Chapter 26 Mars
MARS
The grocery store was a system I had perfected.
Aisle sequence optimized for efficiency.
List organized by store layout. Estimated completion time: fourteen minutes.
I had been performing this system every Sunday for three seasons and the variance was under two minutes, which was a number I was privately proud of and which I would never share with another human being because the pride was embarrassing and the number was obsessive and normal people did not time their grocery runs.
Theo destroyed the system in seven minutes.
"We need lemons," he said, pulling me toward the produce section when I had planned to start in dairy.
"Lemons are in aisle three. Dairy is closer."
"Lemons are right there." He pointed. They were, in fact, right there.
The produce section was directly inside the entrance and the lemons were on the first display, and the logical efficiency of grabbing them now versus backtracking from dairy was undeniable, but the deviation from my planned aisle sequence produced a micro-anxiety that I recognized as irrational and that I tolerated because Theo's hand was on my arm and the hand was warm and the warmth was worth the deviation.
This was Sunday. This was what Sunday had become.
Not the solo grocery run. Not the fourteen-minute efficiency sprint through fluorescent aisles with a list and a timer and the specific loneliness of a man buying food for one.
Sunday was Theo in my apartment in the morning, coffee for me (cold by the time I remembered it), tea for him, Axel on the counter where Axel was not allowed but where Axel had been allowed since approximately the second time Theo brought him, which was now permanent.
Sunday was the grocery store together. The deviation from the system. The lemons.
"You're making the face," Theo said.
"What face?"
"The face you make when something is not where it's supposed to be. The micro-adjustment face. You made it when I moved your coffee mug to a different shelf."
"The mug was in the correct position."
"The mug was in your position. My position is the shelf below. We negotiated this."
"The negotiation was under duress."
"The duress was a cat standing on the counter between us. That is not duress. That is Axel."
We moved through the store. Not in my sequence.
In Theo's sequence, which was no sequence at all, which was a wandering, sensory, improvisational journey through a grocery store that involved touching avocados for ripeness, smelling bread loaves, and spending four minutes in the spice aisle debating whether smoked paprika and regular paprika were sufficiently different to justify owning both.
"They are not sufficiently different," I said.
"They are completely different. Smoked paprika has a depth that regular paprika does not. This is like saying a slap shot and a wrist shot are the same thing."
"That is not a valid comparison."
"It is a perfectly valid comparison and also we need both. For the pao de queijo."
"My mother's recipe does not call for paprika of any kind."
"Your mother's recipe is a foundation. I am adding a second floor."
I put both paprikas in the cart because the argument was unwinnable and because Theo's face when he was passionate about ingredients was the face I had fallen in love with, which was the face of a man who cared about details with the same intensity that I applied to save percentages, and the shared intensity was the thing that connected us even when the subjects were completely different.
We checked out. The total was higher than my solo runs because Theo purchased items that I classified as unnecessary: a candle that smelled like cedar and vanilla, a bag of fancy chocolate, a magazine about architecture that he would read cover to cover and leave on my coffee table where it would become the first decorative object in the apartment's history.
In the parking lot, loading bags into the car, Theo stopped and looked at me.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. You just look like a person."
"I am a person."
"You look like a person in a parking lot with groceries. A normal person doing a normal thing on a normal Sunday. And six months ago you were a goalie who talked to his posts and drank cold coffee alone at 5 AM and had an apartment with no photographs on the walls."
"The apartment still has no photographs."
"The apartment has a magazine and a candle and a cat bed and a second coffee mug on the wrong shelf. That's photographs. That's evidence of habitation."
He was right. The apartment had changed.
Not dramatically. Not the way Cole and Mik's apartment had changed, with photographs and jacket hooks and the visible infrastructure of a shared life.
My apartment had changed in smaller ways.
Theo's tea in the cabinet. Axel's carrier by the door.
A second toothbrush. The turntable playing music I had not chosen, because Theo had discovered my vinyl collection and had opinions about it and the opinions resulted in records I would not have selected being played at volumes I would not have selected at times I would not have selected, and the not-selecting was the point.
The not-selecting was the opposite of the system. The not-selecting was life.
THEO
On the drive home, we passed the Decatur rink.
Mars glanced at it. I glanced at it. The parking lot was empty.
The building was dark. Sunday at noon. The rink that had been our world was closed and quiet and the closedness felt right, because the world was no longer the rink.
The world was a grocery store and a parking lot and an apartment with two coffee mugs and a cat who believed he owned all of it.
"Gerald asked about you," Mars said.
"Gerald?"
"The security guard. At the practice facility. He watches the games on the lobby TV. He asked me, specifically, whether the figure skater was doing well."
"How does Gerald know about me?"
"Gerald knows about everything. Gerald has been watching this team find each other for three seasons. He told me once that hands that stop shaking when someone touches them are telling a story the mouth hasn't started yet."
"That's beautiful."
"That's Gerald. He sees everything and says almost nothing and the almost-nothing is always the most important thing anyone says all day."
I put my hand on his thigh. In the car. In daylight. On a Sunday in Atlanta. The gesture was casual and domestic and it did not trigger the cascade and it did not require the dark and it did not require 5 AM or plexiglass or the specific conditions of the sealed world we had built.
The sealed world was open now. The glass had become a window and the window had become a door and the door had become unnecessary because we were no longer on opposite sides of anything. We were in a car. With groceries. Driving home.
Home. The word had changed. Home used to be a one-bedroom apartment with a cat. Then it was a rink at 5 AM. Then it was row three. Then it was a man's apartment with a turntable and no photographs and a coffee mug on the wrong shelf.
Now it was this. A car. A Sunday. Lemons and smoked paprika and a man whose system I had destroyed and who was, against every prediction his analytical brain had ever made, grateful for the destruction.
"Mars."
"Yes."
"The regional is in two weeks."
"I know."
"I'm going to enter."
The silence lasted one second. Then his hand found mine on his thigh and his fingers laced through mine and the lacing was steady and warm and the steadiness was not the steadiness of a goalie in the crease. It was the steadiness of a man who trusted the person next to him.
"Good," he said.
One syllable. Complete.
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