Page 7 of After His Eulogy
I put on my shoes by the door. I pick up the bag. I open the front door.
The hallway light is on, the way it always is, the building bulb that never goes off. The carpet smell. The faint old-cigarette smell from two doors down. I have hated this hallway for two years. I would give anything to walk it every day for the rest of my life.
I step into the hallway. I turn back to the doorway. I look in one more time.
The corner of the couch I can see from here. The blanket still bunched up from earlier. The cushion still indented where my body was. Three rooms away, in the dark, a man is asleep with a pillow against his chest. He’s going to wake up at six and reach for me. He’s going to find the pillow. He’s going to call my name into the apartment. The apartment is going to give him nothing back. No note. Nothing on the counter. Nothing on the bathroom mirror. Nothing folded into his coat pocket. Mendez was clear about that too.
The tears come.
I had not let them. Hadn’t let them for thirteen hours. I let them now because they are coming whether I let them or not. They come down my face in two clean lines. I do not move to wipe them. I do not make a sound.
I open my mouth.
“Goodbye.”
I say it quiet. I say it to him, asleep, three rooms away, who will not hear it. I say it to the apartment. I say it to the version of me lived here. I say it because if I don’t say it once, out loud, I’m going to carry it the rest of my life as the thing I did not say. I have enough of those.
“Goodbye, Griffin.”
I close the door. I close it slow, with both hands, so the latch does not click loud enough to wake him. I close it until the seam disappears.
I take my hand off the knob.
I turn. I walk down the hall. I do not look back. I go down the stairs and out the front door of the building. The street is empty. The sky over the buildings across the way is starting, just barely, to go gray. The car is at the corner where Mendez said it would be. The driver doesn’t look at me. I get in. I put the bag at my feet. The driver pulls away from the curb without a word.
I look out the back window. Our building gets smaller. The light in our bedroom does not come on. He won’t wake up for two more hours.
The car turns onto the avenue. The building goes out of sight. I face forward. I put my hands flat on my thighs.
I do not cry anymore. The two lines are drying on my face. I do not wipe them. Let them dry.
I close my eyes.
The car drives.
TWO
GRIFFIN
The coffee line at Beans is six people deep, which is normal for a Tuesday. I count them out of habit. Three ahead of me, two behind by the time I get to the register. The barista is new. She has a small constellation of acne on her chin and a name tag that says HI I’M LIANA in handwriting that slants hard to the right.
“Medium drip, room for milk,” I say.
“For?”
“Griffin.”
It comes out the way it always comes out. Easy. A name on a cup. I have been doing this for two years and the trick is to say it like it isn’t his.
She writes it on the cup. She gets the F wrong, makes it look like a P. I don’t correct her. I never do. The wrong letter is the part I keep — it makes it not quite his name. Makes it a coffee name. I pay. I move down the bar. I wait. The coffee shop is in the basement of the humanities building, which means it smells like coffee and damp carpet and whatever someone microwaved at eleven this morning. There are two leather couches by the window where the same three people are always sitting. Today they’re talking about a professor I don’t have. The girl on the leftkeeps sayinghonestlybefore every sentence.Honestly, I think he just doesn’t like women. Honestly, the syllabus is a mess.I get my coffee. I leave.
The walk from Beans to Hartwell takes nine minutes if I cut across the lawn and twelve if I take the path. The path is wet. I cut across. My seminar is on the third floor in a room that used to be something else — you can tell from the molding, from the way the radiator hisses every six or seven minutes like it has something to say. I’m early. I’m always early. I sit in the same seat I sat in last week, third from the door, against the wall.
People come in. I know about half of them by name; the other half I know by the thing they do — the one who clicks his pen, the one who always has a different tote bag, the one who corrects the professor and then apologizes for it. We’re a cohort of fourteen. By the end of the year I’ll know all of them and none of them, which is fine. That’s how I want it. Dr. Mendel comes in, sets her bag on the table, and says, “Okay. Where were we.”
We were on chapter four. Someone says so. We move on. I take notes. I have a system. Main points on the left, questions on the right, a small dot in the margin when something’s worth coming back to. There are two dots on this page already and we’re sixteen minutes in. I write neatly. My handwriting is the one thing about me that hasn’t changed in ten years.
“We’ll pick this up Wednesday,” Mendel says, twenty minutes in, about a thread she wants to come back to.
