It was the contract he’d written up the day we met.
To who it may concern. This agreement herebye states that Cal Callahan and Joseph Harper are band mates and best friends for life. Our band will be called ________ (to be determine). We will be the bosses of it and no body will ever tell us what to do or what kind of music to make. We promise to practice every day. We promise the band will always come first. Girls second. We promise never to do anything to screw up the band or our friendship. As soon as we sign this nothing will break this bond NOTHING. Forever in truth and music.
x Joseph Robert Harper x Christopher A Callahan
I sat on that couch in the Greek Theater, holding the contract, looking up at Cal and thinking, I can’t do it. I can’t.
TWENTY-TWO.
When I think about the Whitefish Community Library, the first thing that comes to mind is the color green. The tables are green, the chairs are green, the air ducts in the ceiling are green. And more often than not, Patty the librarian’s pants were green too.
I often spent Monday afternoons at the library, not only to check my e-mail but also to work on weekly writing assignments. Sid offers a free writing workshop for veterans at the community center in town—he believes in using creative writing to help men and women heal from PTSD—and even though I wasn’t a vet, or much of a writer, he’d insisted I sign up for the workshop. To process my shit.
“Do it as a favor to me,” he’d suggested, once it was clear I wasn’t leaving Montana anytime soon. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll call it your rent.”
Sid said everyone is fighting his or her own personal war, and he thought that if I put my thoughts to paper I might learn something crucial about myself and find the courage I needed to go back to California.
Every week we were given a theme and encouraged to explore that theme any way we saw fit—essays, poems, stories, you name it. There was a woman in the class who could draw cartoons really well, and she turned the themes into comic strips. Another guy was obsessed with cartography, and all of his assignments looked like treasure maps.
During REGRET week, I decided to write about the night of Cal’s show at the Greek Theater.
It was early summer in Whitefish, late in the day, but the sun was still saturating my little corner of the library, casting a bright yellow light over all the green in the room, the colors echoing the canola fields that pop up all over the Flathead Valley in June.
I’d been sitting in my usual chair, with my usual book about trees as my desk, trying to capture the details of that night before Patty the librarian, in her peach-colored cardigan and camo pants, came over and said, “Wrap it up, Mr. Harper. We’re closing in ten minutes.”
But I didn’t know how to wrap it up. Was it enough to say I was a coward and I walked away? Or did I need to include all the gory details?
When I thought about how that night unfolded, my chest was vibratile in its reminiscence, as if the cilia in my airways were clinging to the memories of that night, trying to hold them back, to sweep them away from my lungs, to keep them from reaching my heart.
October and Rae had shown up during soundcheck. I was on the platform in the middle of the theater, at the sound booth, watching Simon dialing everything in while Cal rehearsed with the UC Berkeley Jazz Choir. Cal ended all his shows with a song called “Turn the Lights Out,” the big hit from his most recent album, and he brought a local choir onstage to perform it with him every night.
I saw Wyatt escort October to the left side of the stage. She was wearing a fisherman’s sweater over jeans and green rain boots, and her hands were clinging to their opposite shoulders like she was cold. I watched her look around and then take out her phone. Seconds later I got a text from her that said Where are you? but I didn’t write back because I didn’t know what the fuck to say.
Cal was finishing up with the choir when he spotted her. He handed his guitar to Justin, rushed over, and swept October up in his arms.