She shrugs again.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
She shuts the door to remove the chain and lets me inside.Friendsis on TV, and there are two overflowing laundry baskets on the floor in front of the sofa. Gina sits and resumes folding clothes. I sit next to her and reach into one of the baskets.
“What’s up?” she asks, her attention darting from the TV to the slacks in her hands and then to me.
“I just wanted to ask if it would be all right if you had Mikayla this weekend?” I fold one of the kid’s little frilly nightgowns that has a pink and purple unicorn on it. She’s had this unicorn fixation for like a year now. I don’t think there’s a single spot in her bedroom that doesn’t have a unicorn on it.
Gina lifts a shoulder. “I picked up a double tomorrow.” She pauses. “And I was going to meet up with someone on Sunday. Why?”
“Never mind then. It’s just, um…” I pull out a pink dress with a green unicorn on the front. “I was thinking about maybe, possibly, seeing if Ethan Sawyer wanted some company.”
She tears her gaze away from Ross and Rachel. “Really?”
“It’s like a twelve-hour drive or something, and, I don’t know.” I pause and look at the TV, but I’m not actually watching or listening. “I just thought, if you were cool keeping Mikayla, I might go with him.”
She’s quiet for a moment or two before she asks, “Where’s he going again?”
“Some place in West Virginia. It’s a camp they used to go to, him and Ev, when they were kids.”
Gina pauses folding up a sweater. “And that’s where Everett wanted his…”
“Yeah.”
Our town is ridiculously small, so it didn’t take long for it to get to me or to Gina, or to anyone for that matter, that Ethan Sawyer is driving to that camp to scatter Everett’s ashes. Apparently, it was something Ev had wanted. Ev was my age, only twenty-three, so he didn’t have like a will or anything. He must have told Ethan one day—in a hypothetical way, probably. Maybe even in a joking sort of way, like Ev used to do. I can hear him saying it, laughing about it even. He never said anything like that to me.
After the funeral, Ethan went back to the city to take care of a few things, then came back home to get his brother’s ashes, to take this trip, and fulfill his brother’s wishes.
I haven’t spoken to Everett or Ethan in five years. After high school Everett went to Syracuse for school. I stayed here in Port Leyden—except for when I moved to Lyons Falls when Gina and I were trying to be together for Mikayla—and when Ev graduated, he moved to Utica. Most of the details of his life I just heard from other people. It was strange to hear about him in that way, distantly, and not from him directly. I had his email address. He got a cell phone. Our senior year, we’d planned for me to come visit him in Syracuse, go to concerts, go out to clubs. We had all these plans, and it never seemed anything couldchange them; it never seemed we could possibly be anything but best friends.
But then I fucked it all up.
Gina sighs as she rolls up a towel. “Does Ethan know you want to go or…? Have you talked to him?”
“No.”
“Maybe he wants to go alone.”
“Maybe.” I pause, not knowing what to do with one of Gina’s bras. “I mean, I can show up and if he doesn’t want company, he can tell me to fuck off.”
Gina looks me over for a second. “Doyou actually want to go, though?”
I think about that for a moment. Out of the two of them—Everett and Ethan—Ethan was the brainy one. And Ethan is sort of a big deal around here because he moved to the city to go to Columbia University. He got some kind of academic scholarship. People like to talk about him in a braggy sort of way. And so I heard about Ethan coming back into town.
Ever since, I’ve had this urge to try to make things right. I cut both of them out of my life, I ignored them for five years, acted like a complete and total asshole, and I had the gall to show up late to Ev’s funeral. I have to do something. I could say a proper goodbye to my friend—the only best friend I’ve ever had—and hope that somewhere from the great beyond, he’ll see and he’ll forgive me.
And Ethan? I don’t even know what I could possibly say to Ethan that would make things right.
But I have to do something. Five years ago, I did something awful to him. It’s about time I stop being such a coward and face the thing I’d been so afraid of back then.
I don’t realize there are tears on my face until Gina’s pressing a tissue box into my hands. I push it away.
“I didn’t know this was upsetting you so much,” she says gently, rubbing a hand up and down my arm.
I wipe away a tear, fiddling with the buttons on a shirt. “I just want a chance to say goodbye. And not be such a chicken shit for once.”
“You’re not chicken shit.”
