Honestly— again— I wrestled with whether to go on posting right now. At least, posting fiction. The world— no, fuck that, people— keep hurtling blindly— no, clear-sightedly, with gleeful intent— toward catastrophe. Catastrophes. Who even cares about my sometimes spectral, often quiet, rueful-wistful little medicine bags full of words?
Do I?
That said, I have not wrestled about continuing to write my fiction. I’m pretty sure I’d be doing that down in the subway tunnel, to the accompaniment of air-raid sirens instead of the William Basinski piano loops decaying prettily in my desktop speakers right now. Apparently, I really am like Frederick in Leo Lionni’s masterpiece of a kid’s book, still the best kid’s book I’ve ever read about art. About being an artist. Making up stories is simply what I do. I don’t know any other way to be awake.
At the end of Lionni’s book, Frederick— long considered the most useless mouse, gathering words while the others collect food— shares what he’s done with the mice who’ve shunned but not abandoned him. He brings the memory— the feel— of sunshine to their burrow in winter.
I’ll make no such claim or justification here. If you’ve read any of my fiction, ghostly or otherwise, you know that sunshine isn’t exactly what I offer. Not sunshine alone, anyway. I could— maybe I will—argue that there might be something that could be of use to someone in what I do. Something all my work in any genre turns out to be about: life richly lived in the face of what we all face; meaning and joy that does not derive from taking what others have, or blocking anyone’s path to love, or winning.
Actually, that depends on what’s being won. And how you’re competing. And who makes the rules. See story below. Which is about old friends we rarely see. Aging parents. Proper, made-up games. Missoula, Montana on a cold, glorious spring day. And happiness. Of a kind. Yes.
Maybe this novelette— the title piece in a years-long project that derived from decades-long misgivings about Tolstoy’s most oft-repeated maxim— is about some of that. Maybe someone might find comfort here. Or inspiration.
Or company amongst the creatures we live with. Don’t know about you, but I would so happily settle for that, these days. I’d feel so much of use if I provided that for anyone.
So. Here’s part one. Conclusion next week:
The cover photo, by the way, is of a shirt we had made of a drawing my late friend John produced for a proposed logo for Mean Bed, our imaginary corporate entity that would have “produced and represented”— whatever that would have meant— all our group creative endeavors we started back when we were teenagers. All our Super-8 movies and music. Our made-up backyard games. Versions of several of which appear in this story…
ALL HAPPY PEOPLE (Pt.1)
The second Isaac arrived from the airport, the Huckleberry brothers, who’d been waiting on the driveway, leaned into the bed of their pick-up and broke out the shirts. Isaac’s hit him in the chest as he stepped out of his Lyft.
“Happy birthday, Gary!” Jim yelled, tossing at least five shirts over his shoulder toward the open garage of the house. They landed on wet grass, pavement, the hood of the truck, as though he suspected Isaac’s father was somewhere nearby and invisible. The truck had been repainted since Isaac had seen it last. In place of Jim’s grinning face atop Your house—in escrow! TODAY, the passenger door now sported an airbrush of two boys in caps beside a crooked white picket fence with what looked like either slats or vampire stakes in their hands. The new words read, Twice the Huckleberry = Twice the Sale! Isaac was sure the slogan had meant something to Fin Huckleberry at the moment he’d come up with it.
Shivering in the early morning air, he felt his face stir. Inject enough coffee, bombard him with Huckleberrys and the Mess and his sister and father for a few hours, and he might just smile yet. Also, despite his shivering, the temperature felt downright balmy for Missoula in March.
“You’re late,” his sister called from the house, and then his father was there, too. Somehow, Gary had indeed not just caught but donned a shirt, or else the brothers had given him one earlier. He was walking damn near upright, too; apparently his back was also giving him a birthday present.
“Sorry,” Isaac said. “Traffic. At 6:45 on a Saturday morning. Who let all these people move to Missoula, anyway?”
“Or made so many of them Japanese?” called Jim, straightening his black warm-up pants on his hips and tucking strands of his comb-over into place. “But I know who’s selling them their dude ranches!” He stuck out a celebratory fist toward his brother. Fin, though, was just emerging from the truck, still slathering ointment over his face. Instead of bumping Jim’s fist, he pushed through it as if it were a turnstile.
“Welcome home, Isaac. Put that on,” he said.
