Prologue

I had accomplished nothing in my life.

Nothing was worthy of textbook praise, nothing was satisfying even on a personal scale. Life itself seemed to be a vague waste of time, a half–unconscious reality eternally haunted by the glimmer of a dream – here, then gone, then lingering just out of reach. There had been no time to lose, yet somehow minutes, days, and years had slipped away unchallenged, unnoticed.

Now missed dearly.

My past was certainly not one marred by extravagant suffering, and perhaps that was the most damning quality of my life – that I hadn't actually committed any major failure. I merely existed, somewhere in between success and failure, and that stagnant state of being eliminated any possible justification for my life. I didn't even deserve the right to pity myself because my days were merely yellowed by melancholy, bland and stale like everyone else's. My plight was universal: boyhood dreams had rusted at a young age, aspirations choked out of existence by cruel reality. At some point in my past, just like many before me, I had desired more than anything to be a hero, or simply someone different. My father had been my inspiration on several levels: he'd been different from everyone else in many ways, yet he'd been conformed in many more.

Human beings are inherently selfish, prideful creatures and I'm no exception to the rule. We like to pretend we call all the shots, but really we're just the targets.

Of course, Jimmy had never been like me. Hell, Jimmy had been as different as humanly possible. He had always been happy, always successful. His great ambition in life had been to make a difference – not simply to be different, and maybe that was what kept him head and shoulders above me and the rest of the world.

Jimmy was not necessarily a rich somebody just because he was successful. He entertained modest dreams, held a career job that paid well and gave him a firm financial foothold, and seemed to cruisethrough life. The difference between us was that he had a course heading and I didn't. Mine had somehow been lost in the dispatch.

In his personal endeavors, he remained well advanced and so happy. He had something I didn't – something that had nothing to do with money, success, or friendship. It wasn't even religion. It was just contentment: peace with one's self. He was confident, but not to the point of pride; happy, but not to the point of wasteful expenditure.

We'd been friends as children and become neighbors as adults, a bond perhaps somewhat stronger than friendship. We harbored no secrets; he knew all about me, how I'd been generally unhappy through life, and I knew that my discontent nagged at him like stitches. He'd always been a fixer, but I was one mess in particular which he had to restrain himself from cleaning. I offered him no explanations for my condition, and to his credit, he offered no remedies – only consolation, which I had no use for anyway. I didn't deserve consolation any more than I deserved the right to pity myself.

Jimmy was just that way. He didn't tolerate me out of obligation. There was just something in his soul that drove him to love people – to give to those undeserving. Call it generosity, call it whatever you would like. That was Jimmy.

We had barbeques Saturday afternoons in the summer, invaded each other's homes to watch the football games on Sundays, and when our kids had been growing up, Jimmy had hosted pool parties for the neighborhood in his backyard. He'd been like a favorite uncle to my son, only closer. Sometimes I wondered if Jimmy had taught my boy more than I had, but I'd always been the one standing at his side during the times when it really mattered. My boy had always loved me like a son should, and I had more or less given him the love a son deserves.

But maybe Jimmy had given him something more. See, Jimmy had given him a friend.

Jimmy was the last person to give anyone trouble. He worked longer and harder than anyone, traded kindness for kindness, gentle rebuttal for harsh words. He was the last person anyone would ever suspect of unhappiness to any degree: he had a loving wife, a beautiful daughter who was still living at home, and an impeccably straight line of hedges that marked the edge of his property from the edge of mine.

All this taken into account, it was the greatest shock of my life to learn, on the morning of April the 21st, 2008, that Jimmy was dead. And that he had committed suicide.