living with Rachel at the time. It was a beautiful summer day, the sun shining down all around us. Trails led through the tall grass, up to the summit.
“Listen,” he said. “I think Eve and me are going to get married.”
I stopped and looked at my old friend. My heart was full, but to be honest, it ached a little, too. Back then it seemed as if Zero had figured out how to do the thing that still eluded me, how to be a man in the world. Plus, I hated the fact that now there was someone that he loved more than me. It was the same sense of jealousy and loss I’d felt when my sister got married and moved away. I had a quick vision of me sitting alone at the shore house, or worse, standing by the ocean, the door of that summer house forever closed to me.
But what can you do when your best friend gets married? I tackled him and told him that I loved him. We fell into the grass together and rassled.
Alex watched us, a tennis ball in his mouth.
I didn’t know Eve all that well. For a while she and Zero had been beekeepers. I have a photograph of the two of them, wearing “his” and “hers” beekeepers outfits. They made honey together, Zero and Eve. Sweet tupelo honey.
* * *
After his divorce, Zero and Alex and I gathered at the shore once more.
Zero had a friend named One Armed Bandit who was supposed to join us, too. This was a guy who’d been in a motorcycle gang, then wiped out on his Harley and lost the use of his right arm. Now it hung loosely at his side.
Of the three of us, I was the only one who was neither divorced nor a paraplegic. I had my own issues, though. Those skulls had asked, How much longer do you intend to remain content? and I’d put them off by saying, A little longer.
One Armed Bandit wasn’t there when Zero and I arrived, and Zero said, Well, maybe he’s not coming. At the end of day, we walked along the ocean, from Ventnor through Margate and on into Longport. Alex led the way, his tennis ball in his mouth, as I thought about my recently lost father and his commandment to be the man. A fierce tide was coming in as we walked, and there were some stretches along the beach where the water crashed angrily against the seawall. You shall not pass, said the ocean.
Alex bounded ahead through the foam, turned back, and looked at us. You’re going to make it, he suggested somberly.
We walked past Lucy the Elephant, the six-story elephant hotel from the nineteenth century that is now a tourist attraction and curiosity. Between our freshman and sophomore years, Zero and I had worked at Lenny’s Hot Dog stand directly next to Lucy. We worked the midnight to 5:00 A.M. shift, making hot dogs, roasting hot pretzels. The big rush came at 4:00 A.M. when the disco across the street closed and all the coked-out disco dancers came up to Lenny’s window. I had worked the corn window. Zero worked the grill in the room the Lenny’s workers called the “hemina-hemina room,” because the intensity of everyone yelling while the hot dogs sizzled and the onion rings boiled in the hot fat fryer invoked the memory of a very nervous Ralph Kramden saying just this: Hemina-hemina-hemina.
Alex led us past Lucy, past the shuttered shell of Lenny’s, past the beachfront homes of Longport, until at last we came to a pier at the end of the island, where Alex sat down and dropped his ball between his paws, and Zero and I sat down and watched the sun set over the ocean. The sky turned crimson, then purple, then gray. We put our arms around each other’s backs. A cold wind blew.
Then Zero picked up the ball and threw it into the sea. Alex leapt in, disappeared beneath the waves for a moment, then climbed out of the ocean with the ball in his mouth. He came back to us, dropped the ball at our feet. Then he shook. Salt water flew in every direction.
Alex took a step back. His tail grew erect. He raised his front paw. The Gordon setter pointed at the ball. Look, he suggested, his whole attention fixated upon it. It’s here.
Later, we headed home again: past Lenny’s, past Lucy the Elephant, past the high