Epilogue #2
Benji hesitated, then he squealed in a way that should’ve probably pierced the eardrums of anyone within a ten-mile radius, then he hugged and kissed me until we were both laughing so hard that neither of us could breathe properly.
We carried his boxes across the hallway for the rest of the afternoon.
It was the shortest move in history.
Twenty-two feet of beige carpet, a fire extinguisher, and a flickering light that maintenance had still not repaired.
I had stopped wanting them to repair because the flickering had become part of the landscape, a landmark in the geography of a hallway that had been the setting for the most important journey of my life.
The move took four hours.
Not because twenty-two feet required four hours of transport time, but because every box that crossed the threshold of 4B required a negotiation about its contents and their placement.
The negotiations were extensive.
“The curtains go up,” Benji said, holding a pair of deep green fabric panels that I recognized from his living room that were, I admitted with the reluctance of a man conceding aesthetic ground, warmer than my blinds.
“The blinds are functional.”
“The blinds are institutional. Do you wear a jacket with arms tied in the back? I didn’t think so. Your blinds are what you’d find in a dentist’s office. These curtains are what you’d find in a home.”
“This is a home.” I pouted.
“This is a home that’s about to get curtains.” He refused to budge.
The curtains went up.
“Your couch stays,” he said.
“Agreed,” I tried not to let my relief show.
“My couch goes into the foster room.”
My relief evaporated. “The foster room is for fosters.”
“The foster room is for fosters and for the couch that has sentimental value to me. I’m not getting rid of it, and the fosters will love how comfy and broken in it is.
Plus, it smells like me, which is a smell that the fosters find comforting, as documented by the fact that every foster we’ve had has chosen to sleep in my laundry basket. ”
“The fosters sleep on your clothes because your clothes are on the floor more than they’re in your laundry basket.”
“The fosters sleep on my clothes because my clothes smell like safety. This is another of the ‘knowing-my-cat methodology’ applied to a broader data set.”
“It’s still not science.”
“It’s my version of science, and that’s all that matters.”
The couch went into the foster room where the current litter of five kittens, which Benji had named Wasabi, Sriracha, Tabasco, Cayenne, and Chipotle (the Spice Girls having been adopted out two months ago to families that I’d vetted with a thoroughness that Benji described as “more rigorous than the Supreme Court confirmation process”), were climbing on Benji’s boxes and batting at packing tape with the chaotic enthusiasm of creatures who believed that the world had been created specifically for their amusement.
Wasabi, the boldest, had claimed the top on the highest box and was surveying her domain with a confidence that reminded me, uncomfortably, of General Tso.
General Tso himself was on the refrigerator, watching the proceedings with the expression of a creature whose territory was being altered without his consent.
His tail moved in slow, measured arcs, the metronome of a cat who was processing a great deal of information and would deliver his verdict when he was ready and not a moment before.
Hiro was on his bed, unbothered.
Hiro had been unbothered by everything since the day Benji had sat on my floor at 3 a.m. and stayed until morning. Hiro had decided, with the simple clarity that dogs bring to emotional decisions, that Benji was his, and everything that followed from that decision was acceptable.
Potato was on the couch.
Potato had been on the couch during every significant event of the past six months.
Potato would be on the couch during every significant event for the foreseeable future.
Potato was the fixed point around which the apartment rotated, immovable and wheezing, a four-legged anchor in a sea of endless shedding and change.
The whiteboard was last.
I stood in front of it with a green marker while Benji sat on the counter, which was his counter now.
The whiteboard contained the apartment’s essential information: feeding schedules, foster status, clinic hours, medication protocols, and, in the upper right corner, a section I’d added three months ago titled RESIDENTS, which listed the animals by name, species, and medical status.
I uncapped the green marker and added a line at the top of the RESIDENTS section, above General Tso, above Hiro, above Potato, above the rotating roster of fosters who had passed through this apartment and into families who would love them.
