"Zinnias are going into this last bed if you want to help," April says, over her shoulder, after dropping the news. 

           

"Albuquerque?" I ask, my chest tightening, whether from allergies or her announcement, I can't tell. 

           

"Ben's family is from there, you know, and with his arthritis..."

           

"Can he work from there?" I ask.

 

Don't get me wrong, what I really want to say is are you f---ing kidding me?, but my New Years' resolution was be a more supportive friend so I lean on April's yellow wheelbarrow (which I, young and in love, moved from Chicago sixteen years ago for her) and try to sound curious.

           

"Even though they are headquartered in Seattle, like 3/5ths of the employees live somewhere else," she tells me. "Finland, even."

           

"Great." 

           

"He's really happy about it," she says, ripping weeds from the garden beds that she has carefully constructed over the last 14 years. 

           

"I can never spell Albuquerque," I say. 

           

"Just keep adding q's, that's what I do." 

           

Kith and kin, thick and thin is what our matching tattoos say, and I want to rub my hand under the strap of my tank, but she'd see it and she'd know what I am thinking. Let me tell you, this isn't the future I imagined when that needle pierced my skin. Marriages come and go, I know, but it still surprises me that ours did in just one dark season. Neither of us ever talk about it, which is weird when I stop to think about it, which I try not to do. Our origin story, how we met, why we moved here, what we tell her husband's work friends or at backyard parties has been worn down to something soothing by time and circumstance and compromise, like a piece of broken glass rubbed flat and smooth by the endless pull of ocean waves. Part of the time, I think she deliberately doesn't remember what we have been to each other, because it's easier for her that way. 

           

"Quite a change," I say. 

           

"Really, it's only because he's in so much pain here, with the damp and the cold and the desert, you know, it's better, it is, its —"

           

"So so dry," I supply, tipping seeds from my hands into the furrows she's dug into the bed. 

           

Try as I might to develop some self-respect, some distance, I still am here to help her out in a pinch, to move a wheelbarrow, plant her flower beds, finish an awkward lie. Understand me, divorce doesn't stop you from loving someone, it just stops you from being able to tell her when the wave washes over you, forceful and steady as breath. 

           

"Veronica will tear the car apart or mew like crazy so we will have to drug her for the drive. We're going to have a guest room that she will never be allowed to enter just so you know," she runs the words together like she is afraid I won't understand the significance of a cat-free bedroom she is saving for me in her new home with her new husband 1500 miles away.

           

"‘X' marks the spot," I say, and drop a seed into the ground in answer, a bright fierce feeling blooming in my chest.  

           

"You're visiting in May," she says, and waters the seed I've planted.