He and Beau got along fine but they weren’t close friends and didn’t socialize. After nine months living together, they headed for home, and with an undergraduate student population of forty thousand, it was unlikely they would see much of each other again.
“You ready?” I asked Beau.
“Hungry,” he said, which was always his answer. “Can we hit Tommy’s on the way home?”
“What’s Tommy’s?”
“Oh, Dad, you have not had a chili cheeseburger until you’ve had Tommy’s.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell Beau that because of a weird iron issue with my blood, I had become primarily vegan. And this was one of those opportunities when I figured a chili cheeseburger with my son would have a far greater impact on my memories, not to mention my cholesterol and fat levels, than on my iron count. And I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to create a memory.
We ate the burgers at an outdoor bench in glorious sunshine, then jumped in the car and headed for home. I kept waiting for Beau to turn on the radio and use the aux cord to plug in his playlist, but he never did.
“Did I ever tell you about my final drive home from law school behind my buddy Thomas?”
“No,” Beau said.
“I had an afternoon final, but Thomas waited so we could drive home together. I didn’t finish the test until close to five o’clock. We should have just spent the night, but we were both anxious to get home. We came out of these mountains and descended into tule fog.”
“What’s tule fog?” Beau asked.
“Tule fog is a thick ground fog, like driving through pea soup. The headlights on my Ford Pinto could barely pierce it.”
“Shit, really?”
“We should have pulled over and stayed in a hotel. Not that either of us had any money, but we had credit cards.”
“Why didn’t you?” Beau asked.
Good question. By the end of law school I was twenty-five years old and couldn’t blame an undeveloped frontal cortex. I had a girlfriend, but more importantly, I wanted to get away from law school. It had been three difficult years, and I wanted to put it in my past. “We should have,” I said, “and I hope that if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you have enough sense to do it.”
“Seems logical,” Beau said.
“It does,” I said, “but I wasn’t thinking logically. I just wanted to get home and see my girlfriend.”
“This the girlfriend you broke up with the next year?” Beau asked, smiling.
“Same one,” I said. “The next morning Thomas called and told me to turn on the news. The tule fog had caused a fifty-car crash that night and, by what we could judge, it happened just ten to fifteen minutes behind us. Twelve people lost their lives. Thirty people were hospitalized.”
“Shit,” Beau said again.
“Do you know why those people died and we lived?”
“Luck,” Beau said, shrugging.
I nodded and thought of that line from the Harry Chapin song, but my boy was not just like me. I had no doubt he would have stayed in a hotel. I’d like to believe I had something to do with that, but I think Chris’s death had more to do with it.
“But here’s the thing. We had the chance to make our own luck. We had the chance to pull over and get a hotel or, at worst, to sleep in our cars until morning—so did all those other people who didn’t and lost their lives. Don’t forget that. Sometimes bad luck is really dumb actions or inaction. You can make your own luck by making smart decisions.”
Beau looked out the window. “I could have been better at that this year,” he said.
There had been the phone call home after Beau’s first-quarter finals when he learned he had earned two Cs and a B-minus. There had been the poor girlfriend choice that had also ended badly, and a fight at a UCLA football game that resulted in a black eye and a trip to the hospital.
“It’s part of growing up,” I said. “Hopefully, you learned from the experiences, so you won’t go through them again.”
His spring quarter, Beau pulled two As and a B-plus.
I almost said, At least you had the chance to make your mistakes and live to talk about them, but I realized I wasn’t the best person to tell Beau how lucky he had been. The best person was a guy just about the same age as Beau, who had flown across the country to Los Angeles chasing a girl, and decided to stay for the sunshine, with no humidity. A guy who appreciated those small blessings.
“I have something for you to read,” I said to Beau, and I handed him William’s journal.