BENJI KWON — PERMANENT RESIDENT
“Permanent,” Benji said, reading it from the counter.
“Permanent,” I agreed. “I even used permanent marker. You can’t be removed.”
“You wrote ‘permanent’ on the whiteboard in green permanent ink next to my name, which you wrote above the cats’ names?”
“Above all the animals. You’re the first entry.”
“I’m the first entry on the whiteboard.”
“You’re the first entry because you’re the most important resident. The cats are essential. The dog is essential. The fosters are temporary. You’re permanent.”
“Peter.”
“The whiteboard is now accurate. It reflects the current configuration of the apartment and its occupants. That current configuration includes you, permanently and in green, which is the correct color for planned and intentional things.”
“Peter, I’m going to need you to stop talking about the whiteboard, because I’m about to cry, and I don’t cry about whiteboards. If I start crying about a whiteboard, that’s a threshold I can’t uncross. I’ll spend the rest of my life being a person who cried about a whiteboard.”
“Whiteboards are moving. Your emotional response is appropriate. This particular whiteboard contains life-altering information.”
“That whiteboard contains the most significant information it has ever contained, and I am not going to cry about it.”
He was already crying about it.
Minimally, with the restrained, blinking intensity of a man fighting a losing battle against his own tear ducts, but the evidence was visible.
I crossed the kitchen, stood in front of him, and put my hands on his face the way I’d done the first time I’d kissed him in the foster room with shaking hands and crooked glasses and the absolute certainty that what I was doing was right even though I had no system for it.
My hands didn’t shake anymore.
My glasses were straight.
And my certainty had deepened into something that didn’t need a system because it had become the system itself, the operating principle around which my whole world was now organized.
“Welcome home,” I said.
“I’ve been home for months,” he said. “You just finally gave me a key.”
“You’ve had a key since the first week. I made you a copy when you moved into the foster room.”
“That was a practical key. This is a romantic key. There’s a difference.”
I chuckled because, well, this was Benji being Benji, and that always made me smile or laugh or chuckle, always made me do something that felt good all the way to my toes, in ways that no scientist or doctor or theologian could ever truly explain.
“There’s no material difference between a practical key and a romantic key,” I said. “They’re the same key. They open the same door.”
“This, my dear vet surgeon from the gods, is not true. Your door is no longer the same door. It now stands open. Your door has been open since the night you said, ‘Not yet,’ over a blanket and then walked into my room three days later and kissed me because you couldn’t sit at your desk pretending you didn’t want to be in my room with me. ”
“I wasn’t pretending. I was processing.”
“You were pretending to process. You’d already processed. You’d been fully processed for two months. You were like that sliced cheese in the fridge, so processed you were barely recognizable as cheese anymore. You were just waiting for your body to catch up with your brain.”
He was right, damn it.
He was usually right about the emotional mechanics of my interior life, a diagnostic accuracy that I found simultaneously annoying and essential, the way I found everything about him simultaneously annoying and essential.
So, I kissed him.
Right there in the kitchen where he perched on the counter in the warmth of the sacred stove light with the green marker still in my hand and the whiteboard behind us and five kittens destroying packing materials in the foster room and a twenty-pound cat judging us from the refrigerator and a three-legged pit bull sleeping in the corner and a bulldog wheezing on the couch and the whole loud, chaotic, impossible apartment holding all of us the way it always had, with room.
That evening, after the boxes were unpacked and the curtains were hung and the carrier had been placed in the bedroom, I sat at the island with my blue mug and watched Benji move through the apartment.
Our apartment.
He was rearranging the bookshelf, integrating his books with mine, a process that I would normally have supervised but that I was, tonight, content to watch from a distance.
His books were mostly fiction ranging from romance novels (research, he said, though the dog-eared pages suggested a reader rather than a researcher) to dance memoirs to a collection of Korean poetry his mother had sent him that he kept on his nightstand beside Biscuit.