The Night He Said No One

The Proposal

In late October, a year and a half after that party, Brody proposed to Kenzie on a dock at her family’s cabin.

I saw it the way everyone else did. A video on Instagram. Him on one knee on the gray boards, her with both hands over her mouth, her sister screaming in the background. Four hundred likes in an hour.

Three days later, I got a text from a number I still had saved under his name.

Hey. Long time. I know I’ve been a jerk. Can I buy you a beer?

I stared at it for most of my lunch break.

Then I wrote back: Yeah. Thursday.

The Brewery

We met at Thistle Creek, a brewery in an old tire shop off Highway 2. It had garage doors that rolled up in summer and picnic tables inside and a dog that belonged to the owner and wandered between people’s legs.

He was already there when I walked in. He stood up. For a second I thought he was going to hug me, and I think he thought so too, and then neither of us did.

He looked older. Not much, but some. He’d stopped drinking hard liquor, he told me, and mostly stuck to one or two beers. He said Kenzie’s dad had gotten him into an HVAC apprenticeship that paid better. He said they had looked at a house in Hickman.

He apologized for the year. He said he had been a jerk to me and that he knew it. He said, “That stuff about your room, that was me being a coward,” and I was so surprised he said that word that I didn’t say anything for a minute.

Then I said it.

“Did you ever tell her about Memorial Day?”

He looked down at the table.

He was quiet long enough that the owner’s dog came over and put its head on his knee, and he scratched its ears without looking at it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I told her.”

“When?”