After that I stopped paying attention to what Cal was doing. I stopped surfing the web for news of his life. I stopped listening to any radio station that might play his music. I never spoke of him again to anyone. In general, I tried to pretend Cal Callahan didn’t exist.

It wasn’t that I was jealous of Cal. I loved him, and I missed him. And I was prouder of him than I had ever been of anyone or anything. But it was impossible to feel that proud of everything Cal had accomplished without being reminded in the most painful way of all the things I would never do.

You know where I was the night Cal was making his national television debut on The Late Show? Before I went to the emergency room to have my toes X-rayed, that is? I was sitting in my shitty apartment in Berkeley, eating a shitty burrito from the shitty Mexican restaurant I lived above, wondering why I wasn’t standing on that stage, playing guitar beside my best friend.

EIGHT.

I didn’t know any nice places to eat in Mill Valley, so the night October and I went out to dinner for the first time, I let her pick the restaurant. She chose a tiny, farm-to-table spot off the main street in town and asked if we could go right when they opened, before it filled up, and for the first twenty minutes we had the place to ourselves.

The restaurant had an open kitchen, a wood-fired oven where they cooked everything in cast iron pans, and furry seat cushions that made the room feel cozy and romantic. There was a record player behind the bar, along with stacks of vinyl, and a playlist on the back of the menu, the albums selected by the chef to complement the food being served that night.

Rumors was playing when we walked in, and as October mouthed the words to “Go Your Own Way,” my instinct was to tell her that the first songs I learned to play on guitar were Fleetwood Mac songs, but then I remembered she didn’t know I could play guitar. As a matter of fact, she barely knew any veritable information about me at all.

October was wearing a loose-fitting, knee-length dress the color of Japanese maple leaves in the spring, a long, silky scarf tossed around her neck, and brown suede boots. She looked pretty and cool, and I contemplated telling her so, but that seemed like something you’d say on a date—and specifically not something you’d say to your boss over dinner—and since I wasn’t sure which one of those scenarios we were in, I held back.

As soon as we sat down, the restaurant’s young chef came out and greeted October by name. She introduced me as her friend Joe, and the chef shook my hand and asked me if I had any dietary restrictions. I told him I did not, and he took away our menus.