The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

“So what is it, Josh?”

“What is what?”

“Cali. Why is it that you’ve been thinking about her so much lately?”

“Her birthday would be next week, you know. Next Thursday.”

“I know. Do you think I could forget?”

“No. No, it isn’t that. I know you wouldn’t.”

“I think about her every day, you know. Really, I do. I think about how things might have been different. About how I should have been there.”

“I know, I do too.”

“So why is it bringing you down so much today? She would have wanted us to go on living a decent life, you know. She always wanted the best for us. For both of us.”

“I know that. I always have.”

“Then what is it?”

“I just can’t stop thinking about all of the things she might have had by now. She would be twenty-three, Andrew. We could have taken her out for a beer, taken some kind of crazy road trip my parents would never have approved of. She could be married by now. She could have a kid, for christ’s sake.”

“I wanted to marry her, you know. From pretty much the first time I saw her. She took my hand and led me out of my little hovel down the road and to your house, and I thought to myself, this is what family should be like. I never forgot that feeling. Every moment after that I thought of Cali as exactly what a person was supposed to feel like when they had family around. I wanted to marry her before I even knew what that meant. I wanted to marry her every day before she died, and I’ve wanted to every day since.”

Joshua’s eyes filled up with tears and he quickly splashed his face with the cold water of the watering hole. He hadn’t expected something like that to come out of Andrew’s mouth. He wasn’t the type. For him to come out and reveal so much, well, it must have been important for him. It must have been worth him opening himself up to vulnerability, something he rarely did.

“I had no idea. I knew you loved her, I just didn’t know you loved her like that. I think you guys could have been happy, too. If things had gone differently, if things had just…”

“Stop. I can’t talk like this, ok? I shouldn’t have said anything to you to begin with. I can’t do the memory lane thing. It’s just not in my blood. Can we talk about something else?”

“Please. Anything else, man.”

“Cool. How about we talk about getting the hell out of here.”

“Right, like we’re really going to do that.”

“But why not? You honestly want to just sit around here until the day we die? What the hell for?”

“Well, for starters, my family is here.”

“You think you would be the first person ever to move away from your family? People do it all the time, Josh. Most people do. It’s the normal order of things.”

“But this isn’t a normal place, is it?”

“No, it definitely isn’t, but that doesn’t mean we’re stuck here for the rest of our lives. Was it your choice to live here?”

“No, but who has a choice about that kind of thing?”

“Adults! Adults have a choice about those things. You realize that, right? People go off to college and get jobs and move all over the world, far, far away from their family home.”

“But we aren’t them. We aren’t just normal people and we never have been. I feel like you should know that better than most people. Things aren’t the same for us.”

“Who says?” Andrew said, splashing his fist angrily against the otherwise placid surface of the water, “who said we had to do everything differently just because something isn’t quite the same about our insides? I never agreed to that. Nobody even asked me.”

“Nobody ever had to. You’re different whether you want to be or not. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes not so much, but it’s just the way it is.”

“No, it’s the way they told us it had to be. They made their choices. If they’re afraid of the outside world, that’s on them. It doesn’t mean we have to be afraid as well.”

“Who said I was afraid?”

Joshua didn’t want to fight with his friend, but they had been through this exact conversation so many times he felt like his head was going to explode. It was one of those fundamental differences between the two of them, this idea of where they belonged, and it hadn’t gotten better as the two of them had aged. The older they got the more vehement Andrew’s hatred of feeling trapped became and Joshua feared it would someday culminate in an explosive confrontation after which none of them would ever be the same.

“Look, I don’t want to fight with you. It’s not even you I’m pissed at.”

“Then who is it? My family?”

Andrew gave him a dark look that told him he was treading in dangerous waters. Andrew was a volatile guy with a whole lot of opinions and not a lot he held sacred, but the things that managed to become important to him he became fiercely loyal to. The Peters family was one of those exceptions. Joshua could still remember the boy who had made the unfortunate decision to test the boundaries of impending adulthood by calling his mom a bi*ch. They had all been only sixteen at the time, but Andrew had pounced on the offender with a ferocity that was difficult to match.

That boy had wound up getting eight stitches above his left eye and nobody had ever said a bad word against any member of the Peters family since. And the friend Andrew had hit? Almost a decade later he still couldn’t look Andrew in the face. The way Andrew was looking at him now, well, it reminded him very much of the way he had looked at that friend. Because he had so little by the way of family, he took what he had very seriously.

“Sorry, I know that’s not it. I know you love my family.”

He still didn’t say anything, just clenched his jaw rhythmically and stared at the gently lapping water that rocked them like a baby in a cradle. He wasn’t someone who shrugged things off easily. He was hotheaded and impulsive and held each offense close to his heart.

“Andrew. Look, man, I said I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was over the line, ok?”

“Right. It’s fine. I guess I earned it. But no, it isn’t your family. It’s just this goddamned situation. Don’t you ever get tired of this?”