Page 86 of After His Eulogy

He eats. I eat.

I think about Sara in Chicago at her kitchen table, with her kids and Marcus. My mother in the home in Lake Forest. Reece’smother in the apartment in the city, eating dinner alone the way she has for fifteen years. The way she held a spoon — three fingers and a thumb, the pinky out. I let her hand be in the room.

Across from me, Adam is eating his soup. He looks up. Sees me looking. His eyes are wet. He’s been thinking about his too. We didn’t say. We didn’t have to.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You’re here.”

“I’m here.”

He puts his hand across the table. I take it. His ring is warm. There’s broth on his chin he doesn’t know about. I let him have the broth on his chin.

“Adam.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad I came.”

He looks at me.

“I know.”

“I want to say it. Not because I think you don’t know. Because you don’t get to know it from inside me unless I say it. I’m glad I came. Even on the hard ones.”

“Tomas.”

“I want you to have heard me say it. On a Thursday. Over soup. While you have broth on your chin and don’t know it.”

He laughs. He puts his hand to his chin and finds it. He looks at it on his thumb.

“You let me sit there with broth on my chin.”

“I let you sit there with broth on your chin.”

“For how long.”

“The whole soup.”

He laughs the laugh I’ve known for ten years — the short one, theha. He laughs it in our kitchen with his hand still in mine and his thumb still wet from the broth.

I keep his hand. I don’t let go. Outside the window the maple is in dark. Somewhere Sara is putting her kids to bed. Somewhere my mother is asleep. Somewhere Marisol is washing one bowl. We carry them into this kitchen with us.

“We’re here,” he says.