Two words ended the fight, one on each side. Brett called Sunna jealous, and Sunna called Brett fake, and though both women had used many worse words than those throughout the course of the fight, those were the ones that rang in the air like gunshots. As the saying goes, the truth hurts.
Maybe the fight would’ve been the end of their relationship, but they’d been at Brett’s house, and when Sunna stormed out, she forgot to take her jacket. It wasn’t a special jacket, but it was a jacket—and this was Toronto, and it was January. Sunna had been angry enough to make it home that day without it, but she’d had to make a sheepish phone call the next morning to arrange a time to pick up her coat—“When’s good for you? Sorry I flew out like that. Sorry for everything, actually . . .”
She hadn’t meant to apologize and didn’t mean the apology; it had come out of her mouth like someone else had commandeered her voice box. She realized then that she was opening a door that had been a relief to slam shut.
Of course, then, Brett had no choice but to apologize back. “I know—I’m sorry too. I was out of line . . .”
And Sunna hated herself for saying the next thing and for how whiny and pleading her voice sounded when she said it. “Can we please just forget that happened? Like, all of it. I want to be friends again, like we were before all of this.”
“Yes. Me too.” Brett sounded sincere, but Brett was a good actress.
And then they sat there on the phone, and Sunna knew both of them were thinking the same thing.
How do adults end friendships?
Sunna and Brett had known each other for over a decade, had been each other’s only support through all the usual twentysomething milestones and heartbreaks. They’d gone to school together, worked together, lived together. They had history. Why would anyone want to end that kind of friendship, the kind only lucky people even got the chance to experience in the first place? It was almost ungrateful, wasn’t it?
But Sunna showed up at Brett’s apartment that afternoon, and they hugged and said how relieved they were not to have lost each other, and Sunna even found herself tearing up and then wondering, Do I mean all of this? I must! I’m crying . . .
She got her coat, said goodbye, and felt a little better as she closed the door behind her. Everything was okay. This friendship was far from over.
The cautious optimism lasted all the way to Ossington station, where she stepped onto a subway car and sat ruefully beneath a massive banner that read The 30 Under 35 Initiative—the Future of Toronto Is in Great Hands! It bore the radiant image of none other than her now unestranged friend, Brett. Toronto’s most notable up-and-coming VIP golden child. A role model for anyone even a second younger than her, an inspiration to everyone else. The ad spoke to Sunna; it said, “Look at this woman. Look at you. The friendship is over.”
But they’d disrupted the natural progression of things. That stupid jacket. They were “friends again,” and now they met for coffee every week because they didn’t know how adults ended friendships.
The relationship was on life support. The coffee dates were torturous: Sunna would ask, politely, about Brett’s latest campaigns and sponsorships and speaking gigs. Brett would, in turn, lean across the table and lower her voice and put on her concerned face and speak to Sunna the same way she spoke to her massive Instagram audience.
“Sunna,” she would say, scrunching her forehead up like she was working hard to select every word that came out of her mouth, “I know your job makes you money, but does it make you happy? Are you in your BLZ?”
That was Brett’s problem. She couldn’t even drop her act in casual conversation. She was always on, always Brett Lynn Zaleschuck, creator of the social media empire Best Life Zone. Always there to help the commoners in their pathetic attempts to be like her. Sunna hated it, but in the name of “friendship,” she would smile stiffly and assure Brett that she was in her BLZ, a statement that made her want to pour her hot coffee directly onto her own face.
Occasionally, the women would reminisce about college, or one of them would share something hard or sad and the other would comfort her, and they’d both remember that this relationship, though now strained and warped, was important to each of them, and that it wasn’t going away. They were like family.
At the end of each appointment, out of some kind of weird, polite, mutually shared impulse, one of them would say, “I’ll see you next week?” And they’d make another date.
Sunna was early today; she snagged the last free table in the small coffee shop / cocktail bar on Mutual Street and sipped a black coffee. Brett was fifteen minutes late, then twenty, then thirty. Sunna felt irritated. It was just like Brett to forget; she’d probably had something come up that seemed more important. Next time they got together Sunna would tell her off. This was the nice thing about crossing over from the carefulness and politeness of friendship into familial territory: Sunna could always say how she felt.
But, as it turned out, there would not be a next time. Brett didn’t call to explain why she hadn’t shown up or to offer any kind of apology. She didn’t call at all. Their weekly coffee dates ceased, and a few weeks later, Sunna noticed that Brett had unfollowed her on Instagram.
The finality should’ve made her happy. But you don’t get to choose your feelings, just like you don’t get to choose your family.
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF REBECCA FINLEY
Larry
Larry Finley was not supposed to sell the house on Montreal Street, but he couldn’t live in it either. It said so in the will:
To Larry Finley I give my house on the condition that he does not (a) sell it or (b) listen to any music produced after 1952 in it or (c) paint it or (d) plant flowers anywhere in the front yard or (e) go into the attic or allow anyone else to enter the attic or (f) . . .
The will went on and on like that, almost a full alphabet of strange, mostly unexplained rules.
Larry thought the whole thing was stupid. If he couldn’t listen to his music in the house, he couldn’t move into it. And if he couldn’t live in a house or sell it, and if parts of it were off limits, and if the house came with more rules than a cult, what good, exactly, did it do him to inherit it? At first, a free house had sounded great, but now it just made him cranky.
On his way home from the lawyer’s office, he stopped by the deli counter at the grocery store for potato wedges. This was what he always did when he needed cheering up. It worked for two reasons: one, he liked potato wedges, and two, he liked Ang, the motherly cashier who always magically seemed to be working when he needed cheer-up wedges.
“Hey there, Larry. How’ll you be paying?” Ang always smiled at him like she was relieved to see him, like she’d been waiting for him and was worried he wouldn’t show. It made him feel like his presence, all by itself, was a good deed. He felt the same way about her and always kind of wished he could tell her that. “Cash?”
“Hey, Ang,” he said, digging into his pocket for his wallet. “Yeah, cash.”
“You okay, Larry?”
“Yeah, just . . . a little bit . . . grouchy. Sorry. I inherited a house today.”
Ang laughed through her nose. “Hate it when that happens.”