Chapter 16
Peter
It started with insomnia and a pot of chamomile tea, and it became something I didn’t have a name for.
The first time was an accident.
I’d been trying to write that paragraph for longer than my mental calendar could compute.
The words were there, somewhere, circling the runway but refusing to land. At 2 a.m., I gave up and went to the kitchen to make tea because tea was the only ritual I had left that still worked when everything else seized up.
Benji was already there.
He was sitting on the counter beside the stove, which was a thing he did that I’d given up correcting because correcting Benji’s relationship with furniture was like correcting the wind.
He was in his boxers and the dinosaur shirt, which I’d recently learned was not inside out by accident but by design, because the tag irritated his neck, and he’d rather look like a man who didn’t understand how shirts worked than experience minor physical discomfort.
He was eating cereal from a mixing bowl because he’d broken two of my regular bowls in the first week and had graduated himself to the mixing bowl on the theory that its larger diameter made it harder to knock off the counter.
I supposed that was technically sound reasoning even if it looked absurd.
He glanced up when I came in.
His face was different at this hour, stripped of the animation and the performance, operating on whatever reserves were left after a full shift behind the bar.
His eyes were tired in a way that made him look both older and younger than twenty-five, like a person who’d been awake for a very long time and wasn’t sure if going to sleep would help.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
I made tea.
He ate cereal.
We occupied the kitchen together in a silence that should have been awkward, given that it was 2 a.m. and we were both in our underwear and neither of us had planned to be there. Oddly, it felt like a room we’d been meeting in for years without knowing it.
“Can’t write?” he asked.
I looked at him.
I hadn’t told him about the manuscript, not directly, not in conversation.
He knew I wrote because of the laptop and the late hours and the way I sometimes emerged from my room with the disoriented expression of a man who’d been underwater, but I hadn’t explained what I was writing or why.
He hadn’t asked. The not-asking had been one of the things about him that I appreciated most, because most people asked.
Most people wanted to know what the quiet man was doing alone in his room at midnight.
That wanting felt like a hand reaching for something I wasn’t ready to give.
Benji hadn’t reached.
He’d just noticed.
And waited.
“Can’t write,” I confirmed.
He nodded, as if this were a sufficient answer, as if the entire complicated architecture of grief and memory and creative paralysis could be adequately communicated in two words and did not require further excavation at 2 a.m. over chamomile tea and a mixing bowl of cereal.
“Can’t sleep,” he said, offering his own two words in exchange.
“The shift?”
“The shift, yeah, but not just the shift. It’s this thing where my body is exhausted and my brain didn’t get the memo.
Everything’s still running. I can feel the bar in my arms, you know?
It’s like muscle memory. The reaching and the pouring and the smiling.
It takes a while for all of it to power down. ”
I knew.
Not from bartending, but from surgery.
The hours after a difficult operation, when my hands were still and my body was done, but my mind kept replaying the procedure, running the tape backward and forward, checking for errors, looking for the moment where a different choice might have produced a different outcome.
It was the inability to let go of something your body had finished but your brain hadn’t released.
“Surgeons call it ‘the loop,’” I said. “When you can’t stop replaying a procedure after it’s done.”
“The loop.” He pointed his spoon at me. “That’s exactly what it is.
Except instead of replaying a surgery, I’m replaying every conversation I had tonight and wondering if the guy in the green shirt who ordered two bourbons and didn’t talk to anyone was actually okay or if I should have checked on him harder. ”
That wasn’t what I expected. He served drinks in a bar. He wasn’t a therapist.
“Did you check on him?”
“I sent Jacks over with a plate of Rod’s wings and a casual comment about the basketball game. The guy started talking. He was going through a divorce. He stayed until closing and tipped forty percent.”
“Then you did your job.”
“I did my job for that guy, but there’s always another guy. There’s always someone at the bar who’s holding it together by their fingernails and trying to make it look like they’re just having a drink. My job is to see them, and some nights I’m not sure I’m seeing all of them.”
He said this without drama, without the performative intensity he brought to his stories about Post-it notes and kitten escapes. He said it as a fact he’d been carrying for a while that had gotten heavy enough to set down.
“You can’t see all of them,” I said.
“I know.”
“Trying to see all of them will break you.”
“I know that, too.” He swirled his spoon in the cereal. “Doesn’t stop me from trying.”
We sat with that for a minute.
The kitchen hummed with the low sounds of a sleeping apartment. Potato snored from the couch. The fridge whirred. The clock above the stove ticked despite how I’d never gotten a replacement battery so it would keep correct time.
“What do you write about?” he asked.
The question was light and conversational. He tossed it out the way he tossed out all his questions, like a ball he was throwing in the air to see where it might land. He blinked weary eyes but stared attentively, ready to catch it or let it drop depending on how I responded.
I could have deflected.
I could have said, “Nothing important,” or “Just a project,” and he would have accepted it and moved on and the 2 a.m. kitchen would have remained what it was, a neutral zone where two insomniacs coexisted without asking too much of each other.
But I couldn’t stop myself.
I don’t know why.
“My partner,” I said. “His name was David. He died two years ago. I’ve . . . I’ve been writing about him.”
