Page 4 of Walking Wounded

“You don’t need to carry my luggage.”

“Nah, it’s cool. You look one cigarette away from death, anyway. I got it.” He shoots Luke a grin.

“I don’t still smoke.”

“Yeah you do.”

“Yeah.” He sighs. “I do.”

“Which bag is yours?”

The old bat is finally, blessedly gone, and Luke steps up beside his friend at the carousel. “I’m not your bitch, Rycroft,” he says. “I can carry my own goddamn suitcase.” But he says it without malice. This feels like the old days, suddenly, elbow-to-elbow in the cafeteria, smell of burned tater tots, giving each other shit as they wait for an inedible lunch.

Or before that, diapered butts planted in the sand, shovels and pails in their hands, as their mothers gabbed at a bench just behind them.

A kaleidoscope of old images wheels through Luke’s mind. The story of a lifelong friendship. Best friends.

And then The Incident that happened three years ago that almost ruined it all.

Hal bumps him in the ribs, snatching him back to the moment at hand. “That it?”

“What? Oh, yeah. With the red tag.”

Hal laughs. “You’ve still got that thing?”

Luke thinks he might have toted the ancient American Tourister – belted around the middle in case of latch failure – to a slumber party at some point in the distant past. His face warms. “Hey, duck it or fuck it, right? No sense throwing it out ‘til it stops working.”

Hal laughs again, shakes his head, leans forward to snag the handle of the suitcase. He makes it look effortless, the lifting, though Luke was sweating a little by the time he’d had it checked at LaGuardia.

“Come on.” Hal turns and shoves him between the shoulder blades. “I’ve got enough duct tape at home for you to build a whole new shaving kit.”

“Haha, asshole.”

Dulles International Airport shimmers with sunset light, all pinks and golds and brilliant sienna streaks glinting along the handrails of the escalators, starting fires in the ghostly reflections in windows. The people who bustle around them, dragging fancy wheeled suitcases paygrades above Luke’s, speak a variety of languages into cellphones. The air smells of ethnic food from one restaurant, and burgers from another.

It’s just like all the other major airports he’s been in in the last few years, but it reminds him how very different his adult life is from his child life. A memory catches him off-guard, knifes through his ribs with a quick pain and makes him draw in a deep breath.

“Hey, remember that summer,” he says, before he can catch himself. “Our sophomore year, when Abby’s cousin visited from France?”

“Yeah,” Hal says, snorting a laugh through his nose. “What made you think of that right now?”

Luke gestures to the woman walking ahead of them, her perfect physique wrapped tight in red cashmere, speaking in rapid French to the suited man who walks beside her.

Hal laughs again. “Shit. I hadn’t thought about that in years.”

“What was her name again?”

“Celine.”

“I forget. Did you sleep with her?” Luke asks, grinning, to be a pain in the ass.

“You know that story, asshole.”

“I swear to God, I forgot.”

Hal gives him the side-eye.

“I’m serious! My memory’s not what it used to be. All the smokes and coffee.”

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