Chapter 27 Griffin
TWENTY-SEVEN
GRIFFIN
The maple outside the kitchen window has buds on it. Pink, tight, two weeks later than they would have come at home, because we’re further north now.
I’m at the sink, washing carrots. There are six and they need to be peeled and chopped because Reed is making the soup again tonight.
The soup needs carrots and barley and a piece of meat and stock and some kind of green he keeps swapping out, since he can’t ask his mother.
He’s tried kale. He’s tried spinach. Last week the man at the grocery suggested escarole and that was the best one.
So escarole again. I peel the carrots slowly.
Twice a week I have these afternoons, on the days I’m not shelving at the library. I’m still learning how to have them.
The library job is part-time and the woman who hired me didn’t ask why a man my age with a master’s degree wanted to shelve books two days a week.
People in this town have their reasons for not asking.
I’d emailed Hellman from the old apartment, three days before we left.
Four sentences. I am withdrawing from the program for personal reasons.
I will not be returning. I’m grateful for your time on the seminar paper.
I do not require a response. He’d written back in two minutes.
Withdrawn the way you’re withdrawing, or withdrawn the way I send you a letter?
I’d written back: the first one. He’d written okay.
Take care of yourself, Griffin. I hadn’t replied.
I’d closed the laptop and sat at the kitchen table with the boxes around me and not cried, because I’d done the crying about Hellman the week before, alone, while Reed was at his apartment, before the email had even been a thing I was going to write.
He calls them my Tuesdays. The first one was a Tuesday and now they’re my Tuesdays whether they fall on Tuesday or not. He says it as a joke and the joke stuck. Today is Thursday. Today is one of my Tuesdays.
The kitchen has wallpaper that was put up in 1978 and never taken down — small yellow flowers on a pale green background.
We laughed at it the day we moved in and said we were going to take it down.
We haven’t. We’re not going to. Six weeks in, it’s become something we love about the kitchen.
Things like that happen now. We’re short on small things we’ve chosen, and we haven’t been choosing for very long, so we let things accumulate.
The kitchen has a window over the sink that looks out at the maple.
A small table with two chairs. A stove from some indeterminate decade and a refrigerator that hums. The cabinets are painted white over a previous color the painter wasn’t careful about.
There’s a jar of tomatoes on the counter that the woman next door brought us yesterday — the last from her garden, put up in August. Her name is Diane and she’s decided the two men who moved in across the side yard in March are her business now. I peel the carrots.
His new name is Adam. Adam Pavlik. He’s been Adam for six weeks. I’m getting better at it. Adam goes into my mouth more easily than I’d expected. Whoever picked the name picked well.
I’m Tomas. Tomas Pavlik. We share a last name because we’re married.
We’re married because the program required it — two unrelated men with the same fabricated last name read as brothers, which generates questions, and a married couple doesn’t.
So we got married at the courthouse in the old town three days before we left.
Tuesday afternoon, our old names, a clerk reading the standard text and two strangers from the next office over as witnesses.
We laughed about it on the way back to the car.
We laughed because it had been ten minutes long, because the clerk had pronounced both of our names slightly wrong, because we were getting married for the paperwork and also, somehow, just getting married. The laughter had crying in it.
Tomas, I’m still working on. After six weeks it fits in the shoulders but sits wrong somewhere I can’t identify. I’ll grow into it.
People at the library call me Tomas. The man at the grocery calls me Tomas.
The neighbor across the street, who has spoken to me twice, calls me Tomas.
Adam calls me Tomas in public, Tomas in front of strangers, Tomas about half the time at home.
The other half he doesn’t call me anything, because at home there’s usually only the two of us and we don’t need names. We’re you, and you hasn’t changed.
Sometimes, in the dark, he says my old name. Quietly, into my shoulder, half-asleep. I say his back the same way. We don’t say them at any other time.
I finish the carrots. Rinse the knife. The clock on the stove says four-fifteen.
He gets home at five-thirty most days. He has a job at a small firm.
He has a job that isn’t a Ph.D. and that he doesn’t talk to me much about and that he says is fine.
The job pays the rent and the soup and the wallpaper.
I sit at the table and look at the maple. The buds are pink and tight. They’ll open in maybe two weeks. The leaves will come and the tree will be a tree with leaves and we’ll have been here for two months by then.
