“You stay safe too,” Denny told Sammie.
“Will do. Love you both.”
“Love you,” they said, and she ended the call.
They didn’t do much during the morning hours, not that there was a need to. They sprawled on the lounge chairs, doing dramatic readings of some old Harlequin romances Sammie had once left at the cabin. They weren’t bad, per se, but they often ended up commenting on the lack of any sort of feminism in the stories.
Eventually, they made some lunch and ate inside, and even though Josiah did his best, he could only keep Denny away from alcohol until three in the afternoon. He started light on beer, which was nice, even though he grabbed a cooler with several bottles to take out to the chairs.
Josiah grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the living room table and stuffed them into his pocket. He had a feeling they might need them at some point.
He rolled a joint, deciding that he’d stick to one beer and the weed, to keep a clear head. Anything more than a couple of beers mixed with weed would be really, really bad for his head space. He joined Denny in their sunny spot and sat, but didn’t light up yet. He stashed the stuff in his pocket, and then opened a beer.
“Tell me a good memory.” He looked at Denny who was lounging on the chair, his silly straw hat shielding his eyes. “Anything at all.”
Denny hummed thoughtfully. Then he smiled. “When we were getting into the teen years, we got into that stinky state all boys reach at some point.”
Josiah nodded and grinned.
“We were both a bit rough and tumble, we did a lot of things outdoors and there was the whole athletics thing, so it was pretty bad in our room sometimes.” Denny glanced at him, smiling. “So mom made a rule.”
“Oh?”
“We’d both shower at school or after PE or practice, you know, but it was still tricky to get us to shower often enough.”
“Okay, eww, but I remember that time so go on.” Josiah waved a hand.
“So mom came up with this thing that on all even days, like the second, fourth, and so on, we would have to shower. She figured it was a good pun. Are you ready for this?” Denny grinned, his eyes filled with amusement.
“Probably not, to be fair.”
“’You shower on even days so you don’t start smelling odd.’”
It wasn’t even that good of a joke, but somehow Josiah burst out in laughter. That set Denny off and they just howled with it until Denny’s tears of laughter turned into deep sobs of grief.
Josiah wiped his own eyes and got up to tug his chair against Denny’s. He then rested his head on Denny’s shoulder in silent support and handed him a tissue.
He didn’t push Denny to talk more, but after a couple of beers, Denny blew his nose again.
“You know, you told me a story you’d never told me before. I think I should do that as well,” Denny murmured. Josiah didn’t bother telling him he shouldn’t if he didn’t feel like it, because Denny wouldn’t have brought it up if he wasn’t going to follow through. “About three months before Dave got into that car that crashed, he met this girl. She was his age, real pretty and smart. They started to date and were getting pretty serious in the way nineteen-year-olds can get, you know.”
Josiah hummed and took a sip from his bottle.
“I liked her too, my parents loved her. She was supposed to be in the car with him that night, but she had a cold and couldn’t go to the movies, so he went with his friend Rick. You know the rest. Heavy rain on the way home, car hydroplanes through a bridge railing, Dave has no chance of survival, Rick ends up paralyzed from the chest down and dies of complications from a surgery he insisted on having a few years later.”
Josiah nodded and put his empty bottle away, then hugged Denny’s arm as he continued to listen.
“Then, when I go to college, I bump into the girl there. She’d moved out of town a couple of weeks after the funeral and we didn’t really hear from her after that. Her dad had gotten a new job and she went through a super rough patch with a sort of survivor’s guilt because in her eyes, she should’ve been in that car.”
“That’s… horrible.”
“Yeah,” Denny said softly. “It took her a while to get better to a point that despite her being a year older than me, she still started college at the same time with me and you know I started late, too.” Denny turned to look down at Josiah. “Her name is Janet.”
It took Josiah two seconds, but he felt his jaw drop and he stared at Denny wide-eyed. “No way?”
Denny let out a small, weird sounding chuckle, and nodded. “I got together with my dead brother’s ex-girlfriend. We got married after we got our degrees and we stayed that way for a decade.”
Josiah did the math. “I met you guys when you’d been married like six years or something, right? You didn’t divorce until years into our friendship.”
