We met Kendra the same way we met all of our father’s girlfriends. In the preceding weeks, my younger brother Austin and I would notice a slight uptick in his humor—whistling, singing, humming, laughing and saying, “No big deal!” when we made a mistake like leaving a carton of ice cream out overnight. He would take calls out of the room; he would text furiously on his phone at stoplights. Then, one night, Austin would be lying on the couch watching the Orioles get shutout again, and I would be reading a library book in our recliner. There would be a timid knock at our front door. Before one of us could get up our father would come bounding down the stairs. And there, on our stoop, would be a middle-aged brown-haired woman with a sad, flat face. For a while, our home was practically a hotel for middle-aged brown-haired women with sad, flat faces. They would slip off their shoes, hug our father awkwardly in the entryway, say hello to us in shy voices, and follow our father upstairs to his bedroom, closing the door behind them. Sometimes the woman would still be there in the morning, sometimes they would be gone already. Sometimes, we would never see them again. 

My father was not one of those parents who thoroughly vetted his partners before introducing them to their children. He had scruples, just not any that pertained to his kids. Our attachment never even seemed to cross his mind. Austin and I didn’t really have a mother, but we weren’t looking for one either. Our mom left when I was four year’s old (Austin only two); I had scraps of memories of her. Smells and sensations, the feeling of her presence thrusting my stroller down a sidewalk. Our father did not talk about her, described her as “unstable” and their marriage as “untenable.” Dad revealed later that she had a new family in Florida, a husband and a daughter. A half-sister, I thought with wonder. I wondered if I’d ever get to meet her.  

There had been many women since Mom left. Carrie One, Tina, Meredith, Jamie, Carrie Two, Bailey. (There were a few women we only saw once or twice that I won’t bother to name here.) The relationships could last anywhere from two weeks to twelve months, and he’d never dated anyone for over a year. He gave the same reason for every break-up: “Women expect too much.” Privately, Austin and I ranked the women our father dated by our personal preference. Tina had been young and always had ice cream sandwiches for us in her freezer. Carrie Two had a Yorkie named Cosmo that we loved. Meredith was an anxious woman with a nose like a downturned light-switch who yelped at loud sudden noises. Carrie One (named retroactively, of course) owned the bottom of our list. She’d had no interest in us, doted instead on her own ill-behaved kids, Dalton and Kaya. In the thick of it, Austin and I had serious concerns that we might actually get stuck with her as our step-mother (her weird children for step-siblings). When we went over to Carrie One’s house, she and Dad would lock the four of us kids in the backyard on ninety-degree days while they “napped” inside. Dalton, a year older than me, equally as unpleased at the prospect of a “new family,” would climb trees to get away from us. We might have been friends, Dalton and I, had we not both been terrified of losing our parents.  

As thrilled as we were when Carrie One left for good, there was at least one downside. If Dad was dating someone, he planned fun excursions on the weekends. He made dinners rather than microwaving pizzas. He was an entirely different person around these women—a funnier, gentler version of himself. But when he was in between girlfriends, the house was not a fun place to be. It was hard to know what would set him off. Sometimes our breathing would annoy him. I coughed for five minutes once and he barked, “Get a god damn cough drop already!” He’d come home from work, and I could tell just by the way his key sounded in the lock whether he was in a bad mood already. Part of the problem—he expected Austin and I to be “little men.” When other adults complimented how polite and composed we were, that was what he said. Little men. Independent. Quiet and tidy. If Austin so much as left his backpack in the living room after school, or if I forgot my library book on the table, there would be a lecture. He had an exact way of doing everything—folding laundry, cleaning the bathroom, mopping the floors, cleaning out the gutters, sweeping the porch. If we didn’t do it precisely his way, the chore would have to be redone.  

So, my brother and I were relieved when Kendra arrived. It was probably the summer I turned eleven. Or twelve. Puberty hadn’t hit yet. I was the third shortest boy in my class and fairly terrible at every new thing I tried.

