The Night He Said No One

The FaceTime

Kenzie Roarke had been Brody’s girlfriend for six months. She was a dental hygienist, small and loud and funny, and she laughed with her whole body. She was in Fort Collins that week helping her older sister move into a new house, and she called Brody constantly, which he complained about in the way guys complain about things they secretly like.

Around eleven, she FaceTimed him.

He was on the patio playing beer pong with Ryan against two guys from Ryan’s work. He answered with the cup in his other hand and turned the phone so she could see the table.

“Say hi, everybody.”

Everybody said hi. Kenzie said she missed him. She told him to drink some water. He told her he was being good and that I had his keys, and he turned the phone toward me and I waved like an idiot.

“Nate’s in charge of you,” she said. “Nate, you’re in charge of him.”

“I’ve got him,” I said.

I remember that. I said it out loud, to her face, on a phone screen. I’ve got him.

That was when Danielle walked up the patio steps.

Danielle

Danielle Pruett was thirty-one that summer. She had been showing up at our parties for years, always someone’s cousin or someone’s coworker, always with a seltzer in her hand and a look on her face like she knew something about you. She and Brody had been on and off since he was nineteen. Not dating. Never dating. Just a thing that happened whenever he was single, and sometimes, I suspected, whenever he wasn’t sure if he was.

Everybody knew about Danielle. Everybody also knew about Kenzie, including Danielle. Brody had brought Kenzie to Ryan’s birthday in March and Danielle had been there, and they had talked by the cooler for ten minutes about a show on Netflix.

I had talked to Danielle myself at that same birthday. Small talk, the kind you make with somebody’s cousin by a cooler. I asked her where she was living now, and she told me she’d just bought half a duplex in Bennet, on Pine Street, “the blue one across from the grain elevator, you can’t miss it.” I didn’t think about it again for three months.

So Danielle knew exactly who was on that phone.

She came up behind him, close, and leaned over his shoulder like she wanted to see the screen.

“Who are you talking to?” she said.

Brody did not even look back at her.

“No one,” he said.

Then he tilted the phone, very slightly, so the camera caught the sky and the string lights and the top of his own head, and nothing behind him.

Kenzie said, “What? I can’t hear you, babe, it’s loud.”

“I said I gotta go, it’s my shot,” Brody said. “Love you. Call you tomorrow.”

He hung up. He threw his ball. He missed.

Danielle laughed and walked back down the steps toward the fire, and Brody watched her go the way you watch somebody you have already decided about.

I was standing six feet away holding his keys.