Chapter 11 Reece
ELEVEN
REECE
I run into him on a Wednesday at the pharmacy on Mason Street.
I’m not going to the pharmacy on Mason Street.
I’m going to the pharmacy on Elm. I have been going to the pharmacy on Elm because the pharmacy on Mason is closer to his apartment.
I have been re-routing my life in two-block detours since the conversation in his apartment on Friday night.
I have done this without admitting to myself that I am doing this.
The pharmacy on Elm is out of toothpaste.
The kind I use. The brand. All four of the variants.
I know this because I checked, twice, standing in front of the shelf, and the shelf was empty.
I stood there for a minute longer than I should have.
Then I left and walked the four blocks to Mason because I needed toothpaste and I needed it today.
This is the kind of decision that’s going to keep happening to me.
I’m in the toothpaste aisle. I pick up a tube of the kind I use.
I hold it. I turn to walk to the register. He’s at the end of the aisle.
He has a basket. The basket has things in it: contact lens solution, a roll of paper towels, a box of tissues.
He’s reading the back of a bottle of something.
He’s wearing the same coat he was wearing on Friday.
He has not seen me. I do not move. I should move.
The decision is: do I make it worse by leaving without him seeing me, or do I make it worse by being seen, or do I make it the same amount of bad by saying something first. I run through it in two seconds.
I decide nothing. My body decides for me.
My body stays where it is. I am standing at the toothpaste shelf with a tube of toothpaste in my hand.
I am watching him read the back of a bottle of something at the end of the aisle.
He looks up. He sees me. His face does not move.
His face goes still the way it did on the sidewalk, where it doesn’t move, where it just registers, where his eyes give him away before any other part of him can.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You shop here.”
“I, sometimes. I, the other one was out.”
“Out of what.”
“Toothpaste.”
He looks at the toothpaste in my hand. He looks at it for a second too long. His face moves, this time, just a flicker at the corner of his mouth. I don’t know what it means and I don’t get to ask.
“Crest,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“You still use the same one.”
“Yeah.”
“Mint.”
“Yeah.”
“Same as before.”
“Yeah.”
He looks at me. He looks at me for a long second.
His face has done this thing in the last three days where it looks like a face that has been turned a quarter degree.
Like the angle of it relative to the rest of him has changed by something subtle.
The change is doing something to me. I cannot place what.
I am looking at him. I am holding a tube of toothpaste. I am at a pharmacy.
“How are you,” I say.
I say it because I cannot stand the silence.
I say it because I am the one who showed up at his apartment and said almost nothing.
I say it because how are you is the kind of sentence a person can say to another person in a pharmacy on a Wednesday.
How are you is the smallest possible version of asking. He looks at me.
“I’m at a pharmacy,” he says. “On a Wednesday. With a basket. Buying tissues.”
“Right.”
“That’s how I am.”
“Okay.”
“How are you, Reed.”
He says my name like it’s a word he is testing.
He has not said it before. He did not say it on the sidewalk, and he did not say it in his apartment on Friday.
He called me you. I noticed that, the whole conversation, you.
He is saying it now. He’s doing it on purpose.
He has decided to pick the name up. It’s mine.
It’s what I am called. The other name, the full one, the paperwork, the things he does not know, is its own thing.
Reed is what I gave him on the sidewalk. He’s saying it now.
“I’m okay,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I’m… getting through it.”
“Through what.”
“Griffin.”
“Through what, Reed.”
I look at him. I do not have an answer that is not the answer I cannot give.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Okay.”
I move to walk past him. He does not move out of the way.
He does not block me. He just does not move.
I have to turn slightly to get around him.
As I do, my coat sleeve brushes his sleeve.
The brush is something I do not know how to describe.
It’s a coat against a coat. It is fabric.
There is no skin in it. I feel it for the rest of the day.
I get to the register. I pay for the toothpaste.
I do not turn around. I walk out of the pharmacy and I walk down Mason and I do not look back.
I walk for fifteen minutes before I realize I am still holding the bag at my side instead of putting it in my pocket.
I look down at the bag. The toothpaste is in it.
I think I know what toothpaste he uses. I have known what toothpaste he uses for six years.
I knew it before I left. I know it now. The kind, the brand, the variant, the size of the tube he buys, the way he pinches the bottom of the tube when it’s almost empty rather than rolling it.
Rolling it is, in his words, a thing for people who do not want a clean countertop.
I know what aisle of which pharmacy he goes to.
I know what toothpaste he uses, and I just had to confirm it to him, in an aisle, with a tube in my hand.
I walk home. I sit on the couch. I do not call Mendez.
The toothpaste is in the bag on the couch next to me.
I do not move it. I sit there with the bag on the couch and I look at the bag and I think Crest. Mint.
The same one. I think I just had to confirm it.
I think Griffin knows what toothpaste I use too.
The thought arrives clean. He knows. Of course he knows.
He has known for six years, and he has been sitting with knowing for two more years on top of those.
He’s the one who said Crest before I said anything.
He knew before I had to confirm. We are walking around in this town carrying the same information about each other.
I sit on the couch with the toothpaste in the bag, and I do not call Mendez.