We were supposed to be gone by noon.
I want to be clear about that. Noon was the plan. Noon was what we agreed on the night before, what he repeated twice while setting three separate alarms, and what he confirmed again at 11:52 when he was putting on his jacket and looking, genuinely, like a man prepared to leave.
Then his phone rang.
It was his college roommate, Declan. I know it was Declan because Cormac held it up so I could see the name before he answered, which I now understand was not a request for permission but a courtesy notification, the kind you give someone before a minor procedural delay. He held up one finger. The universal symbol for one minute.
I sat back down.
Outside, Stillwater was doing its whole dramatic gray-sky thing — the kind of May afternoon that can't decide if it wants to be moody or just annoying, clouds stacking up over the river like they had opinions. We had a forty-minute drive ahead of us to get to his cousin's thing, and the parking downtown was already going to be a whole situation because of course it was, it was a Saturday in spring and somebody's half marathon prep had apparently colonized the entire road grid.
I watched Cormac pace the kitchen. He had not taken his jacket off.
This I found encouraging.
"No, yeah, I heard about that," he said, pulling out a barstool. He did not sit on the barstool. He stood next to it in a way that suggested he was definitely almost done. "Wait, how long ago did that happen?"
He sat on the barstool.
The jacket, to his credit, stayed on.
I got my own phone out. I had been trying to find where to park near the Freight House later because the city's app had approximately fourteen different zones and I kept accidentally buying passes for the wrong one, which is its own ongoing project. I bought a pass. It was probably for a zone we weren't going to.
"Bro," Cormac said, from the kitchen, standing up again. "No. Bro."
He walked to the window. Looked out at the river the way people do when they're not actually looking at the river. The clouds had gotten lower. There was a faint smell of rain through the cracked screen door.
"Okay but did he know it was—" He stopped. Started laughing. That surprised full-laugh where his shoulders go up, where he completely forgets there's anything happening outside the phone. "He didn't. No way he didn't know."
It was 12:11.
I made myself a coffee.
Here's the thing about Cormac: he is genuinely delighted by his people. Like, authentically, he just lights up. Declan called and suddenly Cormac is standing in the kitchen in his jacket with one shoe untied, laughing about something that happened to someone I've never met, totally present to that, completely warm. You can't be mad. You can be twelve minutes late and a little cold about it, but you cannot be mad.
I was a little cold about it.
"Okay, okay, I gotta go, I gotta go," he said, starting toward the door in a way that looked very decisive. "No, for real, she's—" he looked at me— "I'm coming. Okay. Yeah. Yeah bro, okay."
He hung up.
"We good?" I said.
"We're great." He checked the time. Looked sincerely surprised. "Oh, we should go."
We went.
He talked about whatever Declan said the whole way to the car, still in the jacket, one shoe still technically not fully tied, full of news about someone I'd never meet who had apparently done something incredible. The sky opened up about ten minutes into the drive, real Stillwater drama, rain and wind and that particular sound on the windshield that makes you feel like the weather is making a point.
Cormac turned up the radio.
We were only eighteen minutes late, in the end. His cousin didn't care. Nobody cared. It was fine.
But I'm keeping a record.