“Is it a problem for you?”
"It's not that," she says quickly.
I hold up the two books — the philosophy one and the dark romance she chose blindly, still unlooked-at. "I'm buying these."
"And then will you tell me what we're doing?"
I lean in slightly. "Our date doesn't end here."
The word lands between us. She doesn't correct it.
"What if I have plans after this?" she says.
"Cancel them. I'm taking you somewhere."
She looks at me for a moment, weighing it. Then she nods.
I have her.
I pay for the books and hold out my hand for her phone. She unlocks it and gives it to me without asking why. I type in the address for Gas Works Park and hand it back.
"I'll meet you there," I say.
She looks at the location and nods.
"Okay," she says.
The park is mostly empty on a Sunday morning in November.
Good.
I find a grassy slope above the water with a sightline to the parking lot and enough distance from the walking path that we won't be part of anyone's morning. I spread the blanket before she arrives. The fruit I bought on the way goes in the center — strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries.
I sit, open the philosophy book, and wait.
She appears at the top of the slope in her grey sweater and her good coat. She shades her eyes against the flat winter light and looks around. I raise my hand, and she walks down to me.
She looks at the blanket, the fruit, and the book already open in my hands. "What's this?"
"Fruit?"
She sits beside me and reaches for a strawberry. She bites into it and looks out at the water.
I start reading to her.
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are…”
She's eating the fruit slowly, looking at the clouds, listening. I keep going — Kierkegaard, the passages I marked at the red lights on the drive over, the ones that have been sitting with me since I first read them at seventeen and felt for the first time that a dead man understood something about being alive that nobody around me had bothered to say out loud.
She doesn't interrupt.
She just listens.
I reach the end of a passage and stop.
She's lying down now on her back, looking up at the gray sky with one arm behind her head and a strawberry stem between her fingers. The city moves behind us. The water moves in front of us. The clouds move above her.
"Do you think that's true?" she says.
