Page 80 of After His Eulogy
“Your name. The old one. Somewhere on me. Where nobody else has to see it.”
I do not say anything for a second.
“Griffin.”
“You don’t have to. I am not asking you to. I am telling you what I want for me.”
“I want yours.”
“What.”
“The old one. On me. Same place. Same time.”
He is quiet for a second.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“We do it before we go.”
“Yes.”
He finds my hand under the blanket. He laces his fingers through mine. We lie there. After a while, quietly, almost not outloud, he saysReece, and I say backGriffin, and we say the names once into the dark between us, and I don’t let mine go this time. I let it stay. I’m going to carry it on my body. He’s going to carry his on his. The names aren’t gone. They’re just somewhere only we can see.
He breathes slow. The room is dark and the bed is warm and his hand is in mine.
“We have time.”
We sleep.
TWENTY-SEVEN
GRIFFIN
The maple outside the kitchen window has buds on it. Pink, tight, two weeks later than they would have come at home, because we’re further north now.
I’m at the sink, washing carrots. There are six and they need to be peeled and chopped because Reed is making the soup again tonight. The soup needs carrots and barley and a piece of meat and stock and some kind of green he keeps swapping out, since he can’t ask his mother. He’s tried kale. He’s tried spinach. Last week the man at the grocery suggested escarole and that was the best one. So escarole again. I peel the carrots slowly. Twice a week I have these afternoons, on the days I’m not shelving at the library. I’m still learning how to have them.
The library job is part-time and the woman who hired me didn’t ask why a man my age with a master’s degree wanted to shelve books two days a week. People in this town have their reasons for not asking. I’d emailed Hellman from the old apartment, three days before we left. Four sentences.I am withdrawing from the program for personal reasons. I will not be returning. I’m grateful for your time on the seminar paper. I do not require a response.He’d written back in two minutes.Withdrawn the way you’re withdrawing, or withdrawn the way I send you a letter?I’d written back:the first one. He’d writtenokay. Take care of yourself, Griffin.I hadn’t replied. I’d closed the laptop and sat at the kitchen table with the boxes around me and not cried, because I’d done the crying about Hellman the week before, alone, while Reed was at his apartment, before the email had even been a thing I was going to write.
He calls them my Tuesdays. The first one was a Tuesday and now they’re my Tuesdays whether they fall on Tuesday or not. He says it as a joke and the joke stuck. Today is Thursday. Today is one of my Tuesdays.
The kitchen has wallpaper that was put up in 1978 and never taken down — small yellow flowers on a pale green background. We laughed at it the day we moved in and said we were going to take it down. We haven’t. We’re not going to. Six weeks in, it’s become something we love about the kitchen. Things like that happen now. We’re short on small things we’ve chosen, and we haven’t been choosing for very long, so we let things accumulate.
The kitchen has a window over the sink that looks out at the maple. A small table with two chairs. A stove from some indeterminate decade and a refrigerator that hums. The cabinets are painted white over a previous color the painter wasn’t careful about. There’s a jar of tomatoes on the counter that the woman next door brought us yesterday — the last from her garden, put up in August. Her name is Diane and she’s decided the two men who moved in across the side yard in March are her business now. I peel the carrots.
His new name is Adam. Adam Pavlik. He’s been Adam for six weeks. I’m getting better at it. Adam goes into my mouth more easily than I’d expected. Whoever picked the name picked well.
I’m Tomas. Tomas Pavlik. We share a last name because we’re married. We’re married because the program required it— two unrelated men with the same fabricated last name read as brothers, which generates questions, and a married couple doesn’t. So we got married at the courthouse in the old town three days before we left. Tuesday afternoon, our old names, a clerk reading the standard text and two strangers from the next office over as witnesses. We laughed about it on the way back to the car. We laughed because it had been ten minutes long, because the clerk had pronounced both of our names slightly wrong, because we were getting married for the paperwork and also, somehow, just getting married. The laughter had crying in it.
Tomas, I’m still working on. After six weeks it fits in the shoulders but sits wrong somewhere I can’t identify. I’ll grow into it.
People at the library call me Tomas. The man at the grocery calls me Tomas. The neighbor across the street, who has spoken to me twice, calls me Tomas. Adam calls me Tomas in public, Tomas in front of strangers, Tomas about half the time at home. The other half he doesn’t call me anything, because at home there’s usually only the two of us and we don’t need names. We’re you, and you hasn’t changed.
Sometimes, in the dark, he says my old name. Quietly, into my shoulder, half-asleep. I say his back the same way. We don’t say them at any other time.
I finish the carrots. Rinse the knife. The clock on the stove says four-fifteen. He gets home at five-thirty most days. He has a job at a small firm. He has a job that isn’t a