Nick calls and says he’s driving across America and needs a place to crash for the night. I tell him I’ve got a futon, and he shows up at dusk in a real beater, explains he’s shipping out to Iraq in a month and wanted to see the country. We go to Church Brew Works, a Catholic church transformed into a bar. I like taking my old friends here, showing them this perversion, how things can change.

We dated the same girl in college. Andrea. I had her freshmen and sophomore years and Nick handled the rest. He tells me they’ve broken up and obviously we have a lot to talk about. We run down our list of mutual grievances, at times feeble and unfair—the high pitch of her voice, her desperate need for coddling. We build her into something laughable and unrecognizable, a thing we can smash to smithereens with our microbrew and organic pizza. We get drunk and slosh our way home.

The next morning Nick has to leave. He doesn’t tell me where he’s headed next and I don’t ask. But he has offered to drive me to work. We drive through Squirrel Hill, a family neighborhood filled with hula hoops and tipped tricycles. Nick asks me to open the glove compartment and I do it. There’s a case inside. It’s steel.

“Open it.”

I find a handgun. Nick explains that he bought it at a gun show in Missouri, says he wanted to have one for protection, to prepare himself mentally for what’s to come. I nod and pretend to understand. He urges me to inspect it, and I pick it up and point it through the window at the neat little yards, the fences flying by.