Before we knew it, Kendra was staying over at our house two or three nights a week. When she was there for breakfast and dinner, we had to eat at the dining room table (usually we ate with our plates on our laps in front of the television). She could look like two different people depending on the day. During the week, she came directly from the hospital, still in her pink or blue scrubs, hair straightened and glossy. On the weekends, she let her hair revert back to its natural waviness and wore volleyball shorts, tank tops, flip flops. Kendra was maybe in her early thirties… What twelve-year-old can gauge the age of an adult? She was an X-Ray technician with a pointy chin and a heart-shaped face. Her tan was not artificial or sprayed-on, but well-earned from hours spent gardening, mowing her yard, tubing in the river, biking, and running. It dawned on me, even then, that she was not my father’s normal type. Physically, too stringy and muscular. Socially, too talkative, too optimistic. Yet, for some reason, this made me think that this time the relationship might stand a chance.  

The thing I liked best about Kendra was that she did not use the talking-to-a-kid voice most grown-ups put on when speaking to my brother and I. The tone and tenor and texture of her voice did not change when she switched from suggesting what our father should do about the wasp nest in our weeping willow to asking us what we were learning at our summer camps. At first, I was a little unsettled by her attention. When I was speaking, Kendra locked in on me. She pointed her whole body at me, leaning in, cheek resting in hand, seemingly hanging on my every word. Once I realized that she did it to everyone, including Austin, including other adults, I wasn’t so self-conscious, but at the beginning I stammered and shrunk away from these conversations to the point that my father levied one of his favorite phrases: “What is wrong with you? Act right!” 

On weekends, Kendra would spread out a clean beach towel on the carpet in the living room, paint her toenails and fingernails, and watch her shows in rotation: Survivor, Big Brother, and The Amazing Race. “Asinine reality shows” our father dismissed them as. He would never have allowed such programming on our television had Austin and I been the ones to put it on. Girlfriends had a way of getting away with things like that. Intrigued by this genre of television I’d never been allowed to watch, I would sit with her on the ground and ask her questions during the commercial breaks. I always wanted her to explain something that had been said by one of the contestants or needed her to fill me in on the events of an episode I’d missed.  

“Have you ever thought about going on Survivor?” I asked her.  

“Oh, if they called me, I would go like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I sent in an audition tape when they first started the show. I never heard back.” 

“What about Amazing Race?” 

“Get to travel the world for free? Are you kidding me? Sign me up.” Her voice was deeper, huskier than Dad’s other girlfriends. “I’ve never applied to that one though. I’ve never had anyone to be my travel buddy. My ex-husband. Oh boy. Man.” She paused. “Let’s just say he was not a traveler. I could barely get him to go to Vegas with me.” 

This was news to me, her having once being married. It might feel like it to me, but she had not dropped out of the sky and into our lives. She had a history.  

“Your father wouldn’t be a very good partner either. He would get too stressed out if one thing went wrong.” She applied a shaky stroke to her right pinky. The left hand always looked better than the left hand. “How about you? You want to go on the show with me?” 

“I’ve never been out of the country,” I laughed.  

Kendra blew on the wet neon pink polish on her fingernails, moving her fingers back and forth like they were the holes of a harmonica. “Well that’s the thing, neither have I! I think we’d make a good team.”  

I would have liked to travel the world with Kendra. She was a great teacher. Far more patient than my father. She taught me the best way to dissect a watermelon, how to dig a garden, how to arrange flowers in a vase for maximum beauty, how to make banana bread, how to dive like a pro at the pool. That summer, Kendra had my father, the homebody, driving the four of us all across the state to minor league baseball games with dollar beer nights, a county fair’s demolition derby, friends’ lake houses, rivers to canoe, concerts for musicians I’d never heard of before. We drove four hours to the biggest waterpark in the region. Dad and Kendra booked a night at the Holiday Inn Express; Austin and I didn’t even care that we would have to share a queen bed. In the afternoon, when Austin and Dad got sunburnt and tired and wanted to go back to the hotel room, Kendra and I stayed another three hours, going down the Toilet Bowl slide nine times total. 

Waiting in line for the slide where the floor dropped out from underneath you and you shot down through a chute, I felt brave enough to say to Kendra, “Can I ask you something?” 

“Sure! Can I lie?” 

“No.” I said, gravely. “Why haven’t you, like have you ever, would you want… I wondered… why… did you ever want kids?”   

Her nose scrunched in thought. She pushed her lips to the left, nodding. 

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.” I wished I hadn’t asked.

