ON THE EDGE OF BEAUTY (working title) is a dual-timeline, 100,000-word literary novel. Readers of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter will recognize its collision of the sacred and the profane — grace arriving, as it often does, through violence and dark comedy rather than around them.

At sixty, widowed and alone, Johnny is about to pick up the loaded gun on his desk when the phone rings. It’s Dave — the best friend he hasn’t spoken to in forty-one years. Dave wants to repeat the road trip they took at seventeen: North Dakota to Tijuana. Johnny says yes — the first brave thing he’s done in years.

What neither man expects is a reckoning neither trip can outrun: Carmelita, the woman whose life collided with theirs, the family she married into, and a granddaughter neither of them knew existed.

The phone vibrated softly against the leathered surface of my desk. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone called. I didn’t know if I should pick it up or the Kimber .45 next to it. I kept my eyes on the blues of Lake Michigan stretching in front of me, water as far as the eye could see, evidence of wind in the smattering of whitecaps. It was my favorite view from my office at the back of the house. I would miss it.

My phone vibrated a second time. Don’t look down.

I looked down.

Book, opened to the last page. Phone. Gun.

Unknown Caller, the phone’s screen read.

I started to shake because I didn’t believe in signs anymore.

God?

Unlikely.

I picked up the phone. Held it to my ear. Two beats of silence, then … “Johnny?”

His voice saying my name made a wormhole in the fabric of space-time on the other side of which I was 17 again, my best friend looking down at me, his face silhouetted against a starry sky when he sees that it’s me with the girl he loves even if I love her too. We broke after that, as if we never were friends.

“Dave? How …?”

“Hannah called and gave me your number a few months ago.” His voice trailed off, maybe because he could hear me having trouble breathing.

“Hannah,” I managed to say. “Why would she—”

“She said I should call, said you’d need a friend.” He coughed, his voice lower. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I mean, she never told me that she was …”

Hannah. She’d called him, even after all I had done, because she knew me better than I knew myself. The room went away but for the phone in my hand. Wiping the water leaking from my eyes, I managed to tap a mute button I could barely see but not before I sucked in a deep breath then another to control the inside of me trying to come out.

“I’m sorry” was all I said, but continued in my mind: Sorry for betraying you, sorry for the two seconds I was inside your future wife before you nearly choked me to death, sorry for being such a—”

“Johnny?”

Shit. I’d forgotten the mute button. I tapped it again. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, but it didn’t sound right the second time. Not sincere. More like something I thought I should’ve said, probably because I was so tired of being sorry all my life, saying sorry, over and over again, and never feeling any different.

“That’s not why I called.”

“But … why now?” I whispered, my voice breaking in half. “It’s been a month since she died.”

“I want us to take another trip.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe it was him. Nothing felt real, like I was still in an in-between state of being and not being. “The same one? Bismarck to Tijuana?”

“Yeah. Something came up that I need help with. I was kind of struggling with who I could ask. Then I remembered Hannah’s call a few months back, and it’s like I heard her voice in my head. ‘Call Johnny,’ she said.” He coughed, and I heard a metallic creak, like maybe he was leaning back in a chair. “Funny thing is, though, she sounded younger, like she did that day at the beach.” I recognized Neil Diamond in the background but couldn’t remember the song, then he coughed again and cleared his throat. “Besides, it’s been forty years. What difference does a month make?”

“What diff…” I murmured, choking back another sob, not bothering to define the difference it did make, him hearing Hannah’s voice telling him to call me.

“Please, Johnny. It would be good for you—take your mind off things for a while.”

It didn’t make sense. Why? There was something he wasn’t telling me. I could feel the weight of words not there.

“A week and a day or two,” he continued, “just like last time. Difference is this time, it’s all on me.” Papers shuffled. A keyboard clacked. “Actually, it’s on Dad—royalties spiked when he passed a few years back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know—I liked your father.”

“He liked you too.”

“What about your family? I heard you married …” I was such a coward. I couldn’t even say her name.

“Yeah. When I was in the Navy.” His voice hardened. “We divorced about ten years ago.” Then he coughed and cleared his throat like he was getting ready to say something but didn’t.

“Oh … Sorry to hear …” I wondered when they got married, if they were happy, what went wrong.

“I fucked up. It wasn’t her fault. We have two daughters. They don’t talk to me much.”

“I still don’t get it. Why now? Why can’t we just talk on the phone or go grab coffee somewhere and catch up? It’s not exactly a little trip.” I discounted the eight hundred miles between us, but he knew what I meant.

“We used to be best friends.” His voice was quiet, soothing, like maybe the tone of my voice had been too strident.

“Yes … we were,” I said, less stridently. “You were the last best friend I ever had … before…”

“I need you on this trip, Johnny. Like I said, you’re the only one I could think of. Sad. I know. But that’s the truth. I need you. At first, I thought I could just do it myself, but I can’t.”

