took two sips and forgot about his.
“Seriously. How long has it been?” he asked, refilling my glass.
“Fourteen years.”
“Tell him,” he said to October. “Tell him how much I talk about him. I can’t tell a story from my childhood that doesn’t involve you.”
October nodded. “He talks about you all the time.” All the sparks were gone from her voice. She looked beside herself. “Blood Brothers.”
“Blood Brothers!” Cal shouted. “See! She knows!”
I wasn’t ready to talk about Blood Brothers either. I drank my second glass of champagne, even though I don’t like champagne, and it provided me with the dizzying kind of kick in the ass I needed to ask a question I was suddenly obsessed with knowing the answer to.
“How the fuck did you two meet?” I asked with too much gravity, glancing back and forth between Cal and October. “How long have you been together?”
“You want to tell it?” Cal asked October.
She shook her head and stared at the table. Now it was she who couldn’t look at me. The question had clearly unnerved her, and I felt bad about that. But I desperately needed some context to their relationship.
“She bought this property from me,” Cal said. “I’d purchased it for my mom, and after she died and I put it on the market, I was—”
I cut Cal off. “Wait. What?”
Terry had died? Another shock. I felt awful that I hadn’t known, that I hadn’t kept in touch with her, that I hadn’t been there for Cal when he lost his mother. I was the worst kind of human: a terrible friend.
“Good God, Cal. I’m so sorry.”
“Cancer,” he said. “She was sick for a long time. She did get to see me win a Grammy though. That meant a lot to her.” Cal picked up his glass of champagne but didn’t drink out of it, he just rolled it around in his palm. “I bought her this place right before she got sick. She didn’t have time to enjoy it for very long, and before she died she made me promise I would sell it to someone who would love it as much as she did.” Cal leaned over and kissed the top of October’s head. “Enter this incredible woman.”
October squirmed in her seat. I’d never seen her so ill at ease.
“She showed up and gawked at the trees,” Cal said. “No kidding; the first thing she did when she got out of the car was wander through the backyard, looking up and touching and smelling all the trunks. I asked her to have dinner with me before she went into the house. She just had this vibe, you know? Turned me down though. Wouldn’t even give me her phone number. I had to bribe her real estate agent for it.”
“Why not?” I asked her. I couldn’t imagine any girl turning Cal down.
“I’ll tell you why,” Cal responded. “Because I made the mistake of saying, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ and after that she thought I was a dick.”
Cal cracked up at the memory. October gave him a half-hearted smile then looked my way. “I knew who he was. And I didn’t think it made sense for me to date a man whose job requires him to stand in front of thousands of screaming people every night.” She stared into her coffee. “Especially one who lived in New York, had a somewhat infamous reputation as a womanizer, and was in the middle of a divorce.”
“Divorce?” I couldn’t believe how much of Cal’s life I’d missed. “You were married?”
“Not for very long.”
“Please don’t tell me you have kids.”
“No kids,” he said. “Anyway, I dropped the price of the property so that she was basically stealing it from me, under the condition that she let me take her on a date. I really wanted to hit it out of the park, so I whisked her off to Mexico City because she told me she loved Frida Kahlo, and there’s a Frida museum down there. I rented out the whole place so there were no crowds to bother her, and it was all epically romantic until she got food poisoning from some street tacos we had for lunch. The rest of the trip was me taking care of her for two days while she puked into a wastebasket beside the bed because she was too sick to make it to the bathroom. That’s how I got her to fall in love with me. By holding her hair back while she barfed.”
“Chris.