"Dylan—"
"Don't." He turned the water glass in his hand. "Just. Don't do the version of this where you apologize and we both pretend it's fine. I can't do that one tonight."
"Dylan—"
"You called Dad," he said. "On accident. From a bar in the middle of the night. And then he called me." He looked at the glass. "Because that's how it goes. That's how it always goes."
"Dylan, I didn't—"
"I know you didn't." He looked at me for the first time. His face wasn't angry. It was just tired. "That's the thing, Wes. You never mean to. It's never on purpose. You just—you do something, and then someone gets called, and the someone is always the same someone, and we all just do this thing where we pretend that's normal."
The bar kept going around us.
"I didn't ask Dad to call you," I said. It came out small.
"I know you didn't."
"I would have figured it out."
"Wes."
"I would have."
"Wes. How would you have figured it out?” Dylan asked. "You're three drinks past where you should have stopped. You're in a bar I've never heard of. How were you going to figure it out?"
I didn't have an answer.
He looked back at his water.
"I'm not mad at you," he said. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not mad. I'm just—" He stopped. Started again. "I'm twenty-seven, Wes. I've been doing this shit for you since I was twelve. And I love you. And I'm tired. And those things are all true at the same time."
Someone across the room laughed at something.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I know you are." He drank his water. "That's the other thing. You always are. Genuinely. Every time. And then the next time happens anyway."
I looked at the bar.
I thought about all the times. I thought about how many of them I'd actually counted versus how many of them had just blended into one ongoing thing. I thought about Dylan at twelve, opening the door of the Morrison house to a kid who had been in eleven places. I thought about Dylan at sixteen tying my skate when his knee was the one that hurt. I thought about Dylan in juniors, the third year, his captain year, while Rob was four hours away in a snowstorm watching me play a regular season game.
"Dylan," I said.
"Yeah?"
"I don't know how to be different."
He looked at me.
It was a long look. Not the catalogue look. Not the assessment look. Something else, something I didn't have a word for yet, the thing under everything that I had been seeing flickers of for months and that was now sitting on the surface in a fancy bar at midnight.
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
He stood up.
"Come on," he said. "I'll drive you home."
"Dylan—"
