One Last Thing Before I Go

that, once again, he’s spoken out loud. “But I try not to, because then I get angry at you.”
    He rolls over and pulls himself to his feet, an act that feels like nothing less than an Olympic event, the blood rushing to his face with a dizzying heat that makes him feel fat and old. “We are going to brunch.”
    “At Dagmar’s,” Casey says, popping upright like she’s attached to wires.
    “Shit, really?”
    She gives him a sharp look, one that conveys the many years of shit she is currently setting aside in order to tolerate his presence.
    “Dagmar’s it is,” he says, leaning up against the wall.
    “You OK?” she says, raising her eyebrows. “You’re teetering.”
    He nods and steadies himself against the wall. “Aren’t we all,” he says.

CHAPTER 26
    O ne of two things happens to restaurants in the suburbs: they go out of business, or they remain exactly the same. Dagmar’s has been fortunate enough to remain in the latter category. It’s one of those suburban nooks with unfinished wooden furniture and the condescendingly healthy menu scrawled like a colorful manifesto across three large blackboards above the counter. The words “organic” and “vegan” are sprinkled generously throughout in bright green. This enables the kids behind the counter to feel even more superior in their checkered shirts and ironic tattoos, and it enables the neighborhood patrons to feel good about paying three bucks for a shot glass of orange juice, so everybody wins.
    Dagmar’s also happens to be situated in North Point, where Casey and Denise live, and where Silver once lived with them, during that brief hiccup of time when he had his shit together. When he and Denise first split up, he would come every Sunday to have brunch here with Casey, but after a few months of hostile stares from Denise’s girlfriends and indifference from their necessarily catatonic husbands, the men he had once considered his friends, it became clear that Denise was the people’s champion, and he stopped coming. So the last time he was here was actually with Casey, but it was probably six or seven years ago.
    The kid behind the counter greets Casey by name. She says hi back. Both of his earlobes are deformed by large-gauge hoops, the kind that stretch out the lobe to form a hole the size of a quarter. One day he will want to have normal earlobes again, and he’ll be shit out of luck.
    “You’ll be sorry when you’re older,” Silver tells him, pointing to his ears.
    “Shut up, Silver!” Casey says, scandalized.
    The kid grins and shrugs. “Like when I’m your age? Odds are I’ll be dead long before that.”
    Silver smiles. “Well played.” He likes this kid. Sure he’s a fuck-up—no one properly loved would mutilate himself like that—but who is he to judge? In ten years he might be a fantastic husband and father with fucked-up ears. He grows his hair long, and he’s good to go.
    Silver turns to Casey. “What are you having?”
    She doesn’t consult the chalkboard menu at all. “I can’t decide between the pancakes and the waffles, so I’ll have both. Also a tomato-cheddar omelet with hash browns, two popovers, a large orange juice, and a coffee.” She smiles wickedly at Silver, daring him.
    “I’ll have what she’s having,” he says.
    * * *
    They end up needing a second table for all of the food. The other diners cast sidelong glances at them, but they go about their feast with reckless abandon, their agenda hazy at best, but no less important. They laugh too loud, eat food off the other’s plate, conduct entire conversations with dabs of whipped cream poised on the tips of their noses. And beneath it all, the sense that they are trying much too hard to prove something, to themselves and to each other, something for which they have no compelling evidence. Or else they are trying in vain to manufacture a memory, something they will be able to point to in the future and say, “Whatever else, we had that.”
    The restaurant is filled, and as Casey and Silver play chess with the orgy of food laid out before them, something happens. The room slows down, quiets a little, like the hush before a speech, but no one seems to notice it except Silver. It seems, even as he is fully engaged with Casey, he is able to take note of everyone in the room and, in some superficial but spectacularly clear way, understand them.
    The couple at the far table against the wall is ten years younger than him. She was once a