Free Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver

felt, but thought he had to say more since he’d brought it up.
    “I have a boat,” Nick said. “It’s berthed down at the marina.”
    Robert nodded slowly. Joanne poured his coffee and Robert looked at her and grinned. “Thanks, babe,” he said.
    Nick and Joanne saw Carol and Robert every six months or so—more often than Nick would have liked, to tell the truth. It wasn’t that he disliked them; he did like them. He liked them better, in fact, than any other of Joanne’s friends he’d met. He liked Robert’s bitter sense of humor, and the way he had of telling a story, making it seem funnier, probably, than it really was. He liked Carol, too. She was a pretty, cheerful woman who still did an occasional acrylic painting—Nick and Joanne had hung one of her paintings, a gift, on their bedroom wall. Carol had never been anything but pleasant to Nick during the times they’d been in each other’s company. But sometimes, when Robert and Joanne were reminiscing over the past, Nick would find himself looking across the room at Carol, who would hold his look, smile, and then give a little shake of her head, as if none of this talk of the past were of any consequence.
    Still, from time to time when they were all together, Nick couldn’t help feeling that an unspoken judgment was being made, and that Robert, if not Carol, still blamed him for breaking up Joanne’s marriage with Bill and ending their happy foursome.
    They saw each other in Aberdeen at least twice a year, once at the beginning of summer, and once again near the end. Robert and Carol and Jenny, their ten-year-old, made a loop through town on their way to the rain forest country of the Olympic Peninsula, heading for a lodge they knew about at a place called Agate Beach, where Jenny would hunt for agates and fill up a leather pouch with stones that she took back to Seattle for polishing.
    The three never stayed overnight with Nick and Joanne—it occurred to Nick they’d never been asked to stay, for one thing, though he was sure that Joanne would have been pleased enough to have them, if Nick suggested it. But he hadn’t. On each of their visits, they arrived in time for breakfast, or else they showed up just before lunch. Carol always called ahead to make the arrangements. They were punctual, which Nick appreciated.
    Nick liked them, but somehow he was always made uneasy intheir company, too. They’d never, not once, talked about Bill Daly in Nick’s presence, or even so much as mentioned the man’s name. Nevertheless, when the four of them were together Nick was somehow made to feel that Daly was never very far from anyone’s thoughts. Nick had taken Daly’s wife away from him, and now these old friends of Daly’s were in the house of the man who’d committed that callous indiscretion, the man who’d turned all their lives upside down for a while. Wasn’t it a kind of betrayal for Robert and Carol to be friends with the man who’d done this? To actually break bread in the man’s house and see him put his arm lovingly around the shoulders of the woman who used to be the wife of the man they loved?
    “Don’t go far, honey,” Carol said to Jenny as the girls passed through the kitchen again. “We have to be leaving soon.”
    “We won’t,” Jenny said. “We’ll just skate out in front.”
    “See that you do,” Robert said. “We’ll go pretty soon, you kids.” He looked at his watch.
    The door closed behind the children, and the grownups went back to a subject they’d touched on earlier that morning—terrorism. Robert was an art teacher in one of the Seattle high schools, and Carol worked in a boutique near the Pike Place Market. Between the two of them they didn’t know anyone who was going to Europe or the Middle East that summer. In fact, several people, friends of theirs, had canceled their vacation plans to Italy and Greece.
    “See America first, is my motto,” Robert said. He went on to tell something about his mother