“They were.”
“Bet they’re a handful now, too.”
“Different sort of handful.”
Diwa nodded and gestured Colin further in through the café ahead of him. He was doing the maths in his head.
Colin had been about fourteen when he’d had the twins. Diwa, at fourteen, had been recovering from surgery on his ankle after racing his bike down a road inside the Forbes Park subdivision and finding out, in real time, that fourteen-year-olds didn’t have the body control they thought they did. He’d had pins put in, and he remembered being mostly cross about missing a paintballing weekend in Santa Rosa with his cousins.
The hostess was already coming towards them with menus, top-knot bobbing, and Diwa fitted his most charming smile onto his face and said, “Two, please, somewhere quiet if you’ve got a spot.” They were settled into a corner table tucked in between the impressive foliage of two giant palms.
“This one’s good,” Diwa said, pointing to a menu balanced between them. “The corn fritter. It comes with — actually, I’m not going to tell you what it comes with. You’ll have to be surprised.”
“I don’t like surprises,” Colin said.
Diwa grinned. “All right. It’s a corn fritter with a smear of crème fraîche on top, and then they dust dried avocado powder over the whole thing. It’s incredible. The avocado goes sort of bitter and earthy when they dehydrate it, and it cuts through the —”
“Well, I’m not having that, then.”
The waitress arrived, her pen poised over a notepad, and Colin ordered the full English without consulting the menu a second time, or even pretending to politely listen to Diwa’s recommendation.
“And for you, sir?”
“Salmon miso poke bowl, please. With extra edamame, swap the jasmine rice for brown if you can do that. And a flat white.”
“Tea for me, please, love. Builders’.”
The waitress went off, and Diwa folded his menu and set it aside.
“All right,” he said. “So. Where do you live, Colin?”
“Barking.”
“Right. Right, that’s east, isn’t it?”
“Mm.”
Diwa waited for the rest. Some sort of elaboration about what it’s like to live in Barking. Diwa had never been, but Colin volunteered nothing else. He was used to dealing with Bay Areafounders who’d talk for forty-five minutes given a single word of encouragement, and Colin Huxley had just managed to make that single word feel like a closing statement, and a story in and of itself.
“And what do you do for fun?”
“Stay in, mostly.”
“Yeah?”
“My flat’s quiet, now that my boys’ve moved out. I like it quiet.”
Diwa nodded as though this were a perfectly normal amount of information for an adult human being to volunteer about themselves over a meal.
This was the first time in years he’d sat across a table from somebody who wasn’t actively merchandising himself. Everybody he’d dated since 2019 had answered thewhat do you do for funquestion with a full on CV. They climbed mountains. They ran ultras. They had a sourdough starter named after a dead philosopher they admired. They were doing the John Muir Trail in August, they were learning Mandarin, they had just got back from a ten-day silent retreat in Big Sur and they were, you know,processing.
The unstated rule was that the answer to‘what do you do for fun?’ was meant to demonstrate that you were a person with a project centred around self-improvement.
Colin just liked to keep it quiet.
“What about you?” Colin asked. “What’ve you been up to since you got here?”
Diwa shrugged. He had been up to, in approximate order: sleeping in until nine, sitting in front of his light therapy box, going to Mysore yoga, drinking smoothies, sitting on the floor of his half-finished living room reading the same paragraph of a book about Stoicism for forty minutes, ordering Deliveroo, and doing his journaling.
