“Chris,” she said nervously. “I’m sure Joe has stuff to do. And you must be exhausted.” She turned to me. “He took the red-eye in from Chicago.” Then she looked back to Cal. “Don’t you want to rest or something?”

“Rest?” he shouted. “I’ve just been reunited with my long-lost best friend. How can I rest at a time like this?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You don’t have any plans today, do you? Tell me you don’t have any plans.”

I looked to October for an answer, but her face was blank.

“No plans,” I said.

“Fucking Harp,” he said. “Fantastic. Follow me.”

ELEVEN.

Fourteen years had passed since Cal and I had seen each other. In a way it seemed like a lifetime, and yet after five minutes together it was as if no time had passed at all. We picked up right where we’d left off.

Blood brothers.

After October wandered off to nap, I followed Cal to the garage. It turned out the garage was a small recording studio, which explained why all the windows were covered up and it had been padlocked since I’d moved in.

Cal said the equipment was state of the art, but I know very little about recording; when I looked at it, all I saw were three large computer screens and a console with lots of knobs and buttons. However, the studio feature Cal was most excited to show me was the wall of guitars just outside the live room.

“Check it out,” he said, presenting the wall to me like a game show host revealing the big prize.

There were over a dozen of them, each one more beautiful than the next. The real-life version of our childhood bulletin board. Our Wall of Dreams. And the dream belonged exclusively to Cal.

One particular guitar ripped my heart out. The 1953 butterscotch Fender Telecaster hanging in the center, just like it had on the corkboard in my bedroom. Cal saw me eyeing it and started grinning.

I looked at him, wide-eyed and in disbelief. “Don’t even tell me that’s a Micawber…”

He nodded like crazy. “Go ahead. Play it.”

I couldn’t even reach for it. The guitar rendered me starstruck.

Cal took it down and handed it to me. “There is no one in the entire world I would rather hear play this than you.”

I ran my fingers up and down the neck and held it in my arms for a while, feeling its weight, admiring it, absorbing its energy before I felt ready to pluck a note or strum a chord.

Cal laughed. “That’s exactly what I did the first time I touched it.”

“I can’t believe you have this.”

Allegedly, Keith Richards had named the guitar Micawber after a Dickens character, and back when Cal and I were first discovering different makes and models, we thought the Tele sounded too country for us—until we listened to Exile on Main Street a couple dozen times and Keith set us straight.