max

I’d forgotten how much I appreciate Max, until he walks (saunters? flounces? bounds? leaps?) back into my life. He talks about our kids’ summer camp as if it were a prison. 

“I keep telling David to look for Lena,” he says. “But I’m not sure if they’re let out into the yard at the same time.”

A new good friend is turning 40, and I’m going out with her to celebrate. Our kids are a month apart, and good friends. I am immeasurably lucky in that I love Jenny as a person. Despite over a decade in age difference, we are some of the same. Figuring out how to be parents, how to deal with daughters. We recommend each other books, meet at the pool.

But Max. Max flops down on my bed without asking. Opens drawers and cabinets and my fridge. Stops by my house with pie and comic books. Max calls, keeps calling, and forgives. Max is twenty-something. He doesn't know what he wants to do, really. He’s still a dreamer. He's lost, but he doesn't care. He's in limbo. He doesn't have a mortgage. He’s just Max. 

Max and I have never been in love with each other at the same time. Sometimes I wish this wasn't the case. But most of the time I don’t. I don’t want to have to give up another best friend. 

High school, when pops taught max and me to ride motorcycles.

I went to Asheville this weekend looking for a story. I’m not really sure what I found.

**

    “I like my heated seats, because my heat doesn’t work that well,” I say.
    “It doesn’t?” Max asks, “What’s wrong with it?”
    “I dunno,” I say, “It just makes this squeaking sound that annoys the shit out of me, so I never turn it on.”
    When we’re next in my car, Max blasts the heat, and he hears the tinny whistling that comes from the vents.
    “It’s probably just something off with the blower,” Max says, “All you need to do probably is to take out the glove box, because it should be right under here.” He starts kicking under the glove box as he sits in the passenger seat. The whistling stops.
    “There,” he says. “Fixed it.”
    “What did you do!” I exclaim.
    Max laughs, “I was just kicking it to show you where it would be, and it stopped.”
    “You fixed it!” I am beyond happy. The ridiculousness of the situation, the freedom of being away from home, no responsibility; everything about this moment is hilarious and perfect and golden.
    “How long has that been going on,” Max asks.
    “Years!” I say, emphatically hitting the steering wheel, then turning down the music in the car, to fully appreciate the silence of the fans. “It’s gone! It’s completely gone!” I could kiss this moment.
   We drop off the movie we rented. I take a suspicious reverse U-turn half in the parking lot, half in the street. I’m feeling lucky and reckless and invincible.


**

I called Max after I first found out I was pregnant. I left him a voicemail saying there was something I wanted to tell him and asking him to call me back. When he did and I told him I was pregnant, he said, “Yeah I figured with that message you left me.” I was incredulous at the time, but later I understood. As girl-who-got-pregnant-in-college, I became keeper of pregnancy related secrets. Girls who got abortions, girls who were so neurotic about getting pregnant they took pregnancy tests even if they hadn’t had sex. Once, at a party, as I was sitting large and uncomfortable on a couch, trying desperately to blend in with the decor, a woman told me the story of how she got pregnant in college too and gave the baby up for adoption, and had always regretted it. I let her put her hand on my stomach because that seemed like the right thing to do, and didn’t require me to say anything. I left quickly after that.