He gets home at five-forty. I hear the car.
The door. His keys hitting the dish on the small table by the door.
Then him coming down the hall, and his hip clipping the doorframe at the kitchen — the same small thump it has always made, in two apartments and now this house, because he never accounts for the angle and never will.
He leans in the doorway and looks at me at the table.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Carrots done?”
“Yes.”
“How was your day.”
“Quiet. I peeled carrots. Read for an hour. Walked. Came back. Peeled more carrots.”
“Sounds about right.”
“How was yours.”
“It was a day. A day at a job.”
He comes over. He puts his hand on the back of my head. Doesn’t bend down to kiss me yet. Just keeps his hand there for a second.
“Tomas.”
“Yes.”
“I missed you.”
“You saw me at six-thirty this morning.”
“I missed you all day.”
“Adam.”
“Yeah.”
“I missed you too.”
He bends down. He kisses the top of my head.
He cooks. I sit at the table and watch. He’s methodical with the soup.
He’s been doing it once a week for six weeks, treating it like a project.
He’s honest that he doesn’t remember the soup precisely — the soup he’s making is, at best, a translation of a memory.
Even if he gets it perfect by some standard of perfect, he has no way of knowing if it tastes like what his mother actually made.
He could be making a different soup. He could be inventing one.
He browns the meat. Cuts the onion. Carrots in. Barley in. Covers it with the stock. Lid on. Sets a timer for an hour and a half. He turns to me.
“Come here.”
“I’m right here.”
“Come here.”
I get up. I go to him. He pulls me against him by my hips. He kisses me — a real kiss, not a head kiss. Unhurried.
“Tomas.”
“Yeah.”
“The soup needs an hour and a half.”
“It does.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It is.”
I look at him.
“Bed,” I say.
“Bed.”
He smiles. He pulls me by the hand, out of the kitchen, down the hall, into the bedroom.
The bedroom is at the back of the house and has the same view of the maple. The bed is a queen, bigger than his old one. The sheets are white. The lamp on his side is brass; mine is ceramic. We got them at the thrift store on different weeks and we’re letting them be different.
He pulls his shirt off. He’s wearing the gray sweatshirt I bought him three weeks ago at the thrift store, because once, in another life, he’d had one I’d taken as mine, and neither of us got to bring that one.
So I bought him another. He hasn’t asked why this one.
I pull mine off. We do this without ceremony.
The bodies we have are bodies the other person has known for almost ten years, with two years of separation in the middle, and the separation made the bodies a little more vivid to each other than they were. He undoes my belt. I undo his.
We get on the bed. I’m on my back. He’s over me.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Adam.”
“Yeah.”
“You called yourself Adam.”
“I did.”
“You don’t usually.”
“I was telling you it was me.”
“I know it’s you.”
“I know you know.”
I look at him.
“Hi, Adam.”
“Hi, Tomas.”
He bends down and kisses me.
His hand goes to my hip the way it has since we were twenty-one.
His thumb finds the tattoo. He doesn’t have to look.
He’s known where it is since the night he asked for it, the week before we left.
We’d gone the next afternoon to a small shop on a side street, and he’d gotten his while I got mine in the chair next to him.
He runs his thumb over the letters. R-E-E-C-E. Plain font, black ink, two inches above the bone of my hip. In this room, with him over me, his hand is on it now.
“Hi, Reece,” he says, against my mouth.
“Hi.”
I find his hip with my hand. G-R-I-F-F-I-N. Same plain font. Same black ink. Opposite side, so when we lie together facing each other, mirror to mirror.
“Hi, Griffin,” I say.
“Hi.”
We don’t say anything else for a minute. The saying-out-loud is the version we let ourselves do sometimes; tonight we’re doing it.
He goes down my body. The same path, the same pauses, his mouth lingering on the spot under my collarbone.
He gets to the tattoo and puts his mouth on it.
He doesn’t say Reece again. His lips are warm on my skin and I close my eyes.
His hand goes between my legs. He’s unhurried.
I’m hard against his palm and he’s taking his time, using the hand he’s been using for ten years. I make a sound.
“Yeah,” he says.
He’s been saying yeah during sex since the first time. He’s still saying it.
“Adam — come up here.”
“Yeah.”
He comes up. He kisses me. His hand stays on me. His other hand goes to my face.