After the sun set Monday, he fully expected Tuesday to arrive on time, as scheduled. What he didn’t expect were the series of events that he had inadvertently set into action by not calling Andy back.
Andy left three messages for David on Monday morning. The first one was just a calm, cool and collected request to call Andy as soon as appropriate. The second message, about 30 minutes later, had a twinge of anxiousness, but by the third message it was clear that Andy was in full blown panic mode. David saw the calls come in, but ignored them because he was not ready to forgive Andy. He and Andy had quarrelled the night before. Quarrelled was not the word he would have chosen to describe the bitter, hateful exchange of words that happened between them, but that was Andy’s word. It would take a while before David would be able to forgive, and forget wasn’t even on the horizon. Of course, avoiding conversations wasn’t actually a way to repair the relationship either. But David was not quite ready to repair any relationship. First some water needed to flow under that bridge.
Early Monday night, around nine o’clock, David decided to listen to the voice mails. The first was as he expected.
“Hi, this is Andy. Call me when you get a chance. I need to tell you something rather important.” No apology. No mention that they had to smooth over their difficulty so that their friendship wasn’t permanently damaged.
The first thing David thought was, “Fine. You wanna’ pretend you didn’t call me a selfish asshole. Let’s see how that works out for you.” Then, realizing it wasn’t all about himself, he deleted that message and listened to the next one.
“Please! You need to call me. I really need to tell you something and it can’t be over voice mail.”
“OKAY!”, thought David, “let me finish playing the other message…”
The last message was simply a single word surrounded by gulping and gasping and weeping, “PLEASE!”
Wishing he had called her back a lot sooner, David sped dialled Andy’s number. When it went straight to voice mail he began to panic himself. He had to get to her. Where would she be? It was almost 9:30 pm. “What time did she leave those messages?” he thought as he tried finding the time stamp on the phone.