I sat down with a close friend for lunch one afternoon and we were both very quiet at first. I ordered an omelet because I like eggs enough to eat them at any point in the day. I could eat eggs well after the sun sets and I often do.
My friend ordered a sandwich. It was thick with thin slices of roast beef and the top piece of bread lay off the pile like a lank fish. ‘Why didn’t you have it toasted?” I asked him after the waiter put both our plates on the table. “It wouldn’t look so unappetizing if you’d had it toasted.” I was disgusted for him.
“It looks fine,” he said and looked off disinterestedly around the restaurant that was badly lit and smelled like melting wax; there were two candles on every table. It was a basement restaurant; when we walked in we had to take a short set of stairs down and hardly any light from outside made its way in. It was his favorite, he took me there often, and I would begrudgingly go. It was an ok restaurant, the food wasn’t the worst, but it was by no means my favorite. He liked the way they made his roast beef sandwich, like they had hoards of it in the back and they couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.
“Why aren’t you eating it?” I slapped my omelet with the flat part of my butter knife and it made a soft smacking noise.
My friend looked to me. There was no annoyance on his face. There was no emotion at all. He picked up the sandwich, still looking at me, and took a big bite. He chewed it and swallowed, put it back on the plate. “I’ll be back,” he said and walked toward the bathroom.
I watched him walk away. I picked at the roast beef on his plate and tasted a piece that looked particularly good. It was dry and chewy. How could he have taken a bite so easily, I wondered. And then my phone began to vibrate in my pocket. It was a text message.
How’s it goin?
Eh, I hate this place
Are you talkin?
He said sum words
Is he upset?
I think so, he’s not realy eatn the roast beef
I heard him at his chair then and quickly closed my phone.
“You’re always on that phone.” I looked at him not looking at me, not looking at his sandwich, not looking at anything. He was seeing because his eyes were open but I could tell that all he wanted to do was sit somewhere in the dark and not know that anything around him was happening.
I finally picked up my fork and started into the omelet. It was cold and tasteless.
“It was Taylor.” I chewed a bite until it was a watery mush in my mouth and I felt only my teeth meeting and parting. I swallowed the mush. “He says ‘hi.’
He nodded because he knew that I was looking at him. He picked up his sandwich again and took a bite. It took him a while to swallow and in that time I worked through half the omelet.
Time seemed to slow down and I was growing restless in the dark restaurant. The wax smell had long become annoying and I ached to leave. My friend looked as though the seat he sat in was holding him there and would for hours.
“I know you want to go,” he said. “You’re free to go.”
“I don’t want to go,” I lied. “I want to be here with you.” I said it softly because it sounded sincere that way.
“James,” he said, “you should just go. I know you hate this place.”
“I haven’t even finished my omelet. And if I leave now you’ll have to pay for it.” I laughed because it was supposed to be funny. He curled his bottom lip into his mouth and bit it. I stopped laughing. He inhaled loudly through his nose and when he exhaled his jaw jutted out and his mouth opened. “I want to pay for it, for everything. Please.” I said that softly too but this time because I was afraid to talk louder.
My friend stood and I stood too because I was sure he would storm out. “Henry,” I was still talking very softly, “don’t go please. Finish the sandwich at least.”
“I’m gona go the bathroom again. I’ll be back. I’ll be back.”
I sat down again and watched him walk to the back of the restaurant toward the bathroom. I pulled out my phone.
Not goin wel
Shit is still ruff, hes upset
Yea
Tell him I luv him, I want to see him latr
Ok
I sighed and put my phone in my pocket. The lunch was not going well and my friend would leave soon. I knew that he wanted to sit in this dark restaurant and not be bothered. He did that very often because so few people came here and the only person that talked to him was the waiter and he would leave him alone when he wanted him to. I would not because I was worried about him and needed to know that he knew there were people who cared about him, who would miss him if he were not around anymore. He was one of my best friends.
My friend came back to the table and I saw that his shirt was wet around the collar like he had splashed water in his face. There were drops of water still on his neck and one drop held fast to his ear lobe. I noticed for the first time that he had bags under his eyes and looked very tired. He was only four years older than me but looked weighed down by decades of stress. The lines in his dark face were very pronounced in the candle light. I imagined that the water rolled down his face like water over a fall, hitting crevices of rock and splaying out in chaotic mists.
“Henry, you know I love you right?” He only sighed and rolled his ancient eyes. “I do, I worry about you man. And Taylor and Mama, Daddy. We’re all worried.”
“James, I know how to take care of myself. You’re my little brother, remember?”
Of course I remembered. I had looked up to my friend my entire life and when he started his first job out of college at an insurance company I was so proud of him, happy like I had gotten the job myself. It was amazing to watch him climb the ladder and before I knew it, my friend was making more money in a year than both my parents had in their entire working lives.
“I know.” I got quiet again.
He was laid off a year before and his whole pension had evaporated before his eyes. The mortgage on his house ate away his savings and his wife took his son and moved in with her parents when he started to drink too much.
“I just worry is all, since April.”
In April, my friend took his most expensive tie and strung himself up on the ceiling fan in his living room. I knew it was his most expensive tie because I had bought it for him the day he got his own office. I asked his wife about how much to spend and she told me that the most expensive one he’d had cost seventy dollars. I spent an entire afternoon in the mall looking for something over a hundred dollars and left that day having spent a hundred seventy. I found him that April day with the striped tie stretched almost to its limit and him dangling there.
“Yea, yea.”
“You know we all love you?”
“I’m glad somebody does,” my friend said as softly as I had been talking. He was deflated and moved to stand. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills that he let roll onto the table.
“I told you I got it, bro. Let me take care…” He was already standing and leaving. “Henry! Taylor wants to see you later. You should stop by his place!”
“Got shit to do.” He called back as he left the dark restaurant.
I stayed and tried to finish the omelet but ended up leaving before it was done. When I walked outside it was much brighter than I expected, I had completely forgotten the time of day sitting underground. I went to my parent’s house and sat with my father. I told him about lunch with our friend and he sighed.
“He’ll be alright, James. He’s just going through some things.”
“Yea, but I don’t want him to do something stupid. He lost everything Daddy. Everything.”
“We are in hard times. Some people get hit harder than they can handle.”
My friend was the strongest man I knew so I figured that what hit him must have been debilitating. I wanted to be his crutch but he wouldn’t let me. I left my parents’ house well after sunset and went back to my place. I lived in a small apartment across town and it took me about twenty minutes to drive there. My friends house was less than five minutes away. I would check on him tomorrow but decided to make a call before I went to bed.
“Hey Taylor, did Henry call you or anything?”
“Nope. I tried to call him but his cell phone wasn’t working. And he didn’t pick up the house phone. Daddy told me you dropped by today. Did you go by Henry’s house too?”
“I didn’t,” but I wish that I had.
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