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Amigos

Sixteen months later, in Southern California, the sun rose and set as the tables of rotation and revolution of the Earth predicted it would. By that Thanksgiving, all was normal in the lives of the amigos. In the late morning, Ernie and Spencer drove to Rebecca and Bobby’s house, where they intended to spend the day preparing a feast for their dinner. The four lived within ten minutes of one another.

On this occasion, no one who has followed their story should be expecting monsters of any variety or any degree whatsoever of life-and-death drama. That is of no interest to them now, for they are among the fortunate who have gotten past the monsters of childhood and arrived at a place where they can be themselves without having to explain themselves, where they can know themselves without being discouraged by what they know.

The great novelist Thomas Hardy (cited earlier) would not have found much material in this simple gathering, although he had possessed a generous, kind heart that allowed him to appreciate the value of friendship and the joy to be found in common things. Thomas Hardy’s ashes were placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried in Dorsetshire, in that landscape and among those people he had celebrated in his writing.

Robert Shamrock—Bobby the Sham—would one day be interred in just one place. It would not be Maple Grove. The amigos expected to live for decades yet, but they had taken inspiration from some of the residents who lived at the end of Harriet Nelson Lane; they purchased enough grave plots to accommodate them and however many loved ones they were likely to build lives with in years to come.

Throughout their childhood and adolescence, they dreaded going home in the dark to houses where no one lived with them or where those who lived with them were no less strangers than would be any nameless and solitary figure met on a windswept plain or on a dock at night in some port on the far side of the Earth. Friendship is a kind of love, and even on nights when one of the amigos is alone, they live in the light of their friendship. At the end of our days in this world, each of us goes home in the dark, to what we cannot know. The prospect of that journey is fearsome, but if we have loved and been loved, we do not go alone. We go with the memory of light and those who shared it with us, and if our hope is not misplaced, we go from light into light. See, no monsters.