Catching Up with Old Friends

I hugged myself, hoping in vain to stay warm as Stanley knocked on the door. As he waited, facing the door, I turned around and walked to the edge of the porch and leaned against a beam, breathing out puffs of snowy clouds. I scanned the street, looking at the rows of red brick bungalows, nearly identical to each other. All of the houses had stoops that led up to a porch. Lots of the houses had planters shaped like white geese, but they were empty because of the cold.

“Is he in?” I asked pushing myself off the beam and mincing my way to the door, so cold that my legs wouldn’t walk properly. Stanley turned to me, his nose red and his eyes blurry with tears, and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I rang the doorbell, but no one is answering.”

“Are you sure he still lives here. I mean, it’s been, like 10 years, he probably moved out…we don’t even know if his folks live here anymore.”

“I looked at his Facebook and I swear that I saw that plastic Mother Mary,” Stanley said, gesturing at the front yard, “in the background of a recent picture.”

I briefly looked at the front yard and turned back to Stanley, “Wait, you guys know each other on Facebook?” I raised my arms in frustration. “Why can’t we do this on Facebook, then?”

“No,” Stanley said, walking toward me. “That’s not how any of this works. I need to make amends and the right way to do this is face-to-face.” He stomped his foot. “I really was hoping he’d be here, I wanted to get this done today.”

“Well, do we leave a note?”

Stanley thought about it for a minute, looked back at the door and turned back to me and shook his head, “No, we should wait and see if he’ll come back. Let’s go wait in the car.”

Stanley slowly made his way down the stoop, and I followed unsteadily, trying to figure out how to convince him that waiting in a car in the subzero temperatures wasn’t a great idea. But I also wanted to be supportive….well, I wanted to appear supportive so I knew that I couldn’t be too blunt. “Maybe,” I said as we walked to the car, “Maybe we can go home, and then come back another day?”

“If we do that,” Stanley said over his shoulder, “we might come back on a day that he’s not in…Since we’re here already we might as well stay a bit and see if he comes back.”

“How long is ‘a bit’?”

We got to the car and as Stanley opened the driver’s seat, he shrugged, “I don’t know, a couple hours?”

I bundled into the passenger seat and reached into the backseat and grabbed a thick fleece blanket and covered myself. The inside of the car wasn’t that much warmer than the outside but at least we didn’t get our face whipped by the wind. We sat in silence for a few moments. Stanley peered outside of the window looking at the house we just left.

“Do you think Tom will remember why you’re apologizing to him in the first place? After all, it’s been so long.”

“Part of the program is making amends. I treated Tom very badly – I did him wrong.”

I kept from rolling my eyes, “Stanley, you dated his girlfriend, that’s all…That’s normal, people do that in high school.”

“Yeah, but they were going to get married.”

“They were not going to get married,” I answered emphatically. I interrupted him, “Yeah, yeah, he gave her a ring and whatnot, but I mean, c’mon. He proposed to her under the bleachers at homecoming. That’s stupid. It’s obvious that they weren’t going to last.”

Stan grabbed my arm and shook me roughly, “Look, I think that’s him!” We peered through the frost of the windshield as a coated person walked stiffly over the slippery concrete towards the house. Even though he was walking in our direction, we were just far enough, and his face was covered up, that we couldn’t tell if it was him, but he was going to the house we were watching.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for our project, I held my breath as we waited for him to turn into the stoop we had just climbed down, but the figure kept walking. We let out a sigh and settled back. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if we didn’t break up before the year was over.”

I shrugged. “High school romances don’t usually last.”

“He was really devastated when Tammy dumped him. Remember, he had to leave school for a semester.”

I stifled a scoff. I always thought Tom’s love-fueled sabbatical was a little much. I didn’t say anything because Stanley was taking this very seriously and I didn’t want him to think I thought his recovery was silly. “Okay,” I said, “I think it’s a good thing for you to talk this over with Tom. Who knows, maybe you guys could become good friends over this.” I felt stupid lying like this, even worse when Stanley turned to me and asked, “Really? You think so?”

“Let’s just wait for Tom,” I said eventually.

We sat in silence, I shivered despite being cocooned with the thick blanket. I was so glad I bought it at the gas station a couple weeks earlier. Stanley and I hang out a lot and sometimes he’s a bit tight when it comes to using the heater in his car, which is when I pull the fleece to cover myself. Instead of being offended, he welcomed this idea and even laundered the blanket after I bought it.

While Stanley was typing away at his phone, I happened to look up from my phone and saw another man’s figure walking toward us. I nudged Stanley because the person slowed at our house. Yes, he turned and started walking up the walkway towards the stoop.

“That’s him,” Stanley said, “I know it.” He started to gather himself, he pushed his hands into his thick gloves and smashed his knit cap over his head. I started to untangle myself from the blanket when he stopped me. “No, that’s okay,” he said. “I want to do this myself.” I asked if he was sure and he nodded. “I think so. I also think it’d be weird if both of us walked up to him.”

Stanley opened the door to the car, letting in a blast of arctic air which made me open my eyes wide in shock. When he slammed the door, I shuddered some more, drew my legs close to my body, contorting my body into a fetal position as I waited for Stanley to apologize to a guy he wronged in high school ten years ago.

I admired Stanley for doing this – I know this isn’t easy, but I wondered what was the point of saying sorry to someone he wronged so long ago. Stanley apologized to me for being a mild bully during high school, making fun of me being gay, which I thought was strange because when we discovered each other in our freshman college psych class, we started to talk and became fast friends then. Even though he didn’t formally apologize, I didn’t think it was necessary.