Isaac picked the t-shirt he’d been pelted with off the dewy grass and held it up. Even the color was appalling, a fleshtone-pantyhose beige. And the design…
“Jesus Christ, Fin,” Isaac said, though he dutifully unzipped the rumpled hoodie he’d actually thought might help him sleep during his middle of the night Salt Lake City layover.
“Seriously,” Jim snorted. He sat down on the driveway to exchange the slippers he’d apparently worn to drive here for off-brand, bright orange cross-trainers with too many stripes and swooshes. “He’s outdone himself. I didn’t even think that was possible anymore.” He glanced up at Isaac’s father. “You inspired him, Gary.”
“You seem to be wearing yours,” Fin said, crouching in the shade by the side of the truck as though the rays of even this weak March sun might melt him. His slicked bald pate made him look like a freshly unwrapped candle.
“Obviously I’m wearing it, it’s Gary’s birthday.”
“Whatever your reason, you’re wearing my shirt. Victory to me.”
“Not victory. Blackmail. Coercion.”
“Victory.”
“Oh my God,” said Ruth, stepping into the yard with her arms folded and her shirt over her shoulder. “It’s too early for you two.”
She moved across the grass in her bare feet. Her skin looked so much healthier and blood-infused than Fin’s that it barely seemed the same substance. The yoga and Pilates she taught in town had given her a springiness Isaac didn’t remember in his sister. She still had her hair cropped short and spiky like the little goth punk she’d been in high school fully twenty years ago now. The pout on her too-wide mouth was from then, too, or she’d never lost it.
“What even is this?” Isaac said, eying the design Fin had screened onto the shirt: a stick figure with its arms up, perched on what at first looked like the number four. The four had wheels, though, and was in fact a wheelchair. Either by design or accident, the chair tilted downward from the lettering as if in the midst of plunging off a cliff.
The lettering read 2018 GarOlympic 70th Centennial Games in old-Griz gold and copper, which was a nice touch. U of M colors from before the rape cases, the Krakauer book and the national attention it had brought, the administrative carelessness and cover-ups and firings. The colors of the university back when Gary had genuinely loved doing legal for it. Surprisingly thoughtful for Fin, assuming thought was involved, which was always the question.
Fin and Jim Huckleberry. Jim’s name was the one on his birth certificate, and it wasn’t short for James. But was it tribute to the character in the novel? Neither he nor his bonkers, park ranger-lifer parents had ever said. Fin, on the other hand, had renamed himself in eighth grade. But...was that tribute to the character in the novel? If so, did he know he’d misspelled it? Had he even read that book by then? Just once, the night in high school when they’d all decided to try pot together, Isaac had flat out asked. Fin had answered, “Which book?”
Now, through his no-sleep fug, Isaac felt an unexpected surge of affection for both brothers. Along with the Mess, they were his oldest friends, after all. He hadn’t so much as exchanged texts with them in over a year. Partly because they’d all simply disappeared into their lives. Partly because…well. Isaac didn’t want either Huckleberry to feel they had to ask, and anyway he couldn’t imagine talking about the marital and life impacts of miscarriage (let alone the second, or third) with them. And he really couldn’t imagine talking about how Reenie felt. What their marriage felt like now. The Huckleberrys just…weren’t those kind of friends.
So what kind were they?
The friend kind, maybe? People he laughed with, if only out of habit. Maybe he still had more use for that habit than he’d thought. Maybe habit and friendship were the same word.
He stared again at the shirt Fin had made, then glanced at his sister. “70th Centennial?” he murmured.
“I know,” she said.
On the back of the shirt, dead center, was a dark blue smudge. “What is that?” Isaac asked.
Ruth kissed his cheek and patted his gently spreading waist. “Got to get you in my studio, bro. Are you shivering?”
“Do you think it’s a botched Nike swoosh?”
“I’ve been trying to figure it out, too,” Jim called from the driveway. He had picked another shirt off the grass to study. “Come on, what is it, Fin? Half an S? Deer scat?”
Deer scat? Ruth mouthed at Isaac, and through his exhaustion, Isaac felt more than heard himself laugh.
Jim was still going. “Run-over worm? No, that’d make two worms. Ooh, Fin! I know. It’s your new trademark. Is that your trademark? It’s a fin!”
