Craig on my cell phone, a voice I’d last heard years before cell phones even existed. I wasn’t supposed to get a phone call from Craig in the ICU explaining that the treatment had failed, that the doctors were out of ideas. That’s not how the story was supposed to go. It always took a few days for Henry and me to readjust after he saw Craig, for me to understand why he’d keep a friend who imposed such limits, and for him to let me fully back in. Even my name was verboten, a small black hole in the corner of their friendship. That fall, my second senior fall, whenever Craig came to visit, I dropped out of sight. During the years we were together, Henry carried on his friendship with Craig entirely separately from me, never speaking to him on the phone when I was there, always visiting him without me.
He wanted Henry to break up with me, and Henry would not. When Craig returned from Europe, he was angry. Henry left for the summer, but he called me three weeks later, said he couldn’t find a job, was thinking of coming back to North Carolina could he stay on my couch for a few days until he found a place to live? He came, and, to my surprise, a week later he confessed his feelings for me.
We’d come to the end, and it felt right to both of us. He was going to Europe, then moving back to his hometown I was staying in town to wait tables. Craig and I broke up a few days after graduation.
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