The Best Man

Chapter 1: The Phone Call

The cockroach was the size of a lighter, and it was winning.

Mike Connolly stood barefoot on the cracked linoleum of his apartment kitchen, wielding a flip-flop like a man who'd lost all other options in life — which, to be fair, was not far from the truth. The cockroach feinted left. Mike swung right. The flip-flop connected with the countertop and sent a coffee mug spinning off the edge. It shattered on the floor with a sound that perfectly summarized his Thursday.

"Fantastic," he said to the empty apartment.

The cockroach disappeared behind the refrigerator, victorious.

Mike's apartment was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a converted house on East Sixth Street in Austin, Texas. It had good natural light, bad plumbing, and a landlord named Gus who believed that "character" was an acceptable substitute for central air conditioning. The rent was eleven hundred a month, which Mike covered by bartending four nights a week at a place called The Rusty Spur and picking up odd shifts at a screen-printing shop run by a guy named Terrell who paid in cash and never asked personal questions. It was the kind of life that looked temporary from the outside, and Mike had been living it for eight years.

He was thirty-six. He had a degree in communications from UMass Amherst that he'd used exactly once, to get a job at a PR firm in Boston that he'd quit after seven months. He had a truck with 180,000 miles on it. He had a savings account with enough money to cover two months of rent and a dental emergency, but not both. He had a gym membership he used three times a week because vanity was the last vice he could afford. And he had a family back in Keaton, Massachusetts, that he hadn't spoken to in — well, it depended on who you were counting.

His mother, Frances, called on Christmas and his birthday. These calls lasted between four and eleven minutes and followed a rigid structure: weather, health, a carefully curated update about family members that excluded any real information, and a sign-off that managed to communicate both love and disappointment in equal measure. His father, Hank, had called him exactly once in eight years, three years ago, to tell him that the Patriots had won the Super Bowl and that the elm tree in the front yard had come down in a storm. The call lasted ninety seconds. It was the best conversation they'd ever had.

His brother Andrew had not called at all.

Mike swept up the broken mug, poured coffee into a plastic cup from a gas station, and sat down at the kitchen table, which was also his desk, his dining room, and the place where he sorted his tips at two in the morning. It was 11:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in March. His shift started at five. He had the entire afternoon stretching out before him like a sentence he didn't know how to finish.

His phone rang.

The screen said MOM, which was what it always said, because Mike had never updated the contact to say anything more descriptive like QUARTERLY OBLIGATION or GUILT DELIVERY SYSTEM. He picked up.

"Michael."

Nobody else in the world called him Michael. His mother said it the way a judge says "the defendant" — with full awareness of what you've done.

"Hey, Ma."

"Are you sitting down?"

This was new. Frances Connolly did not ask if you were sitting down. Frances Connolly delivered information like a news anchor: clearly, efficiently, and with the expectation that you would handle your emotions on your own time.

"I'm sitting," Mike said. His stomach did something it hadn't done since the last time he'd eaten gas station sushi.

"Your father has pancreatic cancer."

The words landed in the kitchen and just sat there, enormous and terrible, like furniture delivered to the wrong apartment.

"What?" Mike said.

"Pancreatic cancer. Stage four. They found it six weeks ago. He didn't want me to call you, but I'm calling you, because I'm his wife and I'll do what I think is right regardless of what stubborn nonsense he —" She stopped herself. Mike heard her take a breath. When she spoke again, her voice was level. "He has months. Maybe six. Maybe less."

Mike stared at the plastic cup of coffee. A fly was circling it. He watched the fly make three complete orbits before he trusted himself to speak.

"Six weeks ago," he said. "You found out six weeks ago."

"We needed time to process, Michael."

"Six weeks."

"I'm not going to apologize for the timeline. I'm calling you now."

Mike pressed his palm flat against the table. The surface was sticky. Everything in his apartment was slightly sticky. "Is he — how is he doing?"

"He's your father. He's doing it the way he does everything. Quietly and with his jaw set." A pause. "He's thinner. He tires easily. He still insists on making his own breakfast."

Mike closed his eyes. He could see Hank Connolly standing at the stove in the kitchen on Birch Lane, spatula in hand, making eggs the way he'd made them every morning for forty years: over-medium, slightly burned on the edges, served on toast that was more charcoal than bread. Hank was a creature of routine. He'd worn the same brand of work boots for three decades. He'd driven the same route to his plumbing supply company every day until he retired. He would, Mike understood with sudden and total clarity, die the same way he'd lived — on his own terms, without asking for help, and without making a fuss.