By his side, Isaac could feel Ruth asking the question he dreaded with her eyes. Was it his own worry, lack of sleep, guilt over the fact that he’d had to let his sister enact the plan for this day even though it had been his idea, or instinctive sibling snark that made him pretend not to notice and decline to answer?
“.457 bullet wound?” Jim tried, poking the splotch with his finger as if he thought it might go through.
The whole time, Fin stayed crouched, shoulders slumped, his usual bland expression on his corpse-pale face. Isaac had once suggested Ruth name a yoga pose after that look; it was at least as much about the shoulders as the mouth. Nonplussed Pigeon. Bored Brother.
Fin stirred. “.457. That precise caliber.”
“Yeah,” said Jim. “’Cause it’s not a circle. See? It made a splotch coming out.”
“And dyed the wound blue.”
“You fucking drew it, I didn’t.”
“Drew it?”
“Shut up, Fin.”
“Shut up, Jim.”
“River,” Gary said from the front stoop, and stepped into the yard. He was holding another of the shirts high like a trout he’d hooked, and also beaming like he used to on Made-up Games days—these days, with this exact group—twenty-five years ago and more.
Squaring his shoulders, Fin stood, wiping his hands on his jeans. He was beaming too. “You got it. It’s in your honor, Gary. That swoosh is a river.”
Instantly, they all shouted it together. “River!”
“Happy birthday, Gary.”
“I love it, Fin. Thank you.”
“I made 50 of them.”
Whatever his father had meant to say next, he forgot. He glanced at Ruth and Isaac for help. Isaac shrugged. Ruth laughed.
The Huckleberrys wanted Isaac in their truck. But for the first leg of today’s travels, at least, he managed to beg off by insisting he needed to say hello to his dad. It was Gary’s party, after all. He went inside long enough to use the bathroom, brush his teeth, and change. Fin’s shirt even felt like underwear, shapeless yet also unpleasantly clingy, something you threw on over your better bad clothes on paint-the-bedroom days.
Make-it-a-nursery days, he thought, and froze momentarily at the sink with the water running. He closed his eyes, patted the phone in his pocket but didn’t take it out. There had been no vibration, not even a phantom one. Reenie hadn’t texted. Everything was fine.
The last two times it had happened, Reenie had been at work and alerted him by text because she couldn’t bear to say the words again or hear his reaction.
But today, three months and three and a half weeks—another new record, the furthest they’d been and closest they’d come—his phone was asleep.
Because she’s letting me celebrate my dad’s birthday, he thought, then shook his head hard and shut off the water.
Because she’s asleep. Because everything’s fine.
“Where’s mom?” he asked when he came back out. He gave his father a hug. “Mr. About-to-be-Retired Guy.”
“Fled,” Gary said. “Big Fork to see Aunt Gwen. She says she’s seen enough of me risking my back in made-up games with you all to last a lifetime. And also enough of these games, period. She’s taking us to The Shed tonight, assuming we survive.”
“She didn’t want to come cheer? I thought you liked it when she came to cheer.”
“I did. I do. But she’s not really the come-cheer sort, your mom. Never has been. You know that, right? She only ever did that for you and Ruth.”
“But she enjoyed cheering me and Ruth. I think? Which means she is the come-cheer sort. Doesn’t it?”
Gary pursed his mouth, which made the white, wiry hairs of his mustache poke forward like polar bear whiskers. “Hmm.” Then he grinned. “Thanks for coming, son.”
From her tiny red Fiesta in the driveway, Ruth honked.
“Where else would I be on your 70th birthday?”
“What else would we be doing on my 70th birthday?” Gary clapped his hands, and he was practically skipping as he steered Isaac down the steps of the little A-frame he and Isaac’s mother had traded down for the literal day after Ruth had left for college almost twenty years ago.
“What else would we be wearing?” Isaac mumbled, glancing down at both of them. The shirt, if possible, looked even worse on Gary, folding and bunching and rippling all over, as though full of kittens they were taking out to drown.
Gary laughed.
With a honk, the Huckleberrys’ truck vanished down the block, and only then did Isaac realize he’d trapped himself. He glanced at the driveway where Ruth sat tapping her steering wheel. She beckoned impatiently.
“Fled,” he said to Gary. “Big Fork.”
“What?” His father was opening the Fiesta’s passenger door, bending to release the seat lever.
