He shouted in pain, doubled over — and just as he was about to straighten up again, another pot and a lid fell out, as if they’d somehow been teetering there, biding their time. It was the same thing that had happened to me when I was cleaning out the kitchen and I couldn’t quite comprehend how it could be happening a second time. The pots bounced off the back of his head and upper shoulders and Trevor howled again and I knew I had been given another chance.

I turned to Noel. “Can you go get your shotgun?”

35

Life isn’t like the movies. You want the big choo, in a story, but in life it never quite arrives. Or if it does, it’s terrible. It’s not cleansing, or cathartic. It doesn’t bring you that nebulous, perhaps imaginary thing they talk about in self-help circles — closure. Or else it brings you a hideous kind of closure — the kind you’d be perfectly happy to forgo and live the rest of your life without. In stories, successful stories anyway, endings always feel right, satisfying, even when they’re sad. But in life, endings — the big-choo kind of endings — uniformly feel awful. They’re the incidents from which we must recover, the cascade of events that feel unexpected even when they’re not and divide our lives into the innocent, oblivious before and the annihilated after.

Trevor’s departure wasn’t really like that, though. It wasn’t nearly as annihilating as, say, the departure of my mother — which was so quiet and unobtrusive in contrast.

What I should’ve said to Noel, instead of Can you go get your shotgun? was Would you please go to your house and call the police? Whenever I tell this story, I try to make this point before the person I am telling it to can. The person’s eyes always get big, just as Noel’s did after I said those words to him, but then my listener will stop me there, because he or she has objections to raise. A gun changes everything, in a story, even a gun as silly as Noel’s Remington 870 — if you can call a shotgun silly. I read up on it online sometime afterwards and discovered hunters mostly like the 870 for shooting ducks and geese. Which somehow seems ridiculous to me. Once, when I told this story to a man, he burst out laughing at the evocation of the shotgun. He’d been riveted up until that moment, holding either side of his face during the whole dish-throwing episode as if to calm himself. But when I told him what I said to Noel in the foyer, he reacted as if the entire story had been the set-up and Can you go get your shotgun? was the punchline. “All of a sudden it’s Pulp Fiction!” he exclaimed, meaning either the movie or the genre itself. Either way, he somehow couldn’t take me seriously after that.

“I’m just telling you what happened,” I say to people like the man above, the people who argue with me at this point in this story, as if I’d been doing ok up until now, but suddenly I’ve started telling it wrong and they need to nudge me back on track.