The cereal spoon stopped moving.
Benji’s face went through a fast, visible sequence from surprise to curiosity to something that was not quite pity but was close to it, before finally landing on something softer and more careful.
“A book?” he asked.
“What?” Again, he hadn’t asked what I’d expected.
“Oh, right. No. Well, maybe. I don’t know what it is yet.
It started as a way to remember things, the details you think you won’t forget and then you do.
Like how he sounded first thing in the morning or the specific way he loaded a dishwasher, which was wrong, and which I never corrected because he was so confident about it.
I’m writing the things he said that I want to keep. ”
“Like what?”
No one had ever asked me that.
People asked about the book, about the writing process, about how it was going.
Ayesha asked if it was therapeutic.
My mother, on the rare occasions we spoke, asked if it was finished yet.
No one asked what David said.
“He used to call my cooking ‘Peter-food,’” I said, and the memory arrived with a specificity that surprised me. “He said I ate like a man fueling a machine. He said food should be enjoyed rather than administered.”
“He cooked for you.”
“He cooked for everyone. He cooked the way you bartend, like it was a way of taking care of people that didn’t require him to say what he was actually feeling.”
Benji went quiet for a moment.
“How long were you together?” he asked.
“Six years. We met in Portland. He was a high school English teacher who could make a room full of seventeen-year-olds care about Whitman, which was either a superpower deserving a cape or a form of illegal child-hypnosis. I’m still not sure which.”
“English teacher.” I could see Benji filing this away, adding it to whatever model he was building of the man who had lived with me before him. “That explains the books.”
“The books are mine, too—but the way they’re organized is all David. He had a system. He’d sort alphabetically by author within genre, except for poetry, which was chronological because he said poetry should be read in the order it was written so you could feel the conversation between centuries.”
“That’s beautiful.”
I huffed at the memory.
“I thought it was insane. I told him that. He said, ‘Peter, you organize your animals by species and medical needs. Let me organize my books by the conversations they’re having.’”
I took a sip of tea that had gone cold without my noticing.
“He won that one. He won most of them.”
The kitchen was so very quiet then.
Beyoncé mewed once from the bathroom, a soft, sleepy sound that suggested she was dreaming about future escapes rather than plotting current ones. General Tso’s tail twitched on top of the refrigerator, a single furry metronome stroke in the dark.
“Thank you for telling me about him,” Benji said.
“You asked.”
“Most people don’t?”
“No. Most people change the subject or say they’re sorry or do the face.”
“The face?”
“The pity face, the one where their eyes go soft and their head tilts about fifteen degrees and their mouth forms a shape that’s supposed to communicate empathy but actually communicates discomfort. You didn’t do the face.”
“I didn’t feel the face. I . . . I felt curious.”
“Curious about what?”
Benji shoved his bowl aside and resettled on the counter before answering. “I guess I was curious about him, about what he was like, about who you were when you were with him. That’s different from pity . . . isn’t it?”
It was different.
And that was the problem.
Pity I could manage.
Pity had a shape and a duration and it didn’t ask anything of me except to endure it until it passed.
Curiosity was harder.
Curiosity meant someone wanted to know more, and more meant going deeper, and deeper meant letting someone into the rooms I’d kept carefully sealed.
“You would have liked him,” I said, and the sentence hurt in a way I hadn’t expected.
David would have loved Benji. He would have adopted Benji the way he adopted everyone, with an immediate warmth that made people feel like they’d been friends for years instead of minutes.
David would have sat at the bar and been Benji’s favorite customer, and he would have learned every drink by name and every story behind every regular, and he would have come home and said, “Peter, you have to meet my bartender. He’s extraordinary,” and I would have said, “I know,” and not meant it the way I meant it now.
“I think I would have liked him, too,” Benji said.
We sat in the kitchen until the tea was beyond cold and the cereal was beyond soggy.
We didn’t talk about anything important for the rest of the time, only small things, kitten updates and bar stories and the ongoing debate about whether General Tso respected Beyoncé or was simply waiting for the right moment to reassert dominance.
The conversation drifted the way conversations drift at 3 a.m., following its own logic, finding its own pace.
When Benji finally yawned, slid off the counter, said, “I should get some sleep,” and padded down the hall to the foster room, the kitchen felt like a room where something had been set down that couldn’t easily be picked back up again.
I washed my mug and his mixing bowl.
Then I turned off the light above the stove, then turned it back on, because Hiro didn’t like the dark.
And because Benji had told me once that the light made him feel safe.
And because both of those things lived in the same sentence on the same stove light.
I went to my desk and opened the laptop.
The cursor blinked from the fish taco paragraph.
David’s last good day remained unfinished and waiting.
I put my hands on the keys and wrote the next paragraph.
I wrote the one about the car ride home.
I wrote the one about David falling asleep against the window.
I wrote the one about watching him and knowing.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even good.
But it was written, and it was true, and for the first time in months, the cursor had moved forward instead of blinking in place.
When I saved the file and closed the laptop, the apartment was quiet around me in a way that felt less like emptiness and more like the particular hush that follows a conversation that mattered.