The word was enough. The word was Mars. One syllable. Complete.
I drove home with Axel and the residue of a quad loop in my legs and the knowledge that in three weeks I would stand on that ice again, in front of 2,000 people, and the standing would be the bravest thing I had ever done and the landing would be mine regardless of who was watching.
Mine. Not Mars's. Not Fumiko's. Not the audience's.
Mine.
-e
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 myarm 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.
