The Night He Said No One

Brody Hale asked me to drive him home before he had finished his first beer.

That was how it worked with us. We had been friends since seventh grade, roommates for almost two years, and both of us knew exactly what kind of person he turned into after midnight with a drink in his hand. Sober Brody was the guy who helped you move a couch on a Sunday and refused gas money. Brody at one in the morning made decisions he spent the rest of the week apologizing for.

“Hold my keys,” he said, and dropped them in my palm. “Don’t give them back to me no matter what I say.”

“No matter what,” I said.

“I mean it, Nate. Kenzie’s gone till Thursday. I’m not doing anything stupid this weekend.”

We were standing in the driveway of the Lindqvists’ place, out on an acreage south of Lincoln, Nebraska. Every Memorial Day weekend, Ryan Lindqvist’s parents went to the lake and left him the house, and every Memorial Day weekend about forty of us showed up with coolers. There was a fire pit out back, a beer pong table on the patio, a long gravel drive lined with pickups, and a pond nobody ever swam in because of the snapping turtles.

I put his keys in my front pocket. I was not drinking that night. I almost never drank back then, and the honest reason was that I was too tired. I was working doubles at the concrete plant in Waverly, loading trucks at five in the morning and staying until the yard closed, and on my days off I mostly slept.

I want to be honest about where I was in my life that year, because it matters to the rest of this.

I was not doing well. I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew that I was twenty-three and tired all the time, that I ate gas station food in my truck between shifts, that my bedroom looked like a storage unit, and that I worked as much as they would let me because work was the only place my head was quiet. My mom used to call and ask if I was okay, and I would say “just busy,” and she would let it go because she wanted to.

Brody knew. He lived with me. He never said anything about it, and at the time I thought that was kindness.