Page 42 of All Our Almosts

“Some of them are embarrassing.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

He rotates to face the shelves on the adjoining wall, affording himself a bit more privacy as he admits, “Okay. Well, my first favorite when I was a kid was The Very Hungry Caterpillar…”

I give him a gentle shove. He stumbles forward a step, chuckling, then glances at me over his shoulder, but doesn’t continue his explanation until we’re both looking back at the shelves. “My favorite classic… maybe All Quiet on the Western Front, if you consider that a classic. A recent favorite… I just read The Boys in the Boat and really enjoyed it. I don’t know, I feel like a bad parent choosing their favorite kid.”

I spot a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front right in front of me and pick it up.

“If you weren’t so obviously illiterate,” I ask, opening to a dog-eared page in the middle, “would you ever want to write something?”

I’m consciously not turning to look at Andy. If I’m going to get a real answer from him, I can’t make him feel pressured or observed. And I really, really want a real answer from him.

“I don’t know what I’d write about.”

I force my voice into nonchalance as I say, “I think I do. You clearly love stories about boys growing up together, friendship, trials that bring people closer. You could write about that.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see him take a step farther away. He doesn’t say anything, but the chaos in his mind is unbearably loud, and I know exactly where his thoughts have drifted.

“Have you talked to Owen since the brewery?”

“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

I make my way to his nightstand now. The top book, with a dollar bill about 30% of the way through, is Stephen King’s It.

“I want to want to,” he says eventually, “if that makes sense.”

We’re facing opposite walls now. I can’t see him, even from the corner of my eye, and it has my other senses sharpening to a point. The sound of his voice, the pressure in the air. Everything feels intimate and combustible.

“It’s like,” he continues, “I feel guilty for not wanting to reach out to him. I wish I wanted to, but I don’t.”

“Maybe someday you will,” I reply, just above a whisper, “and I think if that day comes, he’ll be there. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Traffic whirs outside the window. A dog barks. The shelf in front of me is buckling in the middle, curved to bear the weight of old stories.

“We were close as kids, you know?” he says. “It used to be easy. Like how being with you is easy.”

I press my eyelids shut, torn between wanting to hug him and wanting to hear more.

“We just got messed up when our dad left. It was like no one knew how to talk to each other anymore. I still don’t even know why he left. My mom knows, obviously, and I swear Owen knows too, but no one ever wanted to talk to me about it.” I hear the muted bump, shh of Andy sliding a book back into place. “I know it’s stupid to talk about this stuff that happened when I was a kid. I don’t know why I brought it up.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not, though.” Suddenly his voice is firmer, almost angry. “I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want this hanging over me every time I see him. It was like 16 years ago. I just want to have a normal relationship and not feel like we’re walking on eggshells all the time. I don’t understand how we got here.”

With that, I can’t stop myself anymore. I move across the room until my arms are wrapped around his middle and my cheek is pressed between his shoulder blades.

He inhales sharply, then goes still.

“Sometimes when I feel like my emotions are running away with me,” I say into the worn cotton of his old sweatshirt, “or when I’m having a big reaction to a small thing and I don’t know why, I tell myself that it’s just one cloud in a big blue sky. Like, this thing I’m feeling is real, it’s here, but it’s not everything. I can watch it go by if I want to.”

He doesn’t respond, but I don’t need him to. I just want to stay here, listening to his heartbeat slow, and feeling his hands eventually close around mine. And I think about just how perfect this room is for him. So polished and reserved from the outside, but a hurricane of stories and emotions and mess inside.

“Anyway,” I continue, “if you ever think of something you want to say, I hope you’ll say it, in a book or otherwise. You’re so thoughtful and smart and I’m sure anything you wrote would be beautiful.”