The Leftovers

was just an ordinary morning.
    Evan Balzer, he thought, the name floating up, unbidden, from the swamp of his middle-aged memory. That’s how he did it.
    Balzer was an old college friend, a quiet, watchful guy who’d lived on Kevin’s floor sophomore year. He mostly kept to himself, but spring semester he and Kevin had the same Econ lecture class; they got into the habit of studying together a couple of nights a week, and then heading out for a few beers and a plate of wings when they were finished.
    Balzer was a fun guy to hang out with—he was smart, wryly funny, full of opinions—but hard to get to know on a personal level. He talked fluently about politics and movies and music, but clammed up like a P.O.W. if anyone asked about his family or his life before college. It took months before he trusted Kevin enough to share a little about his past.
    Some people have interesting crappy childhoods, but Balzer’s was just plain crappy—a father who walked out when he was two, a mother who was a hopeless drunk but pretty enough that there was usually a man or two hanging around, though rarely for very long. Out of necessity, Balzer learned to take care of himself at an early age—if he didn’t cook or shop or do the laundry, then it probably wasn’t going to get done. Somehow he also managed to excel in school, getting good enough grades to earn a full scholarship at Rutgers, though he still had to bus tables at Bennigan’s to keep himself afloat.
    Kevin marveled at his friend’s resilience, his ability to thrive in the face of adversity. It made him realize how lucky he’d been by comparison, growing up in a stable, reasonably happy family that had more than enough love and money to go around. He’d gone through the first two decades of his life taking it for granted that everything would always be okay, that he could only fall so far before someone would catch him and set him back on his feet. Balzer had never assumed that for a minute; he knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling, that people like him couldn’t afford a moment’s weakness, a single big mistake.
    Though they remained close until graduation, Kevin never succeeded in convincing Balzer to come home with him for Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was a shame, because Balzer had broken off contact with his mother—he claimed to not even know where she was living—and never had any plans of his own for the holidays, except to spend them alone in the tiny off-campus apartment he’d rented at the beginning of junior year, hoping to save a little money by cooking his own meals.
    “Don’t worry about me,” he always told Kevin. “I’ll be fine.”
    “What are you gonna do?”
    “Nothing much. Just read, I guess. Watch TV. The usual.”
    “The usual? But it’s Christmas.”
    Balzer shrugged. “Not if I don’t want it to be.”
    On some level, Kevin admired Balzer’s stubbornness, his refusal to accept what he saw as charity, even from a good friend. But it didn’t make him feel any better about his inability to help. He’d be home, sitting at the crowded table with his big extended family, everyone talking and laughing and chowing down, when, out of nowhere, he’d be struck by a sudden, bleak vision of Balzer alone in his cell-like apartment, eating ramen noodles with the shades pulled down.
    Balzer headed off to law school right after they graduated, and he and Kevin eventually fell out of touch. Sitting in his kitchen on Christmas morning, Kevin thought it might be interesting to look him up on Facebook, find out what he’d been up to for the past twenty years. Maybe he’d be married by now, maybe a father, living the full, happy life he’d been denied in his youth, allowing himself to love and be loved in return. Maybe he’d appreciate the irony if Kevin confessed that he was now the one hiding from the holidays, employing the Balzer Method with pretty good results.
    But then the girls came down and he forgot about his old friend, because all at once it really did feel like Christmas, and they had things to do—stockings to empty and presents to unwrap. Aimee thought it would be nice to have some music, so Kevin turned the radio back on. The carols seemed fine this time, corny and familiar and somehow reassuring, the way they were supposed to be.
    There weren’t all that many presents under the tree—at least not like there used to be back when the kids were little and it took most of the morning to