 “No, it’s fine. I’ve thought about it a lot. I think I always thought I would have kids.” Briefly, the image of Kendra and my father’s baby, my younger half-brother, flashed behind my eyes. “My ex definitely wanted them, but I think more just because he felt like that’s what everyone else was doing.” Men below us in line and men above us in line craned their necks to look at Kendra’s figure without their girlfriends and wives and kids noticing. Kendra never appeared to notice. “I don’t think everybody is meant to be a parent.” 

“I think you would be a great mom.” 

“What a thing to say.” 

Summer vanished; we had to go back to school. We still saw her on the weekends and most weeknights. While we were out, I liked to think that strangers looked at us and saw a normal family.

In early November, the forecast called for nine inches of snow on a single Thursday night. The school had called in the two-hour delay for the next morning. When they called a delay that early that usually signaled an imminent closing. The thought had crossed my mind that, because of the likelihood of school being cancelled, I could forgo my homework this one night and stay up past my weeknight bedtime of ten-thirty, which meant Kendra and I could watch the episode of Big Brother we’d recorded. I came down the stairs to ask them, but Dad was holding out Kendra’s coat and she was bending her arms through the sleeves. My disappointment aside, it made sense. Her house was closer to the hospital. If the roads were dangerous in the morning then she would want the shorter commute.  

“Love you.” She kissed Dad. Whipping her scarf at my nose, she smiled. “Don’t watch that episode without me, okay?” she said. “If I see on the DVR that it’s already been watched, I’m never going to forgive you.” 

“I’ll wait.” Then, mimicking every adult I’d ever met, I said, “Drive safe.” 

She cackled and tapped my father’s nose with her mitten. “How did a jerk like you make such great kids?” Back to me, “Bye, bud. I hope you guys get to go sledding tomorrow! I wish I could call off work and come with.” 

“Bye, Kendra!” As I said this, my body malfunctioned. My foot took one step forward, my arms moved up from my sides, as if ready to embrace, and there was a terrifying moment where all of three of us realized what was happening, and my heart shot up into my throat like the capsules shooting up the tubes at the drive-thru at the bank. Kendra looked at my father, seeking… what? Validation? Permission? Before she could step forward with her arms raised, I aborted. Recoiling, I took two steps back, looked at the ground, stuttered a second goodbye, fled to my room, leaving the two of them standing there in the entryway. Sitting at my desk chair, I opened The Hobbit, strained my ears, listening. Whispers. The soft click of the screen door. The hard thump of the front door closing. The lock tumbling. Kendra’s boots, muffled by snow, bumping down the stairs and the walkway. The page’s lines swam in front of my eyes. In trying to alchemize a similar feeling of mortification, I alloyed the memory of throwing up in the teacher’s trash can in fifth grade with the feeling of not being invited to Ben Jackson’s ninth birthday party. It would be better, I thought, to be a hermit. To never talk to anyone again. To spend all day by yourself. Why did it have to be so humiliating just to exist? 

Dad knocked on my open door. “You reading?” 

I hated when he did this—came into rooms and made obvious observations. Not looking up: “Yes. Trying to concentrate.” 

“Your door’s been squeaking. We might need to hit it with the WD-40 again.” 

“Yup.” 

“All right.” He lingered in the doorway. “Just so you know, kid, it’s…” 

“Okay.” 

“It’s not a big deal.” 

“Uh huh.” 

“You should do what feels right. If you want to give her a hug… It would make me happy. I thin… it would make her pretty happy too, I’d bet.” 

I had read the same line ten times. “Okay, yeah, whatever.” 

“You’re a good kid, you know that, right? I love you.” 

“All right. Love you.” 

In bed that night, I watched through the gap in the curtain as the snow fell steadily under a full moon, replaying the moment in the entryway over and over again. Being a middle schooler, I understood most relationships at that point. I mean to say, I understood how I was expected to act around most people. Brothers fight at home but stand up for each other everywhere else. Dads disappoint sons, and sons disappoint dads. Grandparents are like older parents with less rules. Teachers tell you what to do and you have to respect them. Friends are people who you find it easy to be with. A girlfriend or a boyfriend is someone who you find it easy to be with and who you also want to kiss. But, what I didn’t know, what no one had ever took the time to tell me, was how were you supposed to act around the girlfriend of a father? What were the rules? What was normal? Because that was all I ever wanted to be—normal. I found Kendra easy to be with, so did that make her my friend? Could kids and adults be friends? Could you call someone a friend who could break up with your father tomorrow and then they wouldn’t be in your life anymore? That didn’t seem like a real friend at all.

