Epilogue
Years later…
More than five years, two cities, and three apartments finally landed us in Hudson Burrow.
It had gained a bakery and lost a laundromat, and the scaffolding on the corner had been up long enough to drink.
But the street still narrowed at the same place, and the door of Neon Nights still stuck at the bottom, and when the van turned onto our block that morning, I caught myself doing the math on the last time I’d arrived here with everything I owned.
Eighteen, with holes in my pockets and one protein bar.
This time, I had a sofa with a man attached, and a lease with two names printed so close together they touched.
The jobs had finally agreed on a city. That was the official story of the move, and it was even true, but the real one was simpler, and we’d both stopped pretending otherwise: we’d been borrowing this neighborhood for years, and it was time to stop giving it back.
We’d stayed at Viv’s place for several months one time, and for weeks in Harrison and Taylor’s barely furnished apartment just after they’d moved here.
Harrison and Taylor showed up at nine with coffee and a hand truck, because they were locals now.
They hauled until the van was empty. Then Taylor surveyed the box skyline in our living room, declared everything after this point emotional labor, and towed Harrison down the street to hold a table at Neon Nights, where, he informed us from the doorway, our welcome round would begin aging immediately.
So it was just us and the boxes. Finn’s said things like KITCHEN GLASS and BATH TOWELS in block letters.
Mine said BOOKS nine times in nine different hands.
Nothing was unpacked. Nothing was going to be unpacked tonight; we’d moved together often enough to know that, and there was a specific peace in it, the peace of chaos you recognized like an old friend.
The mattress lay on the bedroom floor because the frame was somewhere else.
I was standing in the bedroom doing nothing, which is a thing empty rooms let you do, when Finn said, from the doorway, “Close your eyes.”
“We agreed no unpacking.”
“It’s not unpacking. Close them.”
I closed them. I heard him cross the room, floorboards creaking that I didn’t recognize yet, and set something down on the mattress, light, with a rattle in it.
“Okay.”
The box on the mattress had not come out of the van.
It was new, and it was wrapped, actually wrapped, in gift paper printed with little gold stars on navy blue, the kind of paper that exists for the birthdays of eight-year-olds.
The folds were neat. The tape had gone dull at the edges.
He hadn’t wrapped this today. He’d wrapped it weeks ago, somewhere in the old apartment, and hidden it, and carried it through the entire migration without letting it touch the labeled boxes, and I knew all of that from one look at one worn corner.
“It’s for the apartment,” Finn said. He’d gone casual in the voice, hands in his back pockets. “Housewarming.”
I sat down on the mattress and opened it slowly, along the tape, and then the paper came off, and I was holding a flat cardboard tube from a hobby shop. Two hundred count. Glow-in-the-dark. Assorted planets included.
I looked at it. He looked at me looking at it.
Then we both went at the same time. It came out of me in a burst, half laugh and half something with less dignity, and Finn folded up on the end of the mattress laughing at my face, and I laughed at his, and there we were, two grown men crying with laughter over five dollars of phosphorescent plastic meant for children.
“It’s so stupid,” I managed.
“It’s incredibly stupid,” he agreed, wiping his eyes. “The guy at the shop asked how old my kid was.”
“What did you say?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Somewhere across the country, in another city, there was an empty lot with weeds in it where a ceiling used to be.
I used to make a point of not thinking about it.
I didn’t need the point anymore. The room above that bed had been the best room of my childhood for one reason, and the reason was standing at the end of the mattress in a tight T-shirt, watching me hold a cardboard tube filled with stars, and I loved him.
I’d said it out loud several thousand times by now, and it still hadn’t felt generic.
Some words wear out. That one had only worn in.
“Well,” I said, and cleared my throat, and shook the stars out onto the blanket. “You know the drill.”
“I know the drill.”
“Get the chair.”
He got the kitchen chair. I arranged myself against the wall with a bag of pretzels from the survival rations, because there is a right way to do this and the right way involves snacks and supervision.
