Chapter 27

November 10^th, 2020

For most of the next day, Andy kept to himself a bit, staying mostly in his office with the cats. Jenny had swung by to bring him lunch midday, and after he finished it, he decided it was time to talk with his best friend, Xander Baker.

While Andy was a little chunky, Xander was the whole damn brick. Xander wasn’t so much fat as just a mountain of a man. But also a bit fat, if people were being blunt. Xander stood some four inches taller than Andy but was at least a hundred pounds heavier, maybe more, a weird combination of muscle and blubber, much of his skin covered in tattoos. And God help him, Xander was still rocking a mullet, as out of fashion as ever. Much of the time, the back of the mullet was pulled into a rattish ponytail, but today it hung free over his shoulders.

He and Xander had grown up together, best friends since they were seven. They’d met playing Little League, something they’d both hated. The two of them had quit playing the next year, but they’d never stopped hanging out. They’d been roommates throughout college, and when Andy had moved to the West Coast, Xander had driven with him and then flown home one way. For years, Andy had been trying to convince Xander to abandon the Midwest, and it always felt like Xander was considering it, though it just never seemed to happen.

There had been a two-year period where they’d stopped speaking, because Xander had gotten married and then gotten divorced all within those two years. Xander’s ex-wife had hated all of his friends and had driven them away, insisting none of them be invited to the wedding. She’d actually been living with Xander and Andy for the last year Andy lived in Cleveland. They’d gotten married six months after he left and divorced two years to the day afterwards. On the very day that Xander had decided to divorce her, the first person he’d called was Andy, to apologize for the two years of radio silence. Andy hadn’t been mad or holding a grudge and had welcomed his oldest friend back into his life with welcome arms.

Xander had drifted from job to job for a couple of years until he’d seemed to find his natural calling as an auto mechanic, one specifically focused on restoration and maintenance of classic and vintage cars, although he did work on pretty much anything to keep the bills paid. Some of Xander’s restorations had won awards at car shows, though, and he’d done a few special commissions for some well-known people that was starting to get him a little national recognition.

For the last six months, Xander had been living vicariously through Andy, when he wasn’t working on cars. Thankfully, Xander’s work backlog had been more than enough to keep him occupied for a couple of years. He’d even had a 3D printer delivered to help him make molds so he could smelt custom parts when he couldn’t find what he needed via mail. It had been a frustratingly solitary life, so his contact with Andy had been what kept him going. They generally talked via FaceTime for an hour every week, like clockwork.

When Andy had first gotten Aisling in his life, he’d called Xander the next day to introduce her to him first, and they’d gotten along perfectly. Since then, generally the day after someone had been added to the household, he’d called Xander the day after to introduce them, although it had been about a week or so since they’d talked, simply because between the poker game, his brother’s death and all the various arrivals. It had been an overwhelming week, and for the first half an hour of the videocall, Andy had literally simply relayed all the various information. He’d even opened the phone call with “You will not fucking believe what a week it has been,” with Xander being doubtful Andy’s week had been as bad as his own at the start, but very quickly coming around to understanding why Andy looked like shit on the videocall.

Andy wasn’t the only one, though, and Xander’s week had also been something of a chain of tragedies. Xander had been especially sad to hear about Matty’s death, and told Andy during the intervening week between this call and their last one that his own brother, Randy, whom Xander was close with, had passed away as well, along with his father, whom he wasn’t that close with.

What a week it had been all around indeed.

Both of them had lost a lot of family in a very short period of time. So, the two of them had shared a little cry for a bit, before they’d decided to just plow on. It was all anyone really could do. There were too many casualties to mourn them all individually, so people they’d known, grown up with, loved ... they all became entries in a long ledger of loss.

From there, Andy had to inform Xander that not only was he getting married, he was getting married to multiple women, including two that Xander hadn’t even been introduced to yet, but Xander had been laughing at that point at the craziness of it all. Andy’d also asked Xander to be his best man, something he’d readily agreed to, even if he was a bit jealous of some of the women lined up to wed Andy. He had sent Xander the group photo shortly before the call, and Xander’s immediate question was how the hell he’d ended up hooking up with not only Sarah Washington, but Emily Stevens as well.

That had turned into Andy relaying the entire poker story to Xander, who went through a roller coaster of emotions while Andy talked him through it. Xander had long been a Daggerfall Academy fan, not just of the movies but of the books as well, so he was understandably a little jealous of Andy’s connection to Emily, but promised not to get too hung up on it when they finally did meet. Xander had still never forgiven him for not meeting E.F. Winston, but Andy had explained to him over and over again that she was simply too big a person to show up to conventions and do meet’n’greets.

And then, of course, Andy had needed to tell Xander that he was also going to be a father, and that both Niko and Aisling were pregnant, which resulted in the oddest moment ever, because Xander had just been grinning. Apparently, Niko had called Xander to tell him about it before they’d even told Andy, just to make sure that he’d really be cool with it.

Andy found himself a little annoyed with Niko and Aisling, but the moment was fleeting, and in the end, he also found it a little funny, knowing that Xander had had the news about the girls’ pregnancies before he did. Andy really was the last one to know pretty much anything.

The last thing they had to talk about was the previous day where the girls had spent hours pitching their friends and colleagues to him, and how overwhelmed by it all Andy was. That was why he’d called Xander, because while Andy had done some thinking about whittling it down, he wanted to talk it all over with his best friend, the person who knew him best in this world.

For the next hour or so, Andy and Xander had talked through all of the pitches one by one, covering all of the women, Andy’s pros and cons (because of course Andy had made a pros and cons list) and where his head was at with each of them.

The call went on long enough that both men had been forced to plug their phones in and let them charge while they continued talking. Internet calling was truly a wonderful thing. It helped his state of mind, being able to talk it all out with someone. He’d thought about talking it all over with Aisling, but he felt like involving any of the girls in the actual decision-making process might put undue stress on their relations, and he didn’t want to put any of the girls in that kind of awkward position.

Xander had proven to be an excellent sounding board, as he always was, and Andy was able to talk himself through all his decisions over the course of their conversation. At least a couple of times, Andy had joked that maybe it would be better if he didn’t invite anyone in, to which point Xander had threatened to phone Niko, so she could slap Andy in the head for him, since Xander was still in Cleveland. He didn’t doubt that Xander would do it in the least, and Andy joked that his friend was getting too reliant on one of Andy’s soon-to-be wives to do his dirty work for him.

Which, of course, led Xander into dropping a bombshell of his own on Andy. As it turned out, once the quarantine was lifted, Xander was likely going to be moving out to Fresno, a city about an hour away from the Bay area, which meant the two best friends would be able to hang out and see each other regularly, something that made Andy cry a little more.

Xander also said, however, that there was also a decent chance the relocation might happen much sooner than that. One of the women he was getting paired up with was a Major in the Air Force, and so she was leaning on people to get him safely relocated across the country, where she could protect him. He’d laughed, saying it was weird to be treated as such precious cargo when just a year ago he was getting turned down by nearly every woman he approached at a bar.