I've always wanted to see Ava again. Before Andrew even came back, I had actually looked her phone number up in the phone book, dialed it, only to find it was disconnected. I was wondering what was going on, especially since the last I heard, things weren't going to good for them. And it wasn't like I could have just called up Matt to ask. Not that it was any business of mine to begin with, but I just wanted to know. I mean this was the lady who happily took us into her home when we were children and made food for us, for five odd years.
Anyway when me and Andrew were hanging out, I told him that I would have liked to see Ava again and to my surprise, the considered going all the way to their place to check it out. I thought it was great since I would've never bothered to go all the way out there not knowing whether she was home or not, but if Andrew was willing to drive, I thought it was worth a shot.
As we were driving there, he started having doubts. With good reason too. I could see how weird it would be if my son's two best friends suddenly showed up at my door years after not seeing them. But I legitimately wanted to know how she was doing and somehow managed to convince Andrew, even after all the doubts he was having, that it'd be fine.
We went around the back to try and figure out which house was theirs going by the car (I know, acting like stalkers) but we couldn't find their car in the driveway so we decided to see if there were any telltale props at the front of the house to be able to tell which one was theirs. Then we found the house with a tin boat and that was the telltale prop for me.
It was nerve racking as we stepped up to the door and I rang the doorbell. I wasn't sure if ti was the right house, what if she no longer lived there, what if she didn't recognize us, what if she did and thought we were stalkers for showingup at her door after so long? She didn't come to the door at first so I reached out and rang the doorbell again and behind me, I could tell Andrew was silently praying that she wasn't home. But then the door opened and Ava pokes her head through. I was the first to say something.
"Ava." I say happily. And she just had this look of "who the hell are you" on her face.
So I had to tell her my name and Andrew told her his and we both said "Matt's friends" and suddenly she knew. And christ, the woman seemed incredibly happy to see us. Opened up the door and told us to come in. She took us upstairs to where their living room was and couldn't stop talking, made us coffee, updated us on her life (after we did the same) and that of all the family members.
Apparently grandpa had a heart attack but managed to survive. But as a result this year he won't be taking his yearly 6 month trips to Croatia by himself (Ava theorizes it's to get away from Nona who was the one responsible for giving him the heart attack in the first place, lol). Lino is working in Richmond, Maggie is working in the medical department at UBC and going to school there while Matt is living on his own with housemates. He's engaged to Nicole Wright, of all peopple (where the hell did she pop out of after all these years?!). Ava also gave us Matt's number and encouraged us to call him. After me and Andrew said our goodbyes to her, we had another smoke outside the house by the elementary school, and Andrew did the craziest thing.
He called Matt. After 4 years of not seeing him, after deciding that he wasn't a friend of ours, Andrew decides to pick up the phone and call him anyway just to see how he's doing cause he's feeling "nostalgic" after that meeting with Ava. I thought Andrew was crazy. There was no way Matt would receive us warmly years after we'd written him off. But surprisingly, they managed to organize a dinner for us the next day. Andrew said he was feeling pretty good about it and it would be nice to see Matt again. I still thought he was crazy.
The next day we left at around 5, got a quick coffee and Starbucks before going downtown to grab Matt. We were kind of apprehensive at this point, not sure what to expect. But everything turned out pretty good. Went to Matt's house, met his room mates - and he introduced us as being his best friends from elementary school which was more or less accurate. And here we were visting him more than ten years after the fact. We went to a nearby bar with Nicole and the four of us sat around for dinner and a couple beers talking about all the times (good and bad) we went through at Heritage Mountain Elementary. Matt explained to us the full story behind Ava which I won't repeat here, but the situation was pretty bad. Found out that in the few years we hadn't seen Nicole, she went to photography school and is currently studying computer programming. We talked abit about photoshop technicalities and typographic basics while Andrew and Matt talked about saving the world through the medical field and environmental preservation. Now that I reflect, years ago we probably would've been talking about irrelevent stupid high school shit which is amazing considering what growing up does.
The night ended well, dropped Matt and Nicole off at his house and I went with Andrew to Starbucks. It was good seeing them both again after so long.
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