A Friend Vanishes

Mike is one of those friends who disappears sometimes. We have been friends since third grade, but if you subtract his long absences from my life it is like we have been really good friends for about half of that time.

This is what I am trying to explain to his fiancee Sarah but, as always with girls like her, it is like I am speaking the wrong language. No doubt she has already decided that I am cold, heartless, not a real girl, and (they always get to this point with me eventually) A Husband Stealer.

“He has been gone for two days,” she is saying mournfully, smoothing her gauzy top over last year’s designer jeans. “He always calls.”

“Of course he does.”

“I just thought you, or one of the old crowd (which she always says with sinister emphasis), might have heard something. You don’t think he has cold feet about the wedding, do you?”

I am thinking: Yes, I think he does. I have had this conversation with two or three of my friends’ exes and it always turns out that they are fine, in the middle of a debauched long weekend, and have decided that that they are not quite ready to settle down.

This does not seem like the right thing to say to Sarah, however.

I am trying to figure out exactly what the right thing to say to her is when the doorbell rings and the police come in.