The Last Favor
Back when we were in college, Cynthia and I were more than friends. We started out as friends and we ended up as friends but there was a brief period when we were more. The way I remember it, and this might not be factual because it’s been more than 20 years, it started when we found ourselves on a picnic bench one night under the pretext of a hike. It was freshman year, so these were the days of dormitories and cafeterias and parties on the weekend.
I don’t remember how the idea for the hike came up. I had borrowed a car from my parents for the week so the hike called Red Rocks, which was near campus but too far to walk to, held a special appeal because it felt like an adult activity. There was going to be a group of seven of us and we were going to leave as soon as we were all out of class but one by one everyone got caught up doing other things and bailed. After dinner, I was walking back to the dorm with Cynthia. We were talking about being disappointed that our hiking adventure had fallen through when she said we should still go—just the two of us.
“Yeah, but it’ll be dark," I said.
“So what?” She said.
Five minutes later, we were in the car, and twenty minutes later, we were sitting on the picnic table in the dark. The sex we had that night was spontaneous and awkward, we didn’t have a blanket and she got a splinter. It was also her first time, which I didn’t find out until much later. She was number three for me. My first was special and that gave me the expectation that it always would be but Annie, my number two, introduced me to the idea that sometimes it’s not. In turn, I introduced Cynthia to this idea and I still feel bad about that.
That group of friends I made freshman year were still getting together ten years after we graduated. We all met up and spent a couple nights at a cabin on a lake. Most of us were married at that point but Cynthia and I weren’t. We stayed up sitting around the fire after everyone else had gone to bed and reminisced about that night she got the splinter, that’s when I found out it had been her first time. I told her I felt badly about the way I’d acted in the weeks and months after, and she told me not to worry about it. We had sex again that night and it wasn’t awkward at all until the next morning when we were all eating pancakes. We weren’t drunk by the fire but we definitely weren’t sober. My memory is that our discussion that night avoided anything to do with morality and after, we snuck quietly back into the separate bedrooms we’d chosen on our arrival. The following day we got interupted every time we tried to get a moment alone.
That trip to the cabin was ten years ago and I hadn’t seen Cynthia since then until last week. There’s a group chat on my phone—one of us named the chat Boulder because that’s where we started—the seven of us who met freshman year and spent a weekend at a cabin together once. Months go by between messages, and then someone will post a picture of their kid doing something cute and everyone feels obliged to comment. I guess that’s how Cynthia had my number. She texted me last week to ask for a favor.
I was standing in line at the bank when her text came in and I was reading it for the second time, when the person behind me tapped my shoulder to let me know the next teller was available. I deposited my check, walked to the car and sat there for at least five minutes trying to decide what to do. I couldn’t just ignore the text, I had to say yes or no. Why does it feel like text messages come with an implied deadline? I pictured her holding her phone and waiting. Finally, I typed:
I got to the cell phone lot 30 minutes before her flight landed. In the seven days since I’d agreed to pick her up, we’d been texting each other once or twice a day. We still hadn’t talked on the phone, I think both of us were having fun letting the details about our lives slowly dribble out through the texts. There’s a luxury in being able to compose thoughtful responses. We weren’t sending each other paragraphs of text, just a few sentences here and there but we had learned of our respective divorces. Hers was 5 years in the rearview, and mine was 4. Hers was due to political differences. In her words, her ex had gone from someone who voted differently than she did, to someone she just couldn’t understand. One of her texts said
I told her that my ex and I were still aligned politically — just happier when we weren’t together.
She texted as soon as she landed
Half an hour later, I pulled the car up in front of her and popped the trunk. We met at the back of the car and our first moment together was nothing like I’d imagined it would be. I’d had plenty of time in the cell phone lot to think about it. In my imagination, we were going to hug each other just like everyone else you see at arrivals and departures. But we didn’t. Not at first. She put her hands on my shoulders. I put my hands on her shoulders and we just stood there looking at each other for I’m not sure how long. So much time had passed. I have no idea what she was thinking while we were looking at each other. My thoughts were ambiguous—just trying to take in who this person in front of me was. Eventually we came back to our surroundings and we hugged like normal people—tossed her roll-on in the trunk and got in the car.
I was concentrating on merging across two lanes of traffic as I felt her take my hand from the gear shift and turn my palm up in her lap. I could feel her fingers very lightly crossing the lines in the palm of my hand. I glanced over at her, just as she was looking up from my hand.
“You know what I was thinking on the plane?” She said.
“What?”
“I was thinking that we fucked when we were twenty, and then we fucked when we were thirty and now we’re forty.”
I grinned. “It’s our ten year thing,” I said.
She put my hand back on the gear shift and put her hands on her knees.
“But here’s the thing.” She said, “I’m not as interested in the fucking this time.”
I turned toward her so that she could see my raised eyebrows, “Really,” I said.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m interested. I want to. I just…” she trailed off and I had the idea that she was composing her next thought like a text message.
“I got to know you a little bit when we were twenty.” She said.
“But I didn’t really get to know you when we were thirty.”
“Yeah, not really.” I said.
“So, I’d really like to get to know who you are now.”
“That sounds nice.” I said.
“We don’t have a lot of time though. I have to fly out on Sunday to be back at work on Monday.”
Her parents were expecting her for dinner, or more accurately, her father was expecting her. She said her mother had days when she recognized her and days when she didn’t. She called her dad to tell him that she was going to miss dinner because she wanted to catch up with an old college friend. She had the call on speaker so I heard her dad say take your time, we’ll be here.
I took her to a local brewery because it had a big outdoor space and the weather was beautiful. Neither of us wanted a beer though. I ordered two lemonades and a soft pretzel. We were only there for a couple hours, but covered a lot of ground. We talked about how different the two people sitting there drinking lemonade were from the two who met in college. I said that there were a lot of things I would have done differently. She said that the older she got the less she believed we had control over anything.
“Still, I have regrets,” I said.
The discussion that followed was one we would not have been capable of when we were twenty.
We got to her parents house around nine and she said she wanted to introduce me to her Father. I know that a younger me would have probably been reluctant, but I jumped at the chance to meet her Dad. He was beaming when he answered the door and urged us inside.
As Cynthia released from his hug she said, “Dad, this is Steve, we went to school together, he lives in Denver.”
He took my hand and said, “Steve, I’m Mike.”
Cynthia’s Mother was seated in a chair that was visible from where I stood in the foyer. She looked up and said “Hello Steve, I remember meeting you once when I dropped off chocolate chip cookies to Cyn.”
Cynthia and her Father looked at each other incredulously.
“I remember the cookies,” I said.
Her mom’s expression changed suddenly to one of confusion and she turned to the television.
“Did the cookies really happen? Her Dad asked.
I nodded, “Yeah, they did, I didn’t remember them until just now.”
“It’s pretty rare, but sometimes she pulls something out from a long time ago,” he said.
Mike offered me a drink, but I declined. “I’d love to but I have work in the morning,” I said.
On my way out the door Cynthia’s Dad said “Steve, I want to enlist your help in getting our little girl to leave Boston and come back to the mountains.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
As I was climbing into bed my phone lit up with a text message.
I took a couple minutes to compose my response.
Over the course of the next two days, we exchanged dozens of messages and talked on the phone late at night. There was a nostalgic feeling about it all. Talking to a girl in bed at night when her parents are in the same house, it was almost like we were in high school and the intervening decades hadn’t happened. On Saturday, I asked what time I should pick her up to take her to the airport. She hadn’t asked for a ride, it was an unspoken understanding. She said her flight wasn’t until 7pm but she wanted to tell her parents it was earlier so we could spend some time together. She said she’d have breakfast with her Mom and Dad and be ready at 9:30. She told me she wanted to see my place, wanted to spend the day together, wanted to pretend that we’d been spending days together for decades.
It was raining on Sunday morning when I picked her up. I told her that I had planned to take her to Red Rocks, that we could actually do the hike instead of just sitting on the picnic table.
“It’s too bad it’s raining,” I said.
“I don’t mind the rain,” she said.
When I parked the car near the trailhead and the windshield wipers turned off everything outside of the car was a blur. I looked over at her and she shrugged her shoulders.
“Let’s get wet,” she said.
The Red Rocks Anemone Loop is little over 4 miles. We held hands almost the entire way. By the end we were soaked, the kind of soaked where your shoes squish when you step. When we got to my place we undressed each other and threw all of our clothes into the dryer. I gave her a pair of my jeans and one of my T-shirts, and I put on the same thing. We drank tea and sat at the kitchen table and talked right up until we left for the airport at 4:30.
As we approached the curb in front of departures, I said, “Your Dad wants to know when you’re moving out here.”
“He’s been asking for years,” she said.
When I got home, I mopped up the muddy floor at the back door and made myself a sandwich. I pulled out my phone because I wanted to send a text but I didn’t know what to say. I probably typed five different messages and erased them—they were all variations on when am I going to see you again?
Finally, I just typed: I’m excited like I haven’t been in years and I hit send.
I was in bed when my phone lit up with her response.
I thought about sending a reply but I couldn’t think of the right words and the simple acknowledgement of the excitement felt like it was enough.
The next morning I paused in the middle of brushing my teeth, to type
I hit send and got in the shower.
I was expecting to see her reply when I got out of the shower but there was nothing. I knew she’d gotten to bed really late, but it was 10am in Boston.
I kept glancing at my phone while I fried an egg and made toast. After I put the dishes in the sink I typed:
and hit send.
Still nothing back from Cyn when I got in the car to go to work. I was merging onto I25 when I turned the radio on and heard a story on the news about a mass shooting at Logan airport. I called her immediately but my call went to her voicemail. I listened to her say, I’m really sorry I can’t take your call.
I pulled the car into the breakdown lane put on my flashers and typed
I hit send and tried to call again, straight to voicemail.
I sat on the side of the road watching the morning commute and told myself that everything was fine. I felt disconnected and suspended—felt like I’d been pulled aside. I don’t know how long I sat there but eventually I took a deep breath and clicked on my turn signal.
It was the top story and would be for the next 24 hours, I heard it recounted twice more on the remainder of my drive to work. The event so fresh that there weren’t details yet, just: seven dead including the gunman, and always ending with the phrase, authorities are still looking for a motive.
I got to work but couldn’t do anything, obsessively looking at my phone, waiting for her to call, or text. I thought about how one in my position would find out. Would find out if the unthinkable had happened. They would notify the next of kin. Some person at a hospital or a police officer would call her dad. I thought about calling him but decided I should wait— no sense in worrying him if he hadn’t seen the news.
I walked to the bathroom because it was better than staring at my laptop. I stared at myself in the mirror and told myself that I was worrying about nothing.
“The chances are infinitesimally small,” I said out loud
When I got back to my desk I was able to read and respond to an email and get my mind off of Cynthia for a few minutes. I had a brief and relatively normal conversation with Max who works next to me.
Hours went by as I alternated between doing little work things and then looking at my phone but my phone was weirdly quiet. I hadn’t received any text messages, no calls, nothing all morning. Nothing since the text that said:
Around noon I was thinking that I should just go home—take the rest of the day—go to lunch and not come back. I was holding my phone and scrolling through the story on the New York Times, when I finally got a text. It was the Boulder group chat
