He drained his beer and peered at me through a wispy chunk of hair that had fallen across his eye. But he didn’t shake me off or contradict anything I said. He just listened.

“This is hard,” I admitted. A lot of emotions were hitting me at once. I thought of all the years of Cal’s life that I’d missed. I thought of Terry dying, and I thought about the night I’d spent with October. Sitting there with Cal, realizing what I’d done, I swore to myself that nothing else would happen between October and me. I didn’t care what kind of free-love shit they had going on or how I felt about her, I could see right away that he loved her, and I wasn’t going to get in the middle of that.

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m just so fucking sorry.”

“You don’t need to keep saying that.”

“I do. You don’t even know.” I shook my head and felt myself getting shaky. “You got married, Cal. You fucking got married and I wasn’t there. You got divorced and I wasn’t there. Terry died and I wasn’t there. You won a fucking Grammy and I wasn’t there.”

“None of that matters now.”

“I don’t understand why you’re not pissed at me.”

“We were kids, Harp.”

“But I bailed on you. I made you promises, and I didn’t keep any of them.”

There was a small votive candle in the middle of our table. Cal reached out and put his finger on top of the flame, and at first I flinched, thinking he was going to get burned, but then I realized the flame was fake, plastic, battery-powered.

He said, “I figured you had your reasons for not coming with me. And I knew you well enough to guess at what those reasons were. You wrestle with your demons in a different way than I wrestle with mine. You always have.” He shook his head slowly, contemplatively, rubbing his chin. “I was never mad at you, Harp. I want you to know that. I was just super fucking bummed, for a really long time, that you weren’t along for the ride.” He leaned across the table, his eyebrow arching sharply, devilishly. “It’s been a fun fucking ride, bro.”

Despite how much we’d already had to drink, when the server came over and asked us if we wanted one more round, we both nodded.

“Catch me up,” Cal said. “I want to know what you’ve been doing all these years. Figured you’d be running the family business by now.”

“Yeah, well, that didn’t pan out.”

Cal wanted details, and I explained to him about how when I first started at Harper & Sons, I spent years in the actual construction part of the job. “It was hard but really satisfying work. Building things is like moving meditation. You can forget who you are and what you feel when you’re using tools and making things. And when you’re finished, there’s something to show for it. A tangible object that represents your time on the planet.”