Maybe the Moon

in the moment. “Have you done the Adventure yet?” I asked Callum.
    “A few hours ago.”
    “Pretty tacky, huh?”
    He just shrugged and smiled, remaining sweetly noncommittal. I wondered how much loyalty he still felt for Philip, whether he still kept up with him, whether he had come here as Philip’s guest, maybe, as an official part of the tenth-anniversary hoo-ha.
    “It’s not terrible ,” I said, backing down a little, “but it’s not an improvement on Pirates of the Caribbean.”
    “Can I join you?” he asked.
    “Of course. Sit.”
    He eased onto the lawn next to me.
    “I’m waiting for a friend,” I explained, taking in this new grown-up version of him. “She’s in the john.”
    He nodded.
    “What are the fucking chances of this?” I asked.
    “Got me.”
    “Can I say that around you now?”
    He laughed. “You always did.”
    I laid a hand on my chest to convey my horror.
    “I survived,” he said, grinning.
    “Are you here on vacation or something?”
    “Sort of. Not exactly. Well, it’s a combination.”
    I chuckled at this familiar indecision, a mature variation on the little gavotte he used to do around the candy bar rack at the roach coach.
    “I may be working,” he said brightly. “In a movie.”
    I felt the little stab in the gut I always feel when I hear of anyone else’s movie. It’s awful, I know, really petty of me, but I just can’t help it. “Hey,” I said as gamely as possible. “Good for you.”
    To receive congratulations, Callum ducked his head like a bashful prince: a quirk—or perhaps a device—I remembered from a decade earlier.
    “Who with?” I asked.
    “It’s not definite yet.”
    “Ah.” It’s with Philip , I was thinking. Some big-bucks project they’ve sworn him to secrecy about . Then I realized how silly it was to get paranoid about a kid who’d been cooling his heels in a fishing village for half his life; he was probably just too nervous to talk about it. “I thought you’d retired,” I said blithely.
    He picked at the grass while he decided what to say. “How well did you know yourself when you were eleven?”
    Pretty damn well, actually, but I thought it unfair to say so. Our circumstances were different, after all. Mine, looking back on it, had compelled me to get my shit together fast. “So it got in your blood, huh?”
    He nodded.
    “Well,” I said, “welcome back, then.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Who’s your agent?”
    He shrugged. “Still Leonard.”
    “Oh,” I said colorlessly, “that’s good.” So that little weasel had known that Callum was back in town and had willfully lied to me about it. But why? To keep me out of his hair? To insure that I didn’t pressure Callum about a role in this new movie, whatever it was? Probably. What was brutally clear, if nothing else, was that Leonard wanted me out of his hair for good.
    “He’s as tough a cookie as ever,” said Callum amiably. “You know Leonard.”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “It’s what’s required, I guess.”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Are you still in the business?”
    I tried to be as pleasant and offhanded as I knew how. “Oh, yeah.”
    Right away Callum looked so mortified that I felt a little sorry for him. “That came out wrong,” he said.
    “Hey. You’ve got no reason to know.”
    “What are you up to?”
    I told him I was making a video and left it at that. I didn’t tell him about PortaParty, since he would only make an effort to be positive and encouraging about it, and that would depress me more than anything.
    “Singing, huh?”
    “Some.”
    “I remember how well you sang.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I saw you in that horror movie,” he said.
    “Which one?”
    He widened his eyes and mugged, unable to remember the name.
    “Did I have gray shit hanging off me?”
    “That’s it,” he said.
    “ Bugaboo .”
    “Right. Bugaboo .” He laughed.
    “That came to Maine?”
    He shook his head. “Cable.”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    He picked at the grass some more. “I got your Christmas cards. Thanks.”
    “Sure.”
    “I’m sorry I never sent you one back.”
    “Hey,” I told him, shrugging it off. “You had pubic hair to grow.”
    He laughed. “Just the same.”
    “My Christmas card list is enormous,” I said, letting him know it was much less a give-and-take ritual with me than a sort of therapeutic hobby. “Lots of people don’t write back. I send cards to Phil Donahue and Tracey Ullman. Sometimes I send cards to people who aren’t even