Page 79 of After His Eulogy
We drive. The sun is going down behind the trees on my side and the light is doing the thing it does in late winter, which is gold and short. He reaches over. He takes my hand on the gear shift. He does not look at me. He drives.
After a while I say, “Tell me one of yours.”
“My mother.”
“Yes.”
He thinks. He thinks for a while. He thinks the way he thinks, which is to take the question seriously.
“She used to read the obituaries on Sunday mornings,” he says. “Not because she knew anyone. Because she said it was important to know who had gone. She would sit at the kitchen table with the paper and a coffee and she would read every one.Out loud, sometimes, if she found a good one. Listen to this. Worked at the same bakery for fifty-one years. Survived by his wife and a parrot. She would do voices. She would tell us about strangers like she was breaking news. My father would roll his eyes and Sara would laugh and I would sit there with my cereal and listen. She did it every Sunday for years. It was not maudlin. It was the opposite. She thought it was respectful to read them. To know they had been here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. I have her.”
“You have her.”
We drive. The light goes from gold to the gray that comes after gold. He keeps my hand. After a while he says, “Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Her number.”
I look at him.
“Why.”
“I want to have it. I am not going to call it. I am not going to write it down. I want to know it in my head. The way I will know your name. The way I will know about the spoon. So when I am old, I have her number. I have had it. The not-calling will be a thing I do.”
I look at the road. I tell him. He repeats it once, quiet, and nods. He does not say it again. He is putting it somewhere in his head where he keeps things.
We drive the rest of the way home without talking. Outside is gray and getting dark.
We get back to his apartment at six. We do not eat dinner. We are full from the pie. We get into bed early. We lie in the bed in our clothes for a while. Then we get up and brush our teeth and get into the bed for real. He turns off the lamp. In the dark he says, “Monday.”
“Monday.”
“I will tell Mendez.”
“Okay.”
“You will be there.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
I lie next to him in the dark. I think about the beach. The diner. The pie. My mother whose name is Marisol Coletti and who held a spoon the way I’ve been holding it tonight without knowing. Griffin’s mother in Lake Forest reading the obituaries on a Sunday I’ll never see. Sara in Chicago. All the people we’re going to be carrying. How heavy it’s going to be. How we’re going to do it together.
Next to me Griffin shifts. He has not been asleep.
“Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to do something. Before we go.”
“Okay.”