I was grateful the next time when I saw Kendra and there was no awkwardness. I resolved not to make the same mistake again. 

“I’m getting kind of sick of Kendra,” Austin confided in January. We were alone outside one night, throwing a football back and forth in the slush. Kendra and Dad were at a friend’s dinner party, and we were home alone for the next few hours. We couldn’t leave the yard if Dad wasn’t home. “She’s just always around now.” 

“But is that a bad thing?” I hated playing catch with Austin. He wanted to see how hard he could throw the ball every time. It hurt my hands, my stomach, my chest. “Which girlfriend have you liked more? She’s way better than both Carries. I think she’s nice. I think she’s easily top three.” 

Austin’s throw bounced right off my chest, rattled my sternum. “She’s making our house girly.”  

What made a house “girly,” I wondered? We’d been conditioned, long before we met Kendra, never to leave the toilet set up or belch loudly, so what was different now? No, we couldn’t walk around the house shirtless anymore. The candles hadn’t been there before, scents with names like Apple Orchard and Lilac Daydreams and Lemon Grove after the Rain. There were new lotions and creams and perfumes and oils in our bathroom every month. Recently, she’d taken down our father’s cheap gray black-out living room curtains and replaced them with a green linen fabric that didn’t block out much light and went well with the green accents in the couch’s fabric. I didn’t tell Austin, but I didn’t think the changes were all that bad.  

In the spring, I dated a girl from my class I had crush on named Nicole. The entire relationship lasted two weeks, ten recesses, five hugs, three kisses. She broke up with me over text on the bus ride home without a concrete reason:  

pls dont h8 me 

i hope we can still b frnds 

I didn’t try to hide the break-up, wore it on my face, hoping Dad and Kendra would ask. When they inevitably did inquire, I read them the text messages while they made dinner. By the smell, I could tell it was Kendra’s saucy French chicken. The kitchen was tense. The two of them were snapping and barking at each other that night. It was a big space with a lot of counter space, but they always seemed to be in the other’s way. The problem was that they both thought themselves the head chef and the other their sous chef. Kendra over-seasoned, Dad under-seasoned. Dad cleaned as he went, Kendra preferred to leave a big mess for the end. Kendra preferred an expensive olive oil, Dad always found a way to bring up that she’d made him buy a “ten-dollar bottle of olive oil.” 

Dad’s santoku knife sliced through the chicken savagely. Raw chicken looked like alien flesh to me, hardly fit to eat. He paused between chops, shook his head at me. “Don’t fall for that trap. There’s no going back. So, don’t be friends. But don’t be rude either. Kill her with kindness. Make her think, ‘Why’s he doing so well? Did I make a mistake there?’ Nothing drives a woman crazy like an indifferent man.” 

Kendra scoffed, whisking cornstarch and water together in a bowl for the sauce. One time she had let me help with this part of the recipe and no matter how long I stirred, the cornstarch continued to clump. “You think women and men can’t be friends?” 

“Sure they can,” Dad said. “Just not after a break-up.” 

 “That’s hideous advice to give to your son.” 

“Everything is hideous with you these days,” Dad said. “I’m going to buy you a thesaurus for your birthday so I can hear some new words.” 

She fluttered her eyes and tightened her jaw. She ignored him, speaking directly to me, “There’s nothing wrong with being friends after a break-up. Most people are just meant to be friends anyway, and the relationship stuff just gets in the way. Remember that she’s human too and she’s got her own stuff going on that you might not even know about. If she asks you how you’re doing, tell her the truth. If you tell a woman the truth, you’re automatically ahead of about ninety percent of the male population.”

Dad grumbled something about “feminizing” that was lost in the sound of the chicken popping in Kendra’s olive oil.  

In the spring, through a gray February and a cold March, Kendra cheered me up by enlisting my help in planning the upcoming summer. Our family had a whiteboard in the mudroom with important dates and phone numbers where we kept a tentative schedule of the month. Dad and Austin contributed their ideas too, but they weren’t nearly as excited as us. Most of the ideas came from Kendra and I.  