“Need help with what? I thought the trip was to take my mind off things.” My head was spinning. I was at a divergence. Before me were two realities, one of certainty—the Kimber and a final heart-breaking surge of adrenaline before eternal rest—or an alternate reality that promised only uncertainty, friction and pain but also a chance to make at least one thing in my life right, to correct one of the wrongs.

“Well,” Dave said, “it’s both … It’s a favor I’m asking as the best friends we used to be. But it’s going to take time to be friends again. We can’t pick up where we left off. We need to trust each other.”

Dave picked me up in his big block, all red and gorgeous, rumble-rumbling in the driveway like it was about ready to rocket into the sky trailing a plume of smoke. Who cared if it only got eight miles to the gallon?

“Hey, Johnny. Guess everyone’s going to the falls this afternoon ’cause it’s so fuckin’ hot. Hop in, pardner.” He smiled, his teeth looking especially white against his summer’s-end tan.

I already had my cutoffs on, so I was good to go. I hadn’t known where we were going to meet up, but the falls sounded damn good. It was only a little farther downstream from where we had simultaneously fallen in love with the new cashier, Savannah, two days before departing on our odyssey. I was happy to pass that hallowed ground again, where she had made the concept of woman real, thinking maybe I should have taken a plaster cast of her footprints in the mud the last time we were there.

“Give me a sec,” I said. “I’ll grab a towel, and I gotta get a twenty for Gary.” He was our college-aged supplier. “I still owe him for our going-away party.”

The waterfall was small, only a few feet high, the river little more than a creek, so you could walk into flowing water no more than four feet deep, then dunk under the falls and come up behind it. I don’t even think anyone ever drowned there. Then you could stand still, behind the falls, all wet and shiny and covered in mist, and breathe in the moist, earth-wormy scent of it while marveling at the thundering feel of water cascading down in front, only inches away. It looked like a sheet of liquid glass, a moving, churning mass of translucent whites and at least forty shades of green that was too thick to see through but thin enough to let in the light. It felt like you were behind a living, breathing, magical lens of all the green in the world. In that narrow space behind the falls, I felt like a fish underwater, breathing through gills I didn’t have, like I’d just stuck my head out of the primordial soup, all alone on a virgin planet. Standing there, waist-deep in the whirlpool of frothy, roiling water filling my clothes with its fecund air was like being impregnated by life itself.

When we got there, I was sad to see Savannah wearing cutoffs and a white T-shirt instead of her leopard-print bikini. I was even sadder to see her maybe-boyfriend by the beer cooler, but I didn’t know if he’d come with her or if they were even going out still. It was hard to focus on anything else but Savannah, but I tried so as I wouldn’t look like a total perv. It was easier when she jumped into the river with some friends; that way, I could just look in the general direction.

Gary was tossing around a football with a couple of other guys, and that looked like fun, so Dave and I jumped in. Gary threw a spiral, and Dave laid out for it, parallel to the water. He missed but still looked cool. It must’ve been a hundred degrees and humid, so most of us were in the water by now.

Without my glasses, I couldn’t see shit and was just as likely to catch the ball with my face as with my hands, so I took a deep breath and went down under. That was at least one thing I was better at than anyone else. I could hold my breath for almost forever. I swam toward the falls. I could tell I was close because of the current and bubbles. About a minute later, I reached out my hand for the wall and grabbed someone’s upper thigh. I let go, embarrassed, and emerged from the primordial soup, right next to Savannah.

She smiled, her T-shirt clinging to her like it wasn’t even there. All I could see was her and her cold nipples sticking out. I forgot I had to breathe, until I did. I gasped, feeling more desire than I’d ever felt before, even in Tijuana less than a week ago with my thirty-minute, twenny-dollah girlfriend. It was like old times. I throbbed down under. You’d think I’d have known what to do because I’d already done it. I would just wrap her in my big, strong arms and crush her to my broad chest and bury my tongue, gently, softly, sweetly, into her mouth on the other side of those perfect lips. But I didn’t. I froze.

I looked stupid, standing there, staring fixedly at her nipples, at her face, her eyes, her mouth, the whole completeness of her, like maybe I thought I was clairvoyant and transmitting my love to her through my eyes alone. It just looked like I was staring at her nipples. She giggled. I looked into her eyes more specifically. They were the same color as the water cascading past, like there was a little waterfall inside her. I couldn’t speak. Her beauty overwhelmed me. I was a coward. I tasted her name slowly, Sa-van-nah, each syllable rolling around my mouth, taking shape in celebration of her sensuality.

Her lips strained against laughter trying to come out. She couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it. I dove back under the water so she wouldn’t see my tears, the sound of her laughter a torture as I swam with the current against the muddy bottom, bumping into branches, boulders, and strange legs until I came up, sucking for air, far, far out of sight.

It was after that afternoon that Dave and Savannah started going together. I never asked if he met her under the waterfall or what. I didn’t want to know. I only wondered what she’d have done if I had done what I wanted to do, if it could have been me.