we were neighbors and when we missed the bus, her father, whose Boston accent had the same missing Rs I was in speech therapy to repair, drove us to school in the back of his banana-yellow ServiceMaster carpet cleaning van, even though it had no backseats and we had to sit on overturned buckets and brace ourselves with our feet, these two little girls with dark brown hair, back-to-back birthdays, and names starting with A, one of us searching even then for the end of loneliness—it was me who asked her to wear the other half of the split-heart best friend necklace in seventh grade—and it was her who found a new best friend in tenth grade, so it comes as no surprise that we went to different colleges, moved to different cities, and stopped talking completely, though I was surprised that none of that seemed to matter as I stood in line at the funeral home twenty-five years later, looking at the photo collage propped up on the lid of her father’s closed casket.
I hugged her mother first, then Jeff, then Mer, then Abigail, then her, amazed that people stay warm and familiar even beneath age and grief, and as we wobbled in our sensible shoes I tried to come up with something to say, something about how much her father had meant to me when we were girls, how much I appreciated the way he helped my mother when my own dad left, but my mouth wouldn’t work and instead she said, We should get together sometime under better circumstances, which I knew meant next to nothing, so I left her standing there, walked past her two daughters in their matching dresses, little familiar-faced strangers, and went through a side door, drove downhill past the old white house where our high school football coach had lived, then parked at the strip mall where there used to be a video store, a tanning salon, a Hallmark store, and a diner called The Sandwich Man, thinking of how history is remade in a series of big and little deaths as I opened the door where the CVS used to be and five people sitting at a bar turned around in unison to see who let the September light inside.
I took a seat at a high table so I could swing my feet over the floor, blushed a little when the waitress called me Hon, tried not to stare at the patch of sun by the kitchen door where there shouldn’t be a dog but there was a dog, sitting still as a cactus until the waitress brought out my pizza and he trotted at her heels, then sat beneath my table, wet-eyed and waiting for me to drop the crust, but I didn’t, and eventually he started pacing around the restaurant, sniffing around as if looking for someone, though not seeming to belong to anyone.
