in spite of his accent and his glasses and his atrocious rugby skills, simply because he was my friend. Leon had spent school as the kind of kid who got regular wedgies, and while Susanna (in our sister school, next door) hadn’t exactly been a reject, she and her friends had been a bunch of generally ignored Lisa Simpson types who did stuff like selling handmade candles to raise money for homelessness or Tibet or something; if the two of them got included in anything remotely cool, it was because of me. Even once we grew up, Leon had dropped out of college after a year and ricocheted around the world picking some crop or other in Australia and living in a squat in Vienna and never holding on to a job or a boyfriend for longer than a year or two, and Susanna had turned into Mrs. Stay-at-Home Mummy and spent her time pureeing green beans or whatever, while I had got straight on track for a snazzy career and pretty much the perfect life. It honestly wasn’t that I looked down on them, ever—I loved them, I wanted them to have every good thing in the world—just that I was aware, in the back of my mind, that if they were to compare their lives with mine, mine would come out on top.
But now: they ran up the front steps two at a time, juggled multiple threads of conversation without missing a beat; Leon told scurrilous stories about nights out with bands I had actually heard of, Susanna had just dusted off her degree and got into a prestigious master’s program on social policy and was sparking with excitement about it; and then there was me. I was functioning fine, give or take, within my new miniature simplified world, but I knew perfectly well there was no chance I could handle even a single day in my old job or my old life. I envied them, hard and shamefully, and it felt against the natural order of things. It made it impossible for me to see their foibles and flaws with the old warm, amused tolerance. Stuff that a few months ago would have had me grinning, shaking my head, set my teeth on edge to the point where I could barely keep back a roar of rage. It was always a relief when they left, and Melissa and Hugo and I could slip back into our gentle, crepuscular world of rustling pages and card games and hot cocoa at bedtime, of delicate unspoken agreements and accommodations; of—and I only see it now, really, for the rare and inexpressibly precious thing it was—mutual, grave, tender and careful kindness.
* * *
Leon was right, though: Hugo was getting worse. It was subtle enough that most of the time we could almost convince ourselves it wasn’t happening. A sudden wild buckle of his leg, me or Melissa grabbing at his elbow, oops! mind the rug! but it was happening more and more often and there wasn’t always a convenient rug to blame. The dazed, tractionless gaze skidding around the room sometimes when his head came up from his work, What . . . ? what time is it? and then his eyes lighting on me with such a total lack of recognition that it took a lot not to back right out the door, to say instead Hey, Uncle Hugo, it’s almost three, want me to make the tea? and he would blink at me, coming back into his eyes little by little, and finally smile, Yes, I think we’ve earned it, don’t you? The occasional snap of irritability that verged on anger, out of nowhere—No, I don’t want more vegetables, I’m perfectly capable of serving myself, don’t rush me! The drag at one corner of his mouth, subtle enough to look like a wry deprecating quirk of expression, except that it didn’t go away.
One evening he fell. We were in the middle of making dinner—empanadas, I can still smell the rich greasy mix of chorizo and onion suddenly hitting the back of my throat. We had Chopin waltzes playing, Hugo had gone upstairs to the toilet and Melissa and I were rolling out dough on the countertop and debating how big the disks should be, when we heard a confused scuffle, a thick terrible thud, a tumble and clatter; and then silence.
We were out of the kitchen and calling Hugo’s name before my mind had time to understand what I