Canoe the Boundary Waters 

Overnight trip to the Finger Lakes 

Shakespeare in the park 

Old Oak Beach

Rent jet-skis  

Sometime in April I started to notice that Kendra wasn’t sleeping over as often anymore. We would go a whole week without seeing her, and when she did come around she blamed it on work. Dad was discreet, but once I overheard him hissing on the phone at her. I wasn’t really worried until we were coming home from dinner in town and Dad took a weird, longer route home so that he could drive past her yellow one-story house. She was home, I could tell, because her silver Envoy was alone in the driveway. I figured we would stop and say hello. Why else would we be driving by? Dad slowed down, but ultimately drove right on by. Maybe you could say he didn’t notice, but I was positive I watched his eyes dart toward her house, his shoulders relax.  

If they were fighting, I didn’t know the reason. Was Kendra like all those other women? Expecting too much? What was it that they wanted that my father couldn’t find within himself? Or was it that he could find it and just didn’t want to give it to them? 

My last tennis match of the year, she came to support me. I unfortunately chose that day to have my worst performance of the season. Double-faulted, volleyed balls out of bounds, sent backhands right into the net, let the opponent come back from forty-love to win a game. My dad had climbed down from the small set of bleachers and paced back and forth along the fence. He didn’t yell during the match. He wasn’t one of those dads. But I had performed poorly on enough playing surfaces in my young life to know when he was hot and that I had a miserable drive home ahead of me. I was afraid to meet Kendra’s eyes, but, when I finally did, she didn’t look discouraged at all. She clapped and shouted, “You got this!”  

After the match, on the walk up to the car, I straightened my back, kept my head back on my neck, not wanting a critique of my posture on top of all the other critiques I was due. My father always had his seat way back to accommodate his long legs, so I took the seat behind Kendra. The inside of the car felt like a furnace. Dad sat there, not putting the key in the ignition, denying the relief of air-conditioning, punishing me with silence.  

“If you ever,” Dad growled, his eyes set on the middle distance beyond the windshield, “throw the racquet I bought you again, I will take it, I will beat you with it, and then you will never play tennis again.” 

Kendra inhaled sharply. It could have been a gasp or the beginning of a sigh.

“I didn’t throw it!” I whined. “It slipped out of my hand.”  

Now Dad turned. Sweat slicking his forehead. Wrath in his eyes. Wrath was the only word for it. Something biblical about it. Something city-destroying about it. “Slipped, my ass! Talk back again, I’m going have you running suicides in the yard until you fucking pass out. Is that clear? Look at me when I’m talking to you.” 

“Peter,” Kendra scolded. I’d never heard her scold before. She never had to admonish Austin or I. “He had a bad game. Who cares? You think yelling at him is going to make him into Roger Federer?”  

In lieu of an answer, Dad faced forward, started the car, peeled out of the parking lot. I knew the drive by heart, could guess at how much longer I had to endure it by our location.  

Twelve minutes. Eleven minutes. Ten minutes. Could we make it just nine more minutes? 

“Jesus H. Christ, you’re lazy,” my father cut through the silence. “You loaf around, you don’t hustle, you pitch a fit every time the ref makes a call against you. That’s another thing, show up another ref while I’m in the stands, I swear to God that I will come down th—”

“You are way out of line right now,” Kendra came to my defense. 

I physically braced myself, as if we were about to collide with another car.  

“Don’t.” My father seethed. “Tell me. How to raise. My. Kids.” 

“I’m not,” Kendra began. “I’m—” 

“I have raised them to be little men. I expect them to—” 

“Do you understand how psychotic it is to expect two boys to act like men? Do you understand how fucking insane you sound when you say that?” 

“They’re my kids, it’s my call.” I wanted him to stop there, but he wasn’t capable of it. He wasn’t capable of losing an argument. He always had to be right. “I’m not sure when you became the expert on kids, considering you don’t even have any.”

At home, I had to shower immediately. More wrath would await me if I sat down on furniture while being a sweaty mess. By the time I got out of the shower, Kendra was already gone. Later, once Austin’s friend’s mom dropped him back off at our house, he and I debriefed on our walk down to the gas station to get slushies.   

“Whoa,” Austin said. “That’s like really bad.” 

“I know.” 

“It’s not like your fault though.” 

“I know it’s not my fault!” 

“I just said that!” 