“In your car. “
His father understood, then. He straightened, grinning. His whiskers positively wiggled. “Shotgun,” he said.
“Can I ride in the trunk?”
“You could if it had one.”
“Do you still have my skateboard? Could I just hold onto the back?”
The drive to Grizzly Pool took all of six minutes, just long enough for Isaac’s legs to re-cramp. Ruth didn’t say anything, but she kept smirking in the rearview mirror. Baiting him. Finally, he rose to it.
“I thought you were all about physical wellness, Ruth. Helping people stretch out, tone up, get comfortable.”
“Wellness and comfort are totally different things, Isaac.”
“This is fun. Really. You’ve recreated the Basic Economy Fare experience without even having to form a non-preferred General Boarding line or strap in for takeoff.”
“Come on, whiner. This baby’s like a Tardis.”
“In reverse. It’s smaller on the inside.”
“You mean a Taurus?” Gary asked, and both Ruth and Isaac burst out laughing.
“Tardis,” they shouted together.
Isaac couldn’t see his father’s face. But he could so clearly imagine the wiggling mustache wiggling that he might as well have been peering through the back of his skull.
“And it travels through time,” Ruth said, pulling into the closest university lot, smirking again at Isaac, and taking the first speed bump just a tiny bit faster than she had to.
“Goddamn it. Ow.”
“See? It’s taking you back. It’s like being together in the back of our school bus.”
“Minus the bus. Or our friends. Or you, for that matter, since you’re comfortably up front. What do you when you go out with friends, Ruth? Or a date? What if you had a hot date and you wanted…How would you even…”
Ruth didn’t stop smiling, barely shifted posture as she parked, and Gary just kept looking out the window. But Isaac realized. He started to apologize, thought better of that, too, then abruptly glanced around.
“Where are all the other cars? Did you actually score privileged parking somehow?”
“Spring break, moron.”
“Wait. Hang on. We’re already here? We don’t get breakfast first?”
“You’re not feeling the Bernice’s bag at your feet? Tell me you didn’t step on the Bernice’s bag.”
“There’s Bernice’s?” Gary said, turning as Ruth shut down the car.
“Is it your birthday? Is your daughter your favorite child?”
“Dad,” said Isaac, “can you please let me out of this seat?”
“Of course there’s Bernice’s. Who do you think planned this party?”
“Me!” Isaac barked.
“Oh. I better take the Bernice’s breakfast pastries you didn’t mention in your instructions back, then.”
“Dad, please?”
Gary popped open the door but stopped momentarily to gaze down at Fin’s shirt. “Is that supposed to be me?” he said, as if he’d just noticed the figure tilting out of the wheelchair. “That’s funny.”
“Ruth,” said Isaac. “Shit. I forgot. I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”
“You’re not feeling the other bag? The plastic one, next to the Bernice’s? Who planned this party, remind me?”
Isaac sighed and smiled at his sister in the mirror. If he’d hurt her a few seconds ago, she’d forgotten or forgiven.
“Hey,” he said. “Where’s the Mess?”
“Preparing the pool.”
“Preparing?”
“Scaring any early Saturday interlopers out of the Jacuzzi.”
“Ruth, I bow to your planning genius.”
“You can let him out of the backseat now, Dad.”
The text came right as he was unfolding into the Missoula morning, which seemed to have gotten chillier since he landed. Somehow, he managed not to grab hold of the roof of the car or gasp or tremble. For one second longer, Isaac let himself enjoy standing here with his family, while an open run of hopeful days unspooled in front of him like a runway. The air here tasted like it always had on cold mornings, like the Missoula in his memory: like woodsmoke from everywhere, even though it was illegal, now.
As Ruth and his father retrieved bags from the car, Isaac furtively slid his phone from his pocket. He had already decided he wouldn’t say anything now. He’d let his dad have his 70th birthday. Even if he could get an immediate flight home, Reenie wouldn’t want him around, would be disconsolate no matter what he did. He’d break the news to everyone here before he left, if only to avoid having to call later. He poked his phone awake.
Reenie, all right. But not that text. Not yet. Maybe, just maybe, not ever again. Abruptly, here were those hopeful days again, still unspooling. He read the text once more, just to make sure. The tears in his eyes had formed before he read it the first time. There weren’t any new ones.
“Everything okay?” Ruth asked.
He held up the phone to his sister, watched her mouth the words.