Finn climbed up with a fistful of stars and his arm raised, and the whole scene clicked into place across twenty-something years like a puzzle piece finally finding its place.
Then he just stood there.
“What?”
“I’m drawing a blank.” He turned his hand over and frowned at the stars in his palm. “Orion. I used to do it with my eyes closed. The belt, the shoulders, the sword coming off the belt, and then it just…” He shook his head. “It’s gone, Jes. I knew it went. I didn’t know it went this much.”
“Left hand higher,” I said.
He looked down at me.
“That’s the shoulder. The red one. Higher. There.” I pointed. “Now two down and one across for the belt, and keep the spacing even. You were a tyrant about the spacing.”
“How do you know the spacing?”
“I fell asleep under your work every night for a year and a half,” I said. “I memorized it before we moved.”
He stood on that chair with his arm up and his eyes down for a moment, looking at me, and neither of us said anything else about it, because some things you install by feeling instead of discussing.
Then he pressed the red shoulder into the spot where I’d told him, and we built the hunter between us, him reaching, me remembering, the chair complaining every time he went up on his toes.
We did the belt and the sword. We did the feet.
When the shape was standing, he stepped down, backed to the wall, squinted at it with his arms crossed, climbed back up, and moved one star half an inch.
“Nobody will ever know the difference,” I said.
“I’ll know.”
We did a scatter of nameless filler after that, because every sky needs a crowd, and he threw in one extra star low over where the dresser would go, a star that has never existed in any sky, because he liked the spot.
Then the planets came out of the packet and went up in no order a textbook would defend, and he came down off the chair with one left in his hand. Small. Ringless. Demoted.
“Over the closet,” I said.
“It’s not even a…”
“Over. The. Closet.”
He put Pluto over the closet. He pressed it to the wall with his thumb and held it there a second longer than the glue needed, like hugging someone you missed.
My phone went off in my pocket while he was washing his hands. Taylor.
Your drinks are getting philosophical. One of them has started asking what a drink even is.
We’ll be there, I typed. I sent it, and a thumbs-up came back, and then a photo of two chairs at a table near the piano.
Twenty minutes, I added.
Liar, Taylor sent, accurately.
We aimed the lamp at the ceiling and let it charge while we flattened boxes, because glow stars are honest technology, and they only give back what you’ve given them.
Finn narrated the breakdown of KITCHEN GLASS.
I lost an argument about whether BOOKS could live in the bedroom, and then won the appeal.
Ordinary noise. The kind of evening you don’t know to treasure until you’ve spent a decade betting against ever getting one.
Then Finn killed the light.
The room went, and the ceiling arrived.
Green-white and a little uneven. The hunter leaning slightly, like he’d had a drink.
The nameless crowd around him, and the one impossible star over the dresser-to-be, and over the closet, alone and stubborn, a small planet holding a post it had been fired from years ago.
It wasn’t the old ceiling. The old ceiling was weeds and somebody’s future condominium.
This was the next one, ours, hung crooked on purpose by the man who forgot the sky and the man who didn’t, and it glowed like it intended to stay.
We lay back on the mattress on the floor of a home with both our names on it, in a room that smelled like fresh paint and cardboard, and Finn found my hand in the dark without looking.
Not the whole hand. The finger. Hooked and settled, the standing account, five years of interest, and neither of us ever asking for the balance.
“I wanted this to last forever,” he said to the ceiling.
Old words. The oldest we had. He knew exactly what he was doing with them, and he did it anyway, and then he turned his head on the mattress and looked at me, easy, unafraid, a man handing his friend a ball they’d been throwing back and forth since the earliest days.
Fifteen years ago, I’d said them first and then run the length of a country from them.
“It’s lasting,” I said.
His pinky tightened on mine once. Above us, the hunter leaned and Pluto stayed in place, giving back everything it had been given, and ten minutes down the street, in the bar we loved, two chairs were waiting next to two friends, and they could wait a little longer.
The End.