The Lake

After dinner with Gabby a few weeks back at my mom’s—scatter of photos on the fridge— recounted some of our favorite places on the farm and around town, the big lake with no dock where Matty and I fished for carp in the summer, Rupp Arena for the Louisville game around New Years, some friend’s dad’s lot on the north side where we shot cans off the hood of a rusted-over hatchback. Could have killed each other, I told Gabby, bad as we were with a rifle. Looking at her looking at the photos, I thought back to that text he sent a few months before he died. I’d been going through a rough stretch and crushed seven or eight Klonopin in a glass of orange juice and shut myself in the car, passed out before I could turn the key. You can’t have a phone in those hospitals, so I didn’t see it until I got discharged. Dan I love you. Can’t overdose on those. See you in a few days. It’d take like eighty to kill you, apparently. We met up at the lake the day I got out—we hadn’t been there together in ages—and I told him about some of the people I met, how this woman named Barbara kept calling me a prospect. I realized, as I was telling the story to Gabby, that it was the last time I saw him, there in the tall grass in his undershirt, the car door slung open, Neil Young on the radio. Overhead the Kentucky sky was clear and went on forever. I don’t really remember how we parted or where I went after, only that he wanted to stay awhile, that at some point he hugged me, tucked a cig behind his ear, and started down toward the water.