Tell your dad to Stick it.
“Tell me what?” Gary asked.
“I love Reenie,” Ruth said, laughing again.
“Me, too,” said Isaac. Because he did. He really did. Even if it sometimes seemed their marriage had shrunk and narrowed, become little more than a shaky tightrope stretched between conception and annihilation, conception and annihilation. Maybe there was still somewhere—someone—beyond that point. Just ahead.
Ruth tossed him the Bernice’s bag, and they started across the lot. To their left, Mount Sentinel rose just beyond the edge of campus, brown and stubble-grassed. The switchback path up to the M looked etched into its skin like a scar. Compared even to the mountains around it, let alone the Rockies just a couple hours away, it really was more a bulge in the earth than a mountain. “The U’s very own hernia,” as the Mess put it. But it did shade toward gold in spring morning light.
“Why am I not eating Bernice’s?” Gary asked, tapping Isaac’s arm. “I thought it was my birthday.”
“I thought we’d wait,” said Ruth. “Eat after Stick. When we come out of the pool.”
Isaac snorted. “You’re worried about cramping?”
“Ha-ha.”
“Never understood waiting for things worth waiting for,” said Gary, and Isaac stopped in his tracks.
Ruth turned. She understood immediately, watched him clap his hands together once. “Confucius speaks,” she whispered.
Confucius. Or, Confuse-us, as Jim liked to put it.
“What?” said Gary.
“Just…really happy to be here, Pops,” said Isaac, kicking into motion again. “Still waking up.”
“Bernice’s would help with that.”
Ruth bumped Gary with her shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Dad. Hold your seventy year-old horses.”
Opening the bag, Isaac reached in, started withdrawing the first still-warm waxed-paper packet, and both Huckleberrys erupted from behind a nearby SUV, screaming, “Surprise!” Fumbling, Isaac almost dropped the bag, somehow did drop his phone even though he’d returned that to his pocket, and looked up to find Ruth fully five feet away, having leapt out of her own path as though avoiding a rattlesnake.
“Goddamnit,” she snapped.
“Happy birthday, Gary,” Jim shouted, flinging his arms in the air in celebration of either the occasion or of scaring Ruth.
Only Gary hadn’t jumped. He stood where he’d been standing, smiling faintly. “Thanks, guys,” he said.
“Surprise?” said Ruth. “You realize he already saw you, right? At the house? And that this isn’t a surprise party?”
“It is now.” Jim grinned.
“Why aren’t you wearing your shirt?” Fin asked Ruth, his glance darting between Isaac’s sister and the ground. All through growing up, Isaac had tried to decide which Peanuts character Fin reminded him of with his thinning hair, corpse pallor, perpetually downturned gaze. A combination of Linus (but less comfortable in his skin), Charlie (but less self-aware), and Snoopy (with less luck). Less miserable than that combination should have made him, though. Also, the designs he’d just recently given up trying to make a living from did have magic in them, sometimes.
Without comment, Ruth pulled on her shirt.
“Team Beige, ready for action,” Isaac said.
But Fin was no longer watching. He’d spotted the bag at Isaac’s feet. “Is that Bernice’s? Do we get some?”
“Oh my God, Fin,” Ruth sighed, returning to the group and grabbing the bag. “Is this a party? Were you invited?” She distributed toffee bars to everyone. “Happy now?”
“They’re still warm,” Jim said, shoving half of his in his mouth.
Instead of biting his, Gary lifted the bar to his eyes, turning it as though he were a jeweler studying a ring.
“You approve?” Ruth murmured, in that surprisingly soft voice that slipped out of her at moments Isaac had learned to anticipate but never quite predict.
“If you’re in a corn field,” Gary said…
“Get some!” Isaac immediately responded, with Ruth half a beat behind. A Confuse-us-Gary classic.
“What does that even mean?’ Ruth moaned, biting into her own bar.
It means one of us says, ‘What does that even mean’, Isaac thought. It means today, with the sun on Sentinel while wearing Fin’s t-shirts. “I have no idea,” he said.
Mouths full of toffee, they moved together toward Grizzly Pool. Isaac had meant to fall in with the Huckleberrys, find out how suddenly being roommates again—as co-divorcees, in their late 30s—as well as business partners was working out. But the brothers were in the midst of an argument that had clearly started on the ride from Gary’s house (or the moment they’d been born), and they continued that now without even pausing to chew. Gary was staring around at the campus where he’d worked for nearly forty years. He looked haggard, his gray hair coiling in a clump atop his head like a disused garden hose.
