“Bullshit,” he said. “This isn’t where you belong, and you know it.” Cal crossed his legs and leaned back. “Earlier you said you’d do anything to make things right with me. Here’s how to do that: Go back and make things right for yourself. Make things right with her. Tell her all the things you want to tell her. At the very least, tell her you’re sorry. Because what’s at stake? Literally nothing. You’ve already lost what you were afraid of losing.”

“Why do you care if I make things right with her or not?”

“I don’t care. You care.”

“Besides, she’d just tell me to go fuck myself.”

“You’re missing the point. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. There’s got to be a reckoning, Harp. It doesn’t matter if she tells you to go jump off the top of the Salesforce Tower with your fist up your ass. That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that you don’t die with all this stuff stuck inside of you, tearing you to pieces, making you less and less until there’s nothing left. And let me be blunt, if you think I wanna be hanging out at my big beach house when I’m eighty, shooting the shit and playing the Tam High setlist with a bitter old fool who’s still brooding over a girl he walked away from forty years earlier, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Our conversation was interrupted by Maggie shouting “Dinner!” and knocking on the door until I opened it.

She shrieked when she saw my face. “Yikes! What the heck happened to you?”

Maggie was sixteen and looked like a human version of the lanky coast lilies that pop up perennially on the Point Reyes Peninsula in West Marin. Imagine a bright orange flower with little brown dots, its petals curled backward like Maggie’s hair when she pulled it into a ponytail.

“I happened to him,” Cal announced from behind us.

I told Maggie to come in while I went to grab the beer and ice cream from the fridge. A second later she shrieked again.

I looked over my shoulder. Her eyes were wide, facing Cal. “Wait . . . You’re . . .”

“Chris Callahan,” he said, shaking her hand. “And you are?”

“Margaret Elizabeth Toltz,” she answered formally. “I like your shirt. Where’d you get it?”

“Saint Laurent,” he told her, ironing the front of it with his hands.

I liked Maggie a lot. Her favorite pastimes were chopping firewood and driving the snowplow in winter. Over the summer she worked as a camp counselor in Glacier and tipped me off to all the good trails. In return, I was teaching her how to play power chords.

Maggie looked at me, hand on her hip, hip jutted out to the side. “Joe, why is Chris Callahan in your house? And why did he beat you up?”