“Merry,” I answered.

His brows went up. “Why didn’t you take the call?”

He asked because he knew Merry was a friend. He knew this because, being a friend, we had occasions to be together outside me serving Merry drinks at J&J’s, times when Ethan was around. Parties. Barbeques. Picnics. Basketball and football games Colt would organize with adults and kids. Hanging at the carnival at Arbuckle Acres during the Fourth of July. Heading out with Colt and Feb and their speedboat to a lake.

Merry was in his life. Merry liked kids, dug Ethan, and often passed a ball or Frisbee with him, teased him, shot the shit with him, ruffled his hair, squeezed the back of his neck, laughed when Ethan was funny, made Ethan laugh by being funny.

There was no reason Ethan could imagine why I would not take a call from a good guy who might not be a staple in Ethan’s life but definitely had a firm foot in it.

“’Cause I’m with you at the grocery store and some stuff has gone down with Merry that’s pretty intense, so when I chat with him next, I wanna give him all my attention.”

This was the truth, thankfully.

Ethan’s head tipped to the side. “What stuff?”

“His ex-wife got engaged to someone else.”

Ethan was no less confused. “He still into her?”

That thorn drove deeper.

“Yep.”

Ethan nodded like he was a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old wise man with a twelve-foot-long white beard, sitting on a mountaintop, a pilgrimage destination for folks who wished to beg his wisdom.

“I see that,” he muttered solemnly.

“You got an ex-wife I don’t know about?” I asked, reaching for a bag of Funyuns as we made our way down the aisle.

“Three of them, actually,” Ethan answered.

I swallowed a laugh and tossed the Funyuns in the cart. I still grinned at the back of his head as he grabbed a bag of Fritos Scoops.

“Too bad you didn’t have a momma who taught you how to treat a woman right,” I remarked.

“Nah, me that got rid of them, seein’ as they didn’t treat me as good as my momma,” he shot back.

Suddenly, I needed to hold on to something because I felt weak in the knees.

My dad drank, slapped my mom around, then gave her the best gift he could: he fucked around on her with a woman he preferred, so he left us to be with her and then minimized contact in order not to deal with his responsibility, but it made it so we didn’t have to deal with his garbage.

I didn’t like school so I screwed around, graduating by the skin of my teeth, too young and too stupid to know one day I’d need it.

I liked wild because it felt good, so I found it everywhere I could find it and ended up with men so far worse than my father, it wasn’t funny.

I ate shit because I’d bought it and I ate shit because that was life.