Happy to be with us? Isaac found himself wondering. Isn’t he always? Why wouldn’t he be?
Ruth, meanwhile, was inhaling her second toffee bar.
“You’re not eating reduced-car spelt or something?” he asked.
“It’s dad’s birthday. Also, it’s Bernice’s.”
“Sure. But. You still eat these?”
“It’s Bernice’s. Also, I can, sometimes. I work out. You, on the other hand...” She poked his waist again.
He considered being irritated, then remembered one of Reenie’s off-hand maxims, which always struck him as closer to actually wise or at least comprehensible than his father’s: If you have to consider it, why bother?
“It’s Bernice’s,” he said, and Ruth nodded.
Grizzly Pool wasn’t even officially open, it turned out, but there was a lifeguard at the gate to let them in, a towering, bone-white surfboard of a guy in a red Speedo and checked, unbuttoned shirt. “Happy birthday, Gary,” the guy said as they passed, tipping a cap he wasn’t wearing and wiping at the recently applied smear of sunscreen across his nose. He wasn’t as young as Isaac had thought when they approached. Was probably close to Isaac’s age. Some sort of lifeguard boss. Or more likely, given the familiarity with Isaac’s father, some sort of university official, maybe the swim team coach.
“Tony,” Gary said. “Thanks for letting us in.”
“Don’t break my pool.”
Gary laughed. “Whatever you’ve heard about games in my family--”
“--And please tell me that bear in the Jacuzzi showered before he got in.”
Momentarily, Gary looked blank, glanced at his children. Isaac had no answer. But Ruth shrugged. “Guess the Mess was on time for once.”
“Oy,” said Gary, but Ruth was already gone, headed for the women’s locker room.
While changing, they all went oddly quiet for a while. Stripping out of Fin’s shirt, Isaac wondered if he should bring his phone poolside, then decided that if the text he dreaded came, his not seeing it for half an hour wouldn’t change anything. And why would it come? Reenie’s doctor had told them it was unlikely, now. They were over the first hump, which was the major one. “Time to start painting that nursery,” Doctor Waters had said at the end of the last appointment. Of course, the nursery had been painted three pregnancies ago.
The babbling brook of Jim-and-Fin argument dwindled to a trickle. The brothers had taken lockers a row over from Gary and Isaac, but their voices ricocheted around the room.
“Shut up,” Isaac heard Jim mutter.
“Gimme,” said Fin a few seconds later.
And then Jim: “This, dumbass.”
It was as though the conversation they were having wasn’t even today’s. As though what Isaac was hearing wasn’t his friends now but his friends then, when they’d all actually been friends. The in-each-other’s-lives kind. Or else they’d turned back into that simply because he was here. The magic trick we all perform on each other, for better and worse, simply by returning to each other:
Even Gary seemed uncharacteristically pensive. He was looking down at his pale, mildly flaccid body as he slipped on his bathing suit, then around at the walls. When Isaac and Ruth were kids and their father had just landed his job with the athletic department’s legal compliance team, they’d come here at least twice a week after dinner to play in the pool. “The time will come when you get chlorine,” Gary had told his children at the time, smiling wistfully while they rubbed their red and watering eyes.
Because of the smell, Isaac realized now. That’s what that Garyism had meant.
“Dad,” he said, inhaling, holding the tang in his mouth and lungs. “I get chlorine.”
Instead of stepping forward for a hug or tearing up or just smiling, Gary cocked his head. Then he shuffled in his pool-sandals past Isaac to the end of the row and stuck his head around the corner.
“Oh, boys?” he said. “I’m King of the Bathroom.”
There was a moment of total silence. Then, as Isaac erupted into laughter, both brothers started to burble.
“No. No,” Jim said. “That’s cheating. There are rules. You have to…wait…”
“First one to say it is it, once everyone’s in the room. Those were the rules you gave me. That was the game as we made it.” Gary crossed his arms over his gently drooping chest.
“See?” Fin said, clearly to his brother. “If you hadn’t distracted us. If you weren’t arguing all the time about petty shit.”
“King,” Gary said. “Victory.” Off he walked toward the showers.
(to be concluded next week…)