As I waited for Stanley, I thought back to our time in college. It was great because we became best friends, but I also felt guilty because I should’ve seen the signs that early on that things weren’t great with Stanley. I just assumed back then that we were in college and that’s just what college dudes did. Drink. I didn’t like to think too much about the times I just sort of turned and looked the other way when Stanley would drag himself to class, hungover and stinking of sink and old beer. Sometimes he would be wearing a disheveled remnant of the clothes he wore the night before. I never tried to keep up with him because the one time I did, I was hungover for a whole weekend, nursing a headache so acute and painful, there were moments when I wished to slip into a coma.

So even though I wasn’t responsible for Stanley’s problems, I didn’t exactly do much to help, either. I realized that my low-key guilt was prompting me to help him in this weird journey of amends and apologies. Tom was the stranger, more obscure person we tracked down, but he wasn’t the first. There were old girlfriends – including Tammy – who we looked up, a couple distant relatives he wasn’t nice to, I got to watch him cry in his stepbrother’s arms as the two men reconciled after years of estrangement (it was very awkward as I sat there in between the two of them as they dissolved into manly cries). I didn’t understand the whole point of this exercise but I vowed to do better by my friend this time.

I peered out, jockeying by position a bit – not easy when you’re swaddled like a fleece burrito – so that I could see the house and see what was happening. When I got a decent vantage point, I saw that the porch was empty. Stanley must be inside. “Huh” I said out loud.

The cold was making me punchy and I needed to pee. I wasn’t sure how long this reunion would be. I also was worried that Tom wouldn’t be as sanguine or forgiving as I guessed he would. I downplayed Tom’s depression for Stanley’s benefit, but I remember it was bad. He suddenly stopped going to class. He didn’t go to football practice – there was a rumor that the coach tried to go to Tom’s house to get him to come back. I was told it was a Say Anything kind of thing, where, frustrated, the coach, was shouting at Tom’s bedroom window (I don’t think he was blasting Peter Gabriel out of a boombox). When Tom came back he gained some weight, grew his hair out, and stopped talking to everyone. Stanley wasn’t the most aware person in senior year, so he didn’t catch just how bad Tom was, which is good because he’d feel awful. Since I wasn’t part of Tom’s clique, and he would never confide in me, I didn’t know what happened, but a few months later, I saw that Tom had cleaned himself up, and was doing okay. He never went back to the football team, but he wandered the hallways again with his friends and I think I remembered hearing that he was doing well in the bowling club.

While sitting, I wondered about all the people I would have to apologize to if I had to do this making amends thing. Like thumbing through a file cabinet, I mentally flipped through a series of dossiers of people I wronged. Mostly it was guys who I either ghosted or dumped. I cringed when remembering Gerald, a nice guy who had the unfortunate habit of wearing leather jackets in the Chicago summers which meant that whenever he came near me, it smelled like a leather tannery, and after four dates, I disappeared. He left a series of voicemails, each increasingly aware of his being ghosted. I shifted uncomfortably thinking about Gerald. I should’ve just told him about the leather jackets. I thought about Brian, another guy I ghosted, again for a shallow reason – he was older and spent our first date talking about his knee replacement surgery. Instead of giving him a second chance, or even letting him know that I wasn’t interested, I ghosted him, reducing him to leaving me bewildered voicemails wondering what he did wrong.

Then there was Paul. “Oh, god, Paul,” I muttered out loud, remembering how I strung him along for weeks, not knowing how to break it off with him like an adult. Even though we made plans for Valentine’s Day, I ghosted him, not responding to confirm our date. I still don’t know if he wasn’t waiting for me that evening at the Thai restaurant he suggested for the evening.

I was started to really hate myself, but my self-loathing party was interrupted by the crunchy footsteps coming closer to the car. Stanley let himself in. He got in, rubbing and hugging himself to get the blood circulating again. He turned to me, “That was Tom,” he said.

“And?”

“And we talked. You should see the inside of the house. His mom likes giraffes, so there are giraffes everywhere. Stuffed giraffes. Porcelain giraffes. Giraffe posters.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he was a little confused about seeing me. And to be honest, he wasn’t thrilled with seeing me. Apparently he took the breakup far worse that you thought. It was bad. But he’s doing okay.”

“If he’s doing so okay, why’s he still at home?”

“Oh, he doesn’t live in Chicago anymore. He lives in New Orleans, but he’s visiting his parents, his mom just had heart surgery. Anyways, he said that at the time, he hated me and Tammy. He said he ate a lot, quit football, even losing his chance at possibly getting a scholarship. But he said he got over it, and he thanked me for coming over and saying thank you.”

“That was nice of him.”

“It was,” Stanley agreed. He kept quiet, chewing his cheek, which I knew means he was mulling things over.

“What?”

“Well,” he said, hesitantly. “I mean, I think it’s great and all that he forgave me, but I’m not so sure this is going to count for my amends.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because Tom forgave me, but I’m not sure if he really forgave me or he forgave me because he had to.”

“Well, why would Tom have to forgive you?”

“It’s part of his job?”

“It’s part of his job? To forgive you? I don’t get it.”

“He’s a priest,” Stanley said, as he turned the key and started up the car. “He’s a priest. The last thing he said as I left was, ‘I forgive you my son’.”