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 someonewantedto 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, kittenupdates 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.
