One Last Thing Before I Go

coach?”
    “I guess I do, yeah.”
    Silver shakes his head. He is both moved and very tired. The wine has worked its way into his system, and he can feel his eyes closing. He wonders if he might die, right here, next to his brother at the pond. There’s something about that, a symmetry that makes sense. But even as he thinks it, Silver knows there’s nothing symmetrical about death. Just ask Solomon Corey.
    “Well,” Chuck says. “For what it’s worth, fuck-up or not, I still find myself wishing I could be like you.”
    “Well, like I said,” Silver says. “You were never very smart.”

CHAPTER 32
    L ater, he walks Denise home. Casey left while he was out with Chuck—she is stopping by the Lockwoods’ for a bon voyage party for Jeremy, who is heading off to his semester abroad with no idea of the mess he’s leaving behind. Silver is a bit confused about Casey’s motives for attending the party, but he has never really understood women, and now that his daughter has become one, she is every bit as much of a mystery to him as the rest of them.
    Denise and Silver walk side by side in companionable silence. She’s on his left, so he can’t actually see her—his peripheral vision is still compromised—but her arm brushing lightly against his orients him. He can remember nights like this when they were first married, walking home from his parents’ house on Friday night, anticipating the quiet warmth of their little house. He realizes that they will pass that old house on the way to her new one, and the thought fills him with a quiet dread.
    It’s a small house, a Cape Cod with a large family room off the kitchen that was added sometime in the ’70s. Once Denise and Casey had moved out, the house became Silver’s, until the bank foreclosed on it. Shortly after that, in a drunken pique, Silver had driven his car up the front lawn and through the living-room wall. The criminal charges were eventually dropped, but his car was totaled and he hasn’t owned one since.
    They reach the corner of their old block, and Denise says, “You want to walk a different way?”
    Silver looks down the block. For a while after the divorce, after he had played a gig and loaded his drums into the old station wagon he’d borrowed from his mother, he would find himself driving to the house on autopilot, only remembering as he turned the corner that he didn’t live there anymore. The life you build feels like the entire world, and when it’s suddenly gone, the world doesn’t make sense for a while. Or, in his case, ever again.
    “No,” Silver says. “It’s fine.”
    Something in him wants to walk past the house with her. He doesn’t know if that’s because it might heal something or if it’s just an extension of the masochistic streak he’s cultivated over the years, the need to punish himself for all Denise – and Casey-related matters.
    The house is the fifth one on the right. As they walk down the sidewalk, he feels the dread grow in him. He reaches over and takes her hand, feels her fingers wrap themselves around his, anchoring him to the moment. And then they are there, standing in front of the small, white house. It looks exactly the same. He thinks of all the years he walked up those three stairs and through the front door without a second thought, never imagining he’d one day be standing on the sidewalk like this with Denise, the house now nothing more than a monument to all they’ve lost. This small, dark house that once contained them, its quiet television flickering through the gossamer shades like the last faint sparks of a dying fire.
    “It was all my fault,” he says.
    “We were young.”
    “Not that young.”
    There is movement inside. A man crossing a room lit by the large flat-screen television. You catch glimpses of them now in every house you pass, large LCD screens humming away, everyone plugged into the same hypnotic glow. Maybe if they’d had one back then, he’d have been less restless. Maybe he would have succumbed.
    Denise looks at him and there’s kindness in her eyes and also something else, something familiar that sets the pace of his heart a bit faster.
    “Listen,” he says.
    Denise turns her body, so she is now standing directly in front of him, shaking her head with a sad smile as she reaches for him. He wishes like anything that they could go back to that wedding where they met, and start it all over again. He knows what to do now. He knows the stakes.
    “I wish