. I couldn’t handle it all on my own.”
“I know, I just … I didn’t want to add more stuff to your plate.”
“Bullshit,” Marcus said flatly. “That’s crap and you know it.”
They stopped at a crossing, and Nick forced himself to look at Marcus. It was crap. He’d been insecure, and jealous of his friend’s new life.
He swallowed hard and told himself that Marcus would understand. “I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth, but I hated the truth. I don’t want to be jealous of you. You deserve everything you have, everything you worked for.”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment. “They make you take a liberal arts class if you want to be a physio, don’t ask me why. I ended up in a poetry seminar, and I thought I would hate it, but one day we read this poem that made the last couple of years make sense to me.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.I really needed to hear that.” He put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, just like Nick had done before they’d walked down the aisle the day before. “No feeling is final. The shit ones, the depressed ones, even the great ones, they’re all temporary. You have to remember that, or they’ll swallow you whole. There are only a few things in life that are truly forever and truly unfixable. Everything else, you can get through. And you can get through the unfixable stuff, too. Trust me.”
