Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

few of my old girlfriends dropped by to say hello, introduce their kids. One of
my mom’s best friends, Vicky, came by with three of her granddaughters,
bashful tweens all in pink.
Grandkids. My mom had talked about grandkids a lot, as if it were
doubtlessly going to happen – whenever she bought a new piece of furniture,
she’d explain she favored that particular style because ‘it’ll work for when
there’s grandkids.’ She wanted to live to see some grandkids. All her friends
had some to spare. Amy and I once had my mom and Go over for dinner to
mark The Bar’s biggest week ever. I’d announced that we had reason to
celebrate, and Mom had leapt from her seat, burst into tears, and hugged
Amy, who also began weeping, murmuring from beneath my mom’s
smothering nuzzle, ‘He’s talking about The Bar, he’s just talking about The
Bar.’ And then my mom tried hard to pretend she was just as excited about
that. ‘Plenty of time for babies,’ she’d said in her most consoling voice, a
voice that just made Amy start to cry again. Which was strange, since Amy
had decided she didn’t want kids, and she’d reiterated this fact several times,
but the tears gave me a perverse wedge of hope that maybe she was changing
her mind. Because there wasn’t really plenty of time. Amy was thirty-seven
when we moved to Carthage. She’d be thirty-nine in October.
And then I thought: We’ll have to throw some fake birthday party or
something if this is still going on. We’ll have to mark it somehow, some
ceremony, for the volunteers, the media – something to revive attention. I’ll
have to pretend to be hopeful.
‘The prodijal son returns,’ said a nasally voice, and I turned to see a
skinny man in a stretched-out T-shirt next to me, scratching a handlebar
mustache. My old friend Stucks Buckley, who had taken to calling me a
prodigal son despite not knowing how to pronounce the word, or what its
meaning was. I assume he meant it as a fancy synonym for jackass. Stucks
Buckley, it sounded like a baseball player’s name, and that was what Stucks
was supposed to be, except he never had the talent, just the hard wish. He was
the best in town, growing up, but that wasn’t good enough. He got the shock
of his life in college when he was cut from the team, and it all went to shit
after. Now he was an odd-job stoner with twitchy moods. He had dropped by
The Bar a few times to try to pick up work, but he shook his head at every
crappy day-job chore I offered, chewing on the inside of his cheek, annoyed:
Come on, man, what else you got, you got to have something else.
‘Stucks,’ I said by way of greeting, waiting to see if he was in a friendly
mood.