Dad stalked around the house, searching for chores procrastinated or dirty clothes left on the bathroom floor or mud tracked in. We didn’t see Kendra at all the next week and the next. This had happened plenty of other times with Dad’s past girlfriends: break-ups and make-ups. It was one fight. They would be rational. They would fix whatever was wrong. She would be back on our living room floor asking me to pick her nail polish color by the time school let out. All of a sudden, almost overnight, the candles disappeared. The lotions too. In the trash can, I found the Shasta daisies she’d picked. The garden outside was neglected. I tried watering it for her, but I ended up drowning pretty much everything she’d planted.  

I was afraid to say anything to Dad outright. I couldn’t work up the nerve to ask him directly until he erased the summer plans off the white board and replaced it with that week’s grocery list. 

“So is Kendra not coming back?” 

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” my father grumbled, scrubbing at the board with the eraser. The travel plans ghosted, having been written so long ago that they would need to be removed with some heavy-duty remover. Underneath the grocery list, I could still see Kendra’s handwriting, haunting.  

One Saturday in May, Dad left a brown paper bag by the door. Sneaking a look inside the reused Wegmans bag, I saw where the candles and the lotions and the nail polishes and extra pair of shoes and the special olive oil had disappeared to. It looked like he had assembled the world’s most depressing gift basket of secondhand presents. Some of the items made sense, like her spine-creased copy of 100 Places to See Before You Die. But he also included the pair of sunglasses she’d bought him for his birthday, which I knew Kendra would not expect returned. My father’s blatant pettiness. His thorough attempt to scrub our lives clean of any memory of her existence. I couldn’t stand to look at him. I couldn’t be in the house with him. 

I was down the street playing four-square with the neighborhood kids in badly-chalked lines on the cracked and weedy basketball court when the boxy silver SUV drove by the park, headed in the direction of our house. Our house lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Drivers used it to turn around all the time. Maybe it was someone else? No, I was sure it was her. It had to be her. My friends yelled after me. “Where you going?” My legs were churning, kicking up pieces of gravel. I had never run that fast before, not even at tennis practice. A stitch broke in my side. I bent against it, ran harder, huffing.  

The Silvery Envoy had parked behind our father’s truck. I slowed down on the approach, needing to catch my breath. I didn’t want it to be obvious that I had ran. From afar, I could see my father and Kendra standing on the porch, the front door open, but the screen door closed to keep out the bugs. The Wegmans bag sat at Kendra’s feet. I was too far away to make heads or tails of their facial expressions, whether this was the final snuffing or a last-ditch striking of the flint. Their bodies, however, were rigid as columns, refusing to point their feet at each other. My stomach dropped like I was on the toilet-bowl ride again. I had hoped they might be oblivious to my presence, but as I stepped into the yard they both turned abruptly. Kendra put up her hand: a “hold on,” not a “hello.” Dad took this opportunity to naturally conclude the exchange. “Hope you find whatever it is you want,” his snarky voice carried to me. As he went back in the house, he yelled at me over his shoulder, “Dinner in twenty. Wash up and set the table!” 

She scoffed, seethed. Holding the brown bag by the handle and the bottom, Kendra stepped down off the porch. Her flip-flops slapped against the ground. Nervously, I stepped toward the porch, to go inside, to do what I was told, but suddenly I wasn’t in control of my body again. My arms were latching themselves around Kendra while she still awkwardly holding the bag. My eyes were too afraid to look at her face. They stayed locked to the ground. My body felt her body tense and untense. The bag thudded at our feet. She locked her hands together behind my back, squeezing, rocking. My chin moved to her shoulder. Strands of her hair stuck to my wet face. She smelled of SPF and lavender-lotion. My throat felt as if it had snapped shut like a bear trap. For some childish reason, I felt that if I let go of her, the world would end right there and then; the sky would fall on our heads; the sun would cave in on itself; a cold, apocalyptic darkness would descend.  

Please say it, I thought, still holding tight, still afraid to look at her. Say, I’ll take you with me. Away from here. Away from this man who is allergic to giving. Say, We’ll still canoe the boundary waters! And we’ll go on The Amazing Race. We’ll make a new garden together and I’ll show you how to take care of it. Or just say, If I ever have kids, I sure hope they turn out like you.  

Say, I will see you again, my friend.