One Last Thing Before I Go

twisted with a grief so raw that Silver has to look away.
    * * *
    He loved a girl named Megan Donahue. She had a tiny waist, feline eyes, and was a passionate vegetarian. They wrote each other long love letters, citing proofs from the lyrics of lesser-known rock bands, which they would slip into each other’s lockers. When she wore white turtleneck sweaters, the fuzzy kind, she looked like Christmas morning. They were seventeen, juniors in high school, both virgins, and she was the first person he said “I love you” to. Actually, what he said was, “I love you, too,” but that’s just semantics. They were doomed by the endocrine system. His hormones, which were doing all of the heavy lifting back then, would not be denied. She wanted to stay a virgin every bit as much as he didn’t. Or maybe he just wanted to enjoy a burger now and then without being made to feel like a murderer.

CHAPTER 11
    L ily is wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt today, with shadows where the letters of her alma mater used to be ironed on. It’s the kind of sweatshirt she would have worn endlessly in those first years after college—maybe it belonged to a former boyfriend and for a while had retained his scent. Silver imagines her back then, sitting in a small apartment, listening to music that brought her back, and absently pulling at the ironed-on letters until they came loose and had to be pulled off. There’s a metaphor in there, he thinks. Maybe even a song. But it’s been years since he wrote a song, and he knows that his creative impulses have been worn down to just that, impulses. The idea of actually writing something now is so alien to him that he can’t remember what it even felt like when he could.
    Lily sings songs about birds and bugs and rain and cars and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. When the little kids sitting around her on the floor sing along, she closes her eyes and smiles, banging the strings of her guitar with the flat of her hand to generate percussion. When she hits the high notes, they buzz like static in his ear, his tinnitus deeply sensitive to the upper registers. This gig can’t pay very much at all, Silver thinks, watching, as always, from a safe distance. She either does it because she enjoys working with kids, or because she’s that broke, and while both scenarios are appealing to him, he hopes it’s the latter, because he doesn’t do well with nurturers. He could not say what it is he finds attractive about her—maybe it’s her coltish grace and her open expression, or maybe it’s the way her voice emanates from her, clear, thin, and waveringly melodic; he hears a sweetness in it that he thinks reflects her personality.
    All of which is rendered completely moot by his utter inability to so much as make eye contact with her. He watches as she packs up her guitar, collects her check from one of the two hyperathletic lesbians who own the bookstore, and heads for the door. She will walk right past him, and their eyes will meet briefly, as always, before she dismisses him in much the same way he probably appears to dismiss her.
    He has always been somewhat shy when it comes to approaching women. Alcohol helps, but they don’t tend to serve it in bookstores, and he doesn’t think a flask at three in the afternoon would do much to enhance whatever appeal he might still possess. He watches Lily stopping to thumb through a magazine on her way out, and he cannot come up with a thing to say, a single conversational gambit, that won’t feel like he is coming on to her. To approach a strange woman is to reveal your intentions before the first word has been spoken, and he has always found such transparency to be paralyzing.
    He has been alone for so long now. He has nothing to lose, and everything to gain. She might be lonely too. He’s pretty sure she is, he can hear it in her singing. Maybe she’d welcome the conversation, the possibility of possibility. Maybe it would change both of their lives. The risk of a quick rejection should be insignificant in the face of all of that. But somehow, it isn’t. And as he watches her leave the bookstore, the bells on the door ringing as it swings shut, he decides it’s simply another facet of the same general malaise that has informed the countless wrong turns that have shaped his life.

CHAPTER 12
    C asey’s Infiniti is white, with dark seats that fill the air with the smell of new leather. The drums and bass coming from her stereo are as smooth as the