Kenna

Kenna has a kid. She hides behind Kenna’s legs and won’t say hi to me.

Kenna says to her, “Say hi to this man.”

Kenna means me. I am This Man. But Kenna’s kid refuses.

“It’s okay,” I say to Kenna’s kid. “It’s okay,” I say to Kenna.

“She’s not usually like this,” he says.

I tell him not to worry about it and he asks me what I’m doing in town and I tell him about my work trip. Kenna acts impressed. He still has that salesman energy he had in college. I say that I bet he’s in sales now and Kenna shakes his head. I couldn’t be more wrong. He stays at home with the kid while his wife goes to work.

And that’s another thing. Kenna has a wife. She’s currently in a hot yoga class somewhere in the shopping center. He points in the general direction. They’re all going to get brunch afterwards. “But that’s in an hour,” Kenna says.

“We should get a beer or something,” I say. “Catch up.”

I don’t mean now, I mean later, or probably I mean never, but Kenna checks his phone and says that the Applebee’s is open. Kenna says he could go for a beer for sure.

It’s early enough that they’re still setting up the main dining area so we grab a table near the bar and Kenna asks for a kid’s menu and crayons and a high chair and we order two big beers and when they arrive, Kenna drinks off half his glass in a single gulp.

He burps and says, “I forgive you about all that Muzzy stuff, by the way,” and it’s been so long that it takes me a second to remember who that is.

Muzzy is what he used to call his girlfriend in college. And apparently, what he was forgiving me for, was she told him about the time that I confessed my love to her after a Dave Matthews concert our sophomore year. And then told him when I did it again in the middle of a Halloween party the next semester. And then every subsequent time I confessed my love to her, Muzzy had reported this back to Kenna.

“I can’t believe it,” I say. “Man, what a bitch.”

“What about you?” Kenna says, slugging my shoulder. “You were supposed to be my friend!”

It doesn’t take too long before we’re laughing about the whole thing. Not just Muzzy. Other stuff too. College stuff. Drawing on people’s faces who were passed out drunk. Weird guys we used to know and where they were now. Turns out, he hadn’t kept up with any of them either.

We drink our beers fast and my head gets swimmy. Next to Kenna, Kenna’s kid has grabbed a fistful of crayons and is scrawling in big spirals across the paper menu. Kenna asks her if she wouldn’t like to draw a nice picture for me, her new friend, but all the kid wants to do is cover the menu, edge to edge, with crayon.

Kenna’s phone buzzes. His wife is done with yoga. She’s ready for brunch. I listen as they sort out their plan. She’s going to come meet us. She wants to say hello, Kenna says, grinning.

When Kenna’s wife walks in, I recognize her right away. I stand up to hug her, but she waves me off. Says she’s too sweaty. Instead, I just face her and cross my arms so I won’t be tempted to reach out and touch her.

It is Muzzy. Or rather, the adult version of Muzzy. She has red hair with brown roots and no makeup on except for some smeary eyeliner and there are a few untweezed dark hairs at the corners of her upper lip, but it’s definitely her.

When she scoots past me to sit down, I breathe in. She smells faintly oaty.

Muzzy asks me how long it’s been and what I’m doing now and her eyebrows go up when I say enterprise sales (which is not true, I’m midmarket) and she points to my wedding ring and wants to know if we like California and I answer her by making her promise to come visit.

“Not just Muzzy though, I mean,” I say quickly to Kenna and their kid. “All of you, of course.”

“Muzzy, jesus,” Muzzy says. “No one calls me that anymore.”

“I do,” Kenna says. “I mean, I do sometimes, anyway.”

Muzzy gives me a look that says, You believe this jerkoff? And I give her a look back that says, I’m staying at the Marriott downtown, room 304, and I have fifteen thousand dollars I can withdraw right now and we could leave tonight and never come back and do you think we could make Santa Fe by sunrise tomorrow?

Kenna’s kid starts to whine.

“We promised her pancakes.” Muzzy looks to Kenna. “Or maybe she’s tired?”

Kenna warns his kid to stop whining or he would give her something to really whine about. He winks at me when he says it to let me know he’s not being a corny dad but instead is commenting on corny dads writ large. “Do you have kids?” he asks me.

I say that I don’t, which is not a lie.

“Well,” Kenna says, struggling to get his kid to put on her jacket. “You’re not missing much.”

“It really was so nice bumping in like this,” Muzzy says.

“Here,” Kenna says, folding the paper menu his kid scribbled on and handing it to me. “A gift from Sophia.”

When they are gone, I pay the check and walk to my rental car where I call my wife. I take the kid’s menu with the crayon and put it on the passenger seat as it rings. My wife doesn’t answer, but calls me back as I’m getting on the highway to the hotel.

“What’s wrong?” she says, which is how we’ve been answering the phone since it happened.

Kyle Seibel is a writer in Santa Barbara, CA. His debut collection of fiction is currently… looking… for… okay, I think the coast is clear. The normies are long gone, I bet. Only the complete freaks read the whole bio, aka My People. Anyway. Now that it’s just us, I just wanna say thanks for reading this even if it wasn’t in a lit mag. My inspiration for doing this was Miss Unity’s blog post and the general ethos of Broken River Books, both of which I genuinely suggest you check out. It occurs to me now that I probably should have thought of a way for people to like, give me a dollar to read this, but I don’t know. That kinda sucks. Not that I wouldn’t like, at some point, to start making money from writing. Not a lot of money, but maybe a non-embarrassing amount. That’s a pretty good goal, actually. Rambling now. Speaking of embarrassing. Ahem. So shut up, Kyle. Okay okay. Goodbye. I love you.