Page 29 of Goodbye Days

“Probably a good idea.” I’m glad she suggested it, because I don’t feel like I have the right to.

“It doesn’t mean we care about them less. It just means that we still have to live.”

On the street adjoining the park, a car passes, blaring music from open windows. A group of seven or eight Vanderbilt-aged kids walks past, giggling and chattering. A father and mother stroll by on the path, the father carrying an exhausted toddler on his shoulders.

Night descends as a falling blanket. The city is a constellation of lights, each one representing a hand that turned the lightbulb. A hand attached to a mind containing a universe of memories and myths; a natural history of loves and wounds.

Life everywhere. Pulsing, humming. A great wheel turning. A light blinks out here, one replaces it there. Always dying. Always living. We survive until we don’t.

All of this ending and beginning is the only thing that’s infinite.

I text Jesmyn almost immediately after arriving home from dropping her off. I had fun tonight. I should wait. I don’t want to come off as a weirdo. But also I’m now keenly aware of how important it is to tell people what you want them to know while you can.

After a few seconds: Me too.

Let’s hang again soon, I reply. It felt good to talk.

Definitely, she replies.

A liquid rose-gold warmth—whatever color is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the color of aloneness—fills me briefly.

And then I wonder if Eli, wherever he is, can see me texting his girlfriend, talking about what a blast we had hanging out without him. I hope he can’t. I wouldn’t want him to get the wrong idea.

I’m sitting at home; it’s morning on the day before school starts. I’m psyching myself up for our meeting with my lawyer in a few hours and this weird surge of bravery comes over me. I feel ready to tell Nana Betsy Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do the goodbye day. I’m strong enough to handle it.

I drive out to her house, park, walk up the driveway, and make it all the way to the door. Then I completely chicken out. It’s like my courage was playing a prank on me.

I consider knocking on the door anyway and seeing if she needs any help with anything and not mentioning the goodbye day. But I’m scared she’ll bring it up. She’ll read the cowardice on my face and smell the stink of guilt on me. So I slink away, hoping maybe she’ll forget ever suggesting it.

The lawyer’s oak-paneled waiting room smells like leather chairs, musty paper, and cigarette smoke on clothes from whoever was here last. Dotting the walls are paintings of golfers and hunting dogs with various fowl in their mouths. Generic waiting-room magazines (Sports Illustrated, Time, Southern Living, etc.) sit on an end table, but none of us are reading. On the whole, it’s a fairly shitty way to spend the last afternoon before school starts, but I seem to be in the “fairly shitty way” business lately.

I sit between my mom and dad. My dad shifts in his seat and keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs. My legs bounce while I rest my elbows on my knees and stare at the weathered hardwood floor. My mom lightly rubs my back. Her touch calms me a little. Thank goodness Georgia is at work. She’d be riled up and riling me up right now. The only sound in the room is the clicking of the receptionist’s perfectly manicured fingernails on her phone screen as she texts.

“Lawyers, bruh,” Mars says, pulling up the seat across from me.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Naw, for real, though, dude. I would know.”

“Your dad.”

“And my brother. Don’t forget my brother too. Just like my dad. Man, they would team up on me, lawyer my ass in the most mundane circumstances you can imagine.”

“Like?”

“Oh. We’re playing a board game and my dad’s like, to my brother, ‘Marcus, you cannot make that move,’ and my brother’s like, ‘Yes, I can, because if you examine the structure of the rules generally, they express the implicit intention that I should be able to make this move,’ and my dad’s like ‘Blah blah, but if you go beyond the text of the rules as written, blah blah, I don’t even know.’ ”

“Let me guess: whichever one of them won the argument, you lost.”

“Ding ding.”

“So here I am, sitting in a lawyer’s office, waiting for him to tell me how he’s going to argue with another lawyer to try to save my dumb ass. And whichever one of them wins, I’m going to lose. To some extent.”

“Correct.”

“One of them might win, but I’ll lose.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”