The friends lit cigarettes under a streetlight outside the diner. They’d been going to the diner since they were kids, and they’d been smoking under the same light since sixteen, feeling  so cool and free, actual and metaphoric middle fingers raised to the establishment types across the street, the town, the world.  

“I miss Margot,” Charlene said.

Richard looked out into the night, the snow falling, and didn’t speak.

Peter, always the youngest, always Petey, and now Peter to his wife, his boss, his daughter’s school’s PTA, smoke leaving his lips, said, “Should we light a fourth for her?”

Charlene nodded. The men knew the signature tilt of her head. That way she held her hands in front of her body—prayer and defense—and Richard flicked his lighter, exhaled this new smoke before allowing both cigarettes to smolder unattended in his left hand. 

Charlene hadn’t wanted to drive down from Milwaukee. Not this year. Not without Margot. Margot Sunburst. Margot-starlight-in-her-hair-on-her-lips-between-her-fingers, pretending to be Alanis Morissette in her old smudged mirror. Margot, who introduced Charlene to her husband. Margot, bouquet of bluebells, maid of honor at her wedding. Margot, Margot, vivacious, electric. Could she exist the same way without Margot? Charlene wondered how long it would take her to decide. To sift the last sediments of grief until the waters ran clean. 

The snow found its way down the back of Peter’s starched collar, and he shifted, stared inside the diner, his face half-reflected, phantasmic, in the thin glass. It was Margot who taught him to ride a bike, baseball card in the spokes. It was Margot who played UNO with him until one in the morning, the attic of her parents’ house full of yellowed mannequins and crushed beer cans. Spiderwebs and dusty romance novels. He was her Petey and she was his Waiting for Margot, after the Beckett they had read in English class, and it felt like thorns now, angry heart at his lips, smoke searing, whenever he wished that he remembered how to be the boy instead of the man.

Richard still held both cigarettes. His and Margot’s. Would he be next then? How would it be? Peaceful? Slow? Horrific? Nice? He had tried to sleep with Margot when he was nineteen, mind flush with bruises. She allowed him to cry. She held him, soothed him, told him there was nothing wrong with him. As Richard watched fire eat paper, fingers in the path of burning, he couldn’t help thinking of the many meanings of fag and Margot’s voice a bright bell over the diner door forever welcoming the weary home.