“Don’t worry about it, man. He wouldn’t have been in any shape shortly after the Fourth to have a real conversation.”
“Still. It’s been bothering me,” Connor said.
“You gotta let that one go. There’s too much heavier shit to deal with. Especially for you.”
Connor didn’t need clarification on what Logan meant. Being the only survivor of a car accident that took two close friends added a whole other layer to all of the five stages. And beyond.
“Yeah. It fucking sucks, right? All of it?” He made a motion between the three of us, wrapping up Logan’s and my grief with his own. All different circumstances, but a similar bottom line of loss. “Mind if I ask you about your mom’s accident?” he said to me.
I swallowed my last bite of the pie and motioned for him to go ahead.
“Was there anyone else in the car with her?”
“No. Thank God my little brother and sister were in school. She’d just dropped my brother off at school and was headed to work. It was in the morning and as simple as someone missing a stop sign. No drunk driver or anything like that. Just a stupid accident.”
Connor was kneading a napkin into a ball. “And you were here, right? At school?”
I nodded. “In class. My dad had someone from administration pull me out to be with me while he called to tell me.”
“That was good thinking,” Connor said. Logan opened his mouth to speak, but Connor continued, cutting Logan off, though I didn’t think he was aware he was doing it. “To have that kind of presence of mind with what he was going through, you know?”
I had never really thought about that. Dad had been dealing with the loss of his wife while trying to manage the best way to break the news to his three kids. I’d had a lot of admiration for the way he’d handled the past year, and now even more so.
“It’s funny how your mind can work in times like that,” Connor continued. “Or shit, any time after, even. It’s so weird what sets it off.”
I thought of my mom’s Bribury shirt and how I’d had it for over a year, but only recently had it become so important to me.
“Yeah. I had one of those last week,” Logan said. At our questioning looks, he expounded, “Something that catches you off guard. Throws you back into it all.”
“What happened? I mean, if you want to talk about it,” Connor said. He brought the chair forward, back to the floor, and reached for a new napkin to continue his fidgeting.
“I do want to talk about it,” Logan said. He was looking directly at me, and I sensed there was more to what he was saying than simple grief sharing.
Not that grief sharing was in any way simple.
“Last week, when I came home, my housemates were watching a Tom Clancy movie.”
Connor and I both just waited, knowing there was more to come. Though I knew a bit more about that night than Connor did.
“My brother and I loved those movies. All of ’em. But especially the one that was on when I walked in.The Hunt for Red October.”
“Good flick,” Connor said. I thought so too, but found I couldn’t move enough to even nod in agreement. Logan was not telling this story for Connor’s benefit. This was for me.
This was what he’d wanted to talk about when he waited for me outside the ladies’ room a half hour ago.
“Yeah. It is. We knew all the lines. Did the accents and shit. But there’s one line, when the Russian first mate, or whatever rank he actually is, dies, he says—”
“‘I would like to have seen Montana,’” Connor said along with Logan.
I liked the movie, had seen it more than once when my father would stop on it if it was on, but hadn’t remembered that line.
“J and I used that line when we did something stupid we regretted. Like in a dumb way, you know? We’d crack up over it.”
“Right,” Connor said.
“And then he actually used it when I was with him at the end. Not at the actual moment—he was too medicated then—but in the last conversation he was able to have with me. He said it. And there was no irony in it, no stupid joke. It was all there. The life he’d never get to have. No hockey together. No wife or kids. No future. No Montana.”
“Fuck,” Connor said.
