Chapter 26 Reece
TWENTY-SIX
REECE
We get back to the car at three. We sit in the car with the heater going.
We do not turn it on the highest setting because we have just been in the wind for an hour and a half and even the medium setting feels like too much.
We sit. We do not talk. He has his hand on my thigh and I have mine over his.
“Hungry,” I say, after a while.
“Yes.”
“There was a place we passed. The diner with the pie sign.”
“Yes.”
“That.”
“Yes.”
He starts the car.
The waitress is in her sixties and calls us boys.
We sit in a booth by the window and order coffee and a slice each, coconut for him, blueberry for me.
We sit in the booth and we eat the pie. I watch him eat.
I watch him eat the way I have been watching him eat since November, which is to say carefully.
Griffin eats neatly and methodically and with attention to the food.
He eats the coconut pie and he closes his eyes for a second on the first bite and I watch him close his eyes and I think I get to watch you eat pie for the rest of my life.
I think it without deciding to think it.
I think I get to watch you eat pie for the rest of my life. I’m someone who gets to do that.
“What,” he says.
“What.”
“You’re staring.”
“I am.”
“Why.”
“Griffin. I am thinking about pie.”
“Pie.”
“Yes.”
“Reed.”
“What.”
“That is the worst sentence I have ever heard you say.”
I almost laugh. I do laugh. I laugh in the booth in the diner with the pie sign and the sixty-year-old waitress and the gray February sky outside.
He laughs too. We laugh in the booth for a minute, the kind of laughing where you are laughing at the laughing as much as the thing.
The woman two booths over looks at us briefly and looks away. We laugh until we are done.
“I’m thinking about the rest of my life,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I’m thinking the rest of my life is going to have you in it.
That I’m going to get to watch you eat pie.
For a long time. That this is a thing I hadn’t let myself think about — that I get to watch you do small things.
For a long time. I’d told myself that the most I would ever get with you was the version where I walked past you on a path in October.
I’d been making peace with that being all I got.
I’m sitting in a diner and I realize I get more than that. A lot more than that.”
He looks at me.
“Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“You are going to make me cry in this diner.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry.”
“Pick a different word.”
“I…“
“You don’t have a different word either.”
“No.”
“That’s okay.”
“That’s okay.”
He takes my hand across the table. He keeps eating his pie with the other; I eat mine with the hand he isn’t holding. We finish. The waitress brings more coffee, and we drink it. We pay and leave.
We drive back at four. The sun is setting on the way back. The drive is shorter than the drive there, the way drives back always are. We do not talk much. He has the radio off. He drives. I look at the road. About forty minutes from town he says, “Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“What.”
“Tell me something about her. Anything. One thing.”
I look at him.
“Why.”
“Because I am coming. Because I am going to lose mine and you have lost yours and we are going to carry them next to each other for the rest of our lives. I want to know one thing. I do not need the whole story. I want a thing I can hold. So that when you are quiet at the kitchen table here and I know you are thinking about her, I have a picture. Not the whole picture. One picture. I want to know what to put in the room.”
I look at the road for a minute.
“She held a spoon a particular way.”
“Okay.”
“Three fingers and a thumb. The pinky out. Like she’d been told once as a girl to keep the pinky out and had never stopped.
She held it that way her whole life. I noticed it when I was eight.
Nine. I noticed it because I’d started copying her without meaning to, and one day my grandmother said you eat like your mother and I realized I did.
I’d been holding the spoon the way she held the spoon for a year without knowing.
I stopped doing it on purpose for a while.
Then I started again. I still do it. When I’m alone.
I’ve caught myself doing it in this town — holding a spoon over soup with the pinky out, by myself, in my kitchen, twenty years after I copied her without meaning to. ”
“Okay.”
He drives. He does not say anything for a minute. Then: “Marisol.”
“Marisol.”
“With the spoon.”
“With the spoon.”
“Okay. I have her now.”
“Okay.”
We drive. The sun is going down behind the trees on my side and the light is doing the thing it does in late winter, which is gold and short. He reaches over. He takes my hand on the gear shift. He does not look at me. He drives.
After a while I say, “Tell me one of yours.”
“My mother.”
“Yes.”
He thinks. He thinks for a while. He thinks the way he thinks, which is to take the question seriously.
“She used to read the obituaries on Sunday mornings,” he says.
“Not because she knew anyone. Because she said it was important to know who had gone. She would sit at the kitchen table with the paper and a coffee and she would read every one. Out loud, sometimes, if she found a good one. Listen to this. Worked at the same bakery for fifty-one years. Survived by his wife and a parrot. She would do voices. She would tell us about strangers like she was breaking news. My father would roll his eyes and Sara would laugh and I would sit there with my cereal and listen. She did it every Sunday for years. It was not maudlin. It was the opposite. She thought it was respectful to read them. To know they had been here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. I have her.”
“You have her.”
We drive. The light goes from gold to the gray that comes after gold. He keeps my hand. After a while he says, “Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Her number.”
I look at him.
“Why.”
“I want to have it. I am not going to call it. I am not going to write it down. I want to know it in my head. The way I will know your name. The way I will know about the spoon. So when I am old, I have her number. I have had it. The not-calling will be a thing I do.”
I look at the road. I tell him. He repeats it once, quiet, and nods. He does not say it again. He is putting it somewhere in his head where he keeps things.
We drive the rest of the way home without talking. Outside is gray and getting dark.
We get back to his apartment at six. We do not eat dinner. We are full from the pie. We get into bed early. We lie in the bed in our clothes for a while. Then we get up and brush our teeth and get into the bed for real. He turns off the lamp. In the dark he says, “Monday.”
“Monday.”
“I will tell Mendez.”
“Okay.”
“You will be there.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
I lie next to him in the dark. I think about the beach.
The diner. The pie. My mother whose name is Marisol Coletti and who held a spoon the way I’ve been holding it tonight without knowing.
Griffin’s mother in Lake Forest reading the obituaries on a Sunday I’ll never see.
Sara in Chicago. All the people we’re going to be carrying.
How heavy it’s going to be. How we’re going to do it together.
Next to me Griffin shifts. He has not been asleep.
“Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to do something. Before we go.”
“Okay.”
“Your name. The old one. Somewhere on me. Where nobody else has to see it.”
I do not say anything for a second.
“Griffin.”
“You don’t have to. I am not asking you to. I am telling you what I want for me.”
“I want yours.”
“What.”
“The old one. On me. Same place. Same time.”
He is quiet for a second.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“We do it before we go.”
“Yes.”
He finds my hand under the blanket. He laces his fingers through mine.
We lie there. After a while, quietly, almost not out loud, he says Reece, and I say back Griffin, and we say the names once into the dark between us, and I don’t let mine go this time.
I let it stay. I’m going to carry it on my body.
He’s going to carry his on his. The names aren’t gone. They’re just somewhere only we can see.
He breathes slow. The room is dark and the bed is warm and his hand is in mine.
“We have time.”
We sleep.