“She always tells us to get there an hour earlier than we’re supposed to because she assumes we’re going to be late,” Josie said. “Remember when we got to that restaurant before they even opened?”
The teenager came out of the office again. “I can take you to meet up with them,” he said. He added, “I’ll probably have to drive you in a golf cart so we can catch up,” his voice full of excitement, as if his opportunities to drive a golf cart were generally limited.
“Perfect, thank you,” Josie said. “Let’s go. Bye, boys,” she said, waving as the teenager escorted her to the side door. Hank shuffled along behind them, a picture of aging masculinity: balding, paunchy, dressed in shades of brown and beige, a deep frown line carved between his eyebrows.
The mere sight of guys like his uncle made Carver nervous. He felt perpetually twenty-two years old, and hated remembering that he wasn’t. He still looked good, but until when? And it always felt like he hadn’t yet begun to live. Why did he have to give up his youth and sex appeal before he’d even lived?
When the door shut again, Scott said, “Speaking of parents, uh… not to throw myself a pity party, but I think my parents are a big reason I didn’t feel like I fit in here. I mean, not having what a lot of you guys had, not having them pushing me to apply to Ivy League schools.”
“You wouldn’t have applied regardless,” Carver said.
“No, probably not, but that would’ve been different. I wasn’t consciously rebelling, I was out of my element.”
Carver nodded. He did understand. Way back, Scott came from family money — timber barons — but the money was misspent over generations until there was almost nothing left when he arrived. His mother Dot was a free spirit who inherited a dilapidated Victorian mansion on the perimeter of Bitterfeld, then settled down in it with a weird guy named Kansas who’d worked every job under the sun and claimed to be descended from a Cherokee princess but was probably “just Sicilian and sun-damaged,” according to Scott.
Scott was an only child. Kansas played about fifteen different instruments and taught his son rhythm at his knee, and Dot the bohemian taught him how to get along with basically every type of person, but neither of them could teach him much about finance, employment or academia. When the property tax on the house got to be more than they could handle, they sold it and fled to Florida. It had since been acquired and subdivided into two AirBnbs.
Carver spent a good chunk of his junior and senior years at Scott’s house, trying to escape the suffocation of his own. The crumbling McCaffrey estate was drafty and damp, with rooms either in a state of bare disrepair or dizzying clutter, and in some spots you could smell the wood rotting in the walls. But Scott’s parents were often out, so that was where they could fool around without too much fear, and the closest houses were far enough away that they could blast music as loud as they liked or get theirfriends together to bang around on instruments with the amps turned up to ear-splitting levels. Scott’s house was the first place Carver smoked weed, and the site of his first handjobs — both given and received.
“I mean,” Carver said, “I did get pushed, and I was still out of my element here.”
“Well, yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” Scott said with a smile. “That’s why I liked you.”
Carver’s throat swelled; he swallowed past this. “And I didn’t get into any Ivies, either.” His resume was good enough, his counselor had assured him of this, but no luck. To this day he suspected he’d come across as desperate in his essays and interviews.
“You got on the waitlist at Columbia, didn’t you?”
“Right, yeah. And I did end up going there for my MBA. I’m surprised you remember that.”
“I don’t think you realize how much you were talking about it at the time,” Scott said, with some sarcasm.
“Okay, and you wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Duane Allman?”
Scott started laughing. “I’ll never shut the fuck up about Duane Allman.”
He had a great nose — Carver had forgotten how much he liked it. Its bridge was very straight in an almost Grecian way.
Carver felt his phone buzz in his pocket and pulled it out to look at it. He had a text from Lillian:we’re heading back to the clubhouse now
“I just try to be realistic about this shit,” he said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “Everywhere you go, people are fucked up and crazy. And everywhere I go, I’m —” fucked up and crazy! “— the same person.”
“You get molded, though,” Scott said. “And then, you know, it’s like the air you breathe, you aren’t even aware of it.”
The back of Carver’s neck prickled. He said nothing.
“Are we going to talk sometime about the note we left things on, the shit we said to each other?” Scott said, with a hesitant catch in his low voice. “‘Cause I did… uh… I wanted to make sure things were cool.”
Carver was astonished that he’d even bring this up. “We’re cool,” he said, fast and clipped. “No need to check.”
“Okay.”
They were silent for a moment. Carver resumed staring into space, trying to normalize his galloping heartbeat.
“I don’t know if I entirely feel like things are cool,” Scott said. “I don’t know. We left it on kind of an, uh… we were both pretty pissed. And we haven’t talked since then.”
“It was a million years ago.”
“If that’s how you want to look at it,” Scott said. Carver stole a glance at him. He was looking down at his lap, examining one of his palms. “I guess that’s the healthy way. I probably live in the past too much.”
