Ingrid had protested with shouts and tears—“I’m not ready, Bob. Please.”—but he told her he’d called the Salvation Army days earlier. “They’re sending a truck over at noon. It’s not up for discussion.”

Ingrid was so upset that after Bob left for work, she told me to go into my brother’s room and take whatever I wanted before the truck came.

What if Dad gets mad? I wrote in the notebook I’d taken to carrying around.

“Joey, I want you to have something to remember your brother by, and if your father says one word to you about that, you tell him I said he can shove it up his ass.”

I wrote her exact words down just in case the opportunity to show it to Bob ever arose.

Even before I went into Sam’s room, I knew what I wanted: the Martin acoustic dreadnought he’d gotten for his sixteenth birthday. The guitar was brand new, and when Sam was alive he wouldn’t let me touch it because he said my hands were too grimy from petting trees all the time.

The guitar was the only thing I’d ever seen that was as beautiful as the redwoods I worshipped, and I started teaching myself how to play it by studying the Fleetwood Mac songbook Sam bought at a garage sale the same week he got the guitar.

Bob never did get mad about me keeping the guitar, but I figured it was because all I did was sit in my room and play it, and that meant Bob didn’t have to see me or talk to me, or deal with me not talking to him. It was a win-win situation for all.

By the time I met Cal two years later, I knew how to play every song in that book and had moved on to the Eagles Greatest Hits. In fact, the first song Cal and I ever performed together in public, during our sophomore year, was “Take It Easy.” We used the bleachers in the gym as a makeshift stage and played the song during the girls basketball practice because Cal insisted we needed to start getting some live show experience, and because he had a crush on a girl named Nell, who’s family was moving to Frontier, North Dakota, at the end of the summer. Cal had been flirting with Nell for weeks. That day he changed the song’s lyrics from “standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” to “standing on a corner in Frontier, North Dakota,” and before Nell left town she gave Cal his first hand job, more than a year before I would get mine.

The second half of dinner went a lot smoother than the first. Brad/Al continued to bring small plates of food to our table—Kennebec fries, braised short ribs, apple cake for dessert—all the while supplying us with the best red wine I’d had since back in high school, when I used to steal Silver Oak from Bob’s fridge.

October didn’t press or pry any further into my life, and that, along with the abundance of wine, put me at ease. I went on to spend a good portion of the meal giving her in-depth play-by-plays of movies she’d never seen—films that were too violent or disturbing for her, like Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, and a documentary about whales that I’d recently watched. I undertook the narratives with real commitment—“Mr. Brown? That sounds too much like Mr. Shit. How about if I’m Mr. Purple? That sounds good to me. I’ll be Mr. Purple”—and October laughed at my sincere, theatrical portrayals, occasionally interrupting to tell me I was funny or cute, and pretty soon being with her began to feel warm and homey, to such a degree that my heart quailed whenever I wasn’t talking.