"Okay," Mike said. "I'll come home."

"There's more."

Of course there was more.

"Andrew is getting married."

Mike opened his eyes. "What?"

"Her name is Tara Thurston. She's a speech pathologist. She's very nice. They've been together two years. The wedding is June fourteenth."

"That's — Ma, that's three months away."

"Your father has a request."

The fly landed on the rim of the plastic cup. Mike watched it rub its front legs together, the tiny, obscene gesture of something that had no concept of human suffering.

"He wants you to be Andrew's best man."

Mike laughed. It came out before he could stop it — a single, sharp bark of a laugh that sounded unhinged even to his own ears. "That's not funny."

"Do I sound like I'm being funny, Michael?"

"Andrew doesn't want me as his best man. Andrew doesn't want me in the same time zone."

"Your father wants it. Andrew has agreed."

"Andrew agreed?"

"Your father is dying. People agree to things."

Mike stood up. He sat down. He stood up again. He walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot behind his building, where a man in a cowboy hat was loading lumber into the back of a truck. Austin continued to exist, indifferent to the fact that Mike's entire life had just been picked up and shaken like a snow globe.

"Ma, I can't go back to Keaton and stand next to Andrew at a wedding. You understand that, right? After what happened?"

"I understand exactly what happened, Michael. I was there for the aftermath. I held your brother while he —" She stopped again. Another breath. "Your father is dying. He wants to see his sons standing next to each other one more time. That is his request. You can honor it, or you can explain to me right now why your comfort is more important than a dying man's wish."

Frances Connolly did not raise her voice. She didn't need to. She had a way of constructing sentences that made disagreement feel like a moral failing. It was, Mike had always thought, her greatest and most terrifying gift.

"Does Andrew actually want this?" Mike asked. "Or is he just doing it for Dad?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

"Andrew is a good son. He's doing what his father asked."

Which was, Mike understood, Frances's way of pointing out that Mike was not a good son, had not been a good son for eight years, and was currently in the process of proving it again. He leaned his forehead against the window glass. It was warm from the Texas sun.

"When do you need me there?"

"The wedding is June fourteenth. But your father would like you here sooner. He'd like time."

"Time for what?"

"Time, Michael. Just time."

Something in her voice cracked, just slightly, like a hairline fracture in porcelain. It was the most emotion Frances Connolly had shown him in eight years, and it hit Mike harder than anything else she'd said.

"I'll be there in two weeks," he said.

"Good."

"Ma?"

"What?"

"I'm sorry. About Dad."

"I know you are." She paused. "Bring a suit. You'll need one."

She hung up.

Mike stood at the window for a long time, holding his phone, watching the man in the cowboy hat finish loading his lumber and drive away. Then he went to the refrigerator, opened it, and stared at the contents: half a lime, a jar of pickles, three beers, and something in a Tupperware container that he chose not to investigate. He closed the refrigerator.

He was going home.

Home, where he was the villain in every story. Home, where his name was shorthand for betrayal. Home, where eight years ago, on the night before his brother's wedding, he had gotten drunk at the rehearsal dinner and ended up in a hotel room with Steph Townsend, his brother's fiancée, and in doing so had detonated his family like a hand grenade thrown into a living room.

The wedding had been canceled. Andrew had not spoken to him since. His parents had chosen Andrew — not explicitly, not formally, but in the way families choose: through proximity, through daily presence, through the simple mathematics of who stayed and who left. Mike had left. He'd driven to Austin because it was far away and warm and nobody there knew that he was the kind of person who slept with his brother's fiancée the night before the wedding.

He'd built a life here. A small, quiet life. A life without holidays or family dinners or anyone who looked at him the way people in Keaton looked at him — with that particular mixture of fascination and contempt reserved for people who have done something so spectacularly awful that it becomes the only interesting thing about them.

And now he was going back.

Mike picked up the flip-flop from the counter. He walked to the refrigerator, pulled it away from the wall, and found the cockroach sitting there, antennae twitching, looking up at him with what he could only describe as confidence.

"You and me both, pal," Mike said.

He let it live.