How to Be a Best Friend
Friends make friends make snow angels
We met up in the hotel lobby.
“Oh no! I left my mask in the car,” she said with a frantic but fun urgency I always associated with her.
We hugged anyway. It wasn’t much of a risk, both of us vaccinated. She couldn’t see the grin beneath my mask. But she beamed like a spotlight.
Diane and I were best friends in high school but hadn’t seen each other often since. I left Minneapolis weeks after graduation. She stayed in the area and worked at a furniture store, helping people turn houses into homes with her eye for design. Before the days of social media, it took more effort to remain in touch. We were both bad at it.
“Where should we go,” she asked excitedly, as though we might suddenly decide on a spontaneous trip to Tahiti.
“The mall?”
She laughed. Diane laughed a lot.
She always struck me as electric, a sparking live wire that might, on occasion, give you a sharp shock which you probably deserved.
It had been years since either of us had been inside the cathedral of consumerism that was the Mall of America but its temperate climate in January in Minnesota was as tempting as forbidden fruit.
