A brief silence, acknowledging the glow of the evening was fading. I asked her about her day, her week, as recently we’d only seen each other in passing. She itemized her walks around the neighborhood and Lynch Park (including her terse confrontation with a man who didn’t clean up after his Labradoodle), phone calls with her sister who lived in West Roxbury, dinner with one of her bank-teller friends who’d had a hard go of it lately. I diverted conversation away from the friend’s hard go. Selfishly, I didn’t want to hear about it, not then. So, I preemptively answered one of her usual questions about a gig.

I said, “No former classmates in the audience, tonight, which is always a plus.”

“You’re almost in your mid-forties, Art. You need to let those high school grudges go.”

I laughed. “Says the person who still complains about when she was a freshman and her senior brother let his friends make fun of and embarrass her at a high school dance.” It was kind of mean to bring that up, though I didn’t do it to be mean. I took an odd sense of comfort from listening to a seventy-year-old (one who had lived a full life, a life blessed with a roof always over her head and loving, if not dwindling, family and friends, but a life certainly not free from upheaval, tragedy, loneliness, and disappointment) remembering the slights and cruelties of her youth with clarity and purpose.

“Well, that was an asshole thing to do. They were all assholes.”

“They certainly were.” I poured the rest of her wine bottle into my glass so that she wouldn’t have to finish it alone.

“Whatever happened to that friend of yours? Mary? No, Mercy.” She asked me like she didn’t know her name, like she didn’t ask me about her every six to eight months.

I said, “I don’t know.”

“Are you still working on your memoir?” novel