One Last Thing Before I Go

beauty, but her age has settled in her cheeks below her eyes, making her look perennially exhausted. He has stayed trim, wears designer sneakers and the jeans of a high school kid, and she quietly hates him for it. Her eyes flit around the room, looking at the other women, measuring herself against them.
    One table over sit Dave and Laney Potter. Silver and Denise used to have a standing weekly movie date with them. Now they steal glances at him and whisper to each other, wondering what he’s doing here, making him wish he looked a little bit better than he does. Laney is ten years younger than Dave, and a decade ago that didn’t matter, but now he’s starting to stoop and bend, and she looks young and spry and she must work hard to banish thoughts of younger men and Dave’s ample life-insurance policy every time she sees his naked, sagging chest or he farts in bed.
    There’s a young couple feeding their messy, high-chair-bound two-year-old girl, both parents overly invested in their daughter’s meal, loudly micromanaging her, and each other, as they cast wary glances around the room, daring anyone to have a problem with the noise they’re making.
    At one of the high round tables in the center of the room sit Craig and Ross, Elmsbrook’s first openly gay couple. They were fabulous for a while, but now they’re just another quietly fading couple melting into the graying tableau.
    And off to their left, four women, all friends or acquaintances of Denise’s, watching him and Casey, holding high-level discussions about what his presence here might mean, what actions, if any, should be taken. They consult their iPhones, send urgent texts to their commanding officers, await orders. He makes deliberate eye contact with each one of them, and they shy away, feigning obliviousness, as if he’s caught them on the one day they aren’t going to mentally catalogue and discuss every other person in the place.
    He processes these and every other diner simultaneously, at genius speed. And he thinks, I used to be one of them, I used to belong here—and the thought fills him with both relief and regret. There’s a modulated numbness to these carefully executed lives, the very numbness that was instrumental in his shameful flight years earlier. And it still scares him now, the muted sameness of everyone. And yet, he wonders, what if he had stayed? What if Denise, Casey, and he were still coming here every week for Sunday brunch? Maybe he’d be looking around, feeling trapped by it all, but maybe not. Maybe it wears you down, like Stockholm syndrome, and then fills you up. Is there really any difference between being fulfilled or just thinking you are? Such questions probably matter less when you wake up next to your wife and the two of you take your beautiful daughter to brunch. He looks around Dagmar’s and understands that somewhere he missed a step; he fell behind, and never caught up again. And his life now is every bit as numb as the ones here, except for those moments when the piercing loneliness cuts like a blade right through it.
    A small commotion at the entrance; a group of teenage boys walking in like teenage boys do, announcing their arrival with self-conscious bonhomie, rolling their shoulders, swiveling their athletic torsos as they make their way to a table. Silver sees Casey’s expression suddenly fall. He follows her gaze, and somehow he can immediately discern which of the boys she’s looking at, and in his stroked-out haze of clarity, he immediately knows why.
    The boy in question looks familiar, tall and slim and fairly nondescript, your standard-issue college kid, dressed down in jeans and a vintage T-shirt, cracking up at his buddies’ jokes. He waits for the urge to throttle the kid to set in, and when it doesn’t, he is vaguely disappointed in himself.
    When the kid sees Casey, he flashes a broad smile and waves. He has no idea, Silver thinks. She hasn’t told him. She waves back, and Silver can tell she’s hoping the kid won’t come over. But he does.
    “Hey.”
    “Hey, Jeremy.”
    Jeremy Lockwood, the neighbors’ kid. That’s why he looked so familiar. Of course, the last time Silver saw him he was a scrawny prepubescent. He has a sudden mental flash of a young boy wearing a cape and a hat, doing magic tricks for them in their living room, something with metal hoops.
    “Hey, Mr. Silver.”
    “You were the magician.”
    “What?”
    “You used to do magic tricks.”
    The kid thinks