Good People

James sat in his car outside the bar for four minutes before going in.

Not because he was dreading it. He'd been clear with himself, over a long time, that dread was not the word. These were his friends. He had known Robbie since university. He had been at Cam's wedding. These were the people who had shown up when his father died — actually shown up, not just texted — and he did not take that lightly.

He went in.

The evening followed its usual shape. The first round went quickly and warmly. Football. A new restaurant someone had tried. Robbie's ongoing conflict with a neighbour about parking, now entering its seventh month and richly detailed.

James drank his beer. He laughed at the right moments. He asked follow-up questions he already knew the answers to.

At some point Cam asked how James was doing — the version of the question that expects fine as an answer, and James gave it fine, and they moved back to the parking dispute.

At 10:30 James said he had an early start. Handshakes, the usual warmth at the door, see you next month.

He sat in his car.

The feeling he was looking for a word for was not quite loneliness and not quite boredom and not quite regret. It was something closer to depletion — a specific tiredness that came from spending three hours as a slightly different version of himself. A version who cared more about parking disputes and less about everything that actually occupied his mind.

He thought about a question he had wanted to ask tonight, actually wanted to ask — something about whether any of them felt the gap between the life they were living and the life they had assumed they would be living by now. He had thought about how to phrase it the whole drive over.

He had not asked it. He knew the shape of what would happen if he did.

He had thought about this before, in the careful way he thought about things he wasn't going to do anything about.

The friendships were real. The history was real. The love, in the way men of his particular generation expressed love — through showing up, through the parking dispute stories, through the specific loyalty of simply being there — was real.

But the conversations. The conversations had stopped going anywhere new around 2009.

James was 41. He had changed considerably since 2009. He suspected Robbie and Cam had too, in ways that neither of them had thought to surface in this setting, in this bar, in this monthly ritual that had become load-bearing for reasons nobody had examined.

He was not going to stop coming. This was the conclusion he arrived at every time. The alternative — the deliberate withdrawal from people who had loved him well enough — felt worse than the depletion.

He started the car.

He thought: maybe next month I'll ask the question.

He thought: no I won't.

He drove home.