My best friend James and I would trade newspaper headlines. A lively turn of phrase or double entendre that excited the ear. Houston Psychic Hit By Bus Never Saw It Coming. DuPont Factory Workers Decry Toxic Workplace. We were plying our trade on the high school paper and both aspired to higher things. In college we would occasionally email each other an enviable line. St. Paul Math Teacher Makes the Little Things Count, or New Plastic Surgery Center Raises Some Eyebrows.

When James's father got sick, he dropped out of college to help his mother with the cost of treatments. We lost touch soon after that. I found a job as a fact checker for a magazine of some repute. I moved into a too-expensive apartment in a too-big city where I survived on buttered noodles and peanut butter sandwiches. It wasn't the life of hard journalism that I imagined, but it was a life.

I seldom returned home in those early years, despite having few friends in the city. I felt, in certain important ways, I had left my adolescence behind. In the evenings I would watch second-run films at the five dollar theatre. It was where I first saw All the President's Men and Ace in the Hole. I was paying my dues. Biding my time before my number was called. Or this is what I convinced myself.

My mother phoned one morning as I was readying myself for work. She couldn't bring herself to speak at a volume any louder than a whisper. "It's James," she said.

He had fallen asleep in a snow drift near his family home. Whether drugs or alcohol were involved, she didn't tell me; I didn't ask.

The next day she forwarded an email with the calling hours. My plan was to return home the following week. But I watched the date near, and then pass, without making the promised travel arrangements.

After the service had come and gone, I started writing a letter to our hometown paper. A eulogy of a kind. Yet each draft read as aimless, artless—a clumsy retelling of our high school exploits. I eventually gave up on the letter, on trying to put what I felt into words. Years later I would give up on journalism too, move back home to teach English composition at the local community college.

One day, when I was shopping at the supermarket, I ran into James's mother. Her basket held a single cantaloupe and a bottle of Gordon's Gin. When she saw me, her expression softened—soothed or heartened by my presence. She took my hand in her own. She said what she had waited for years to say to me. "We're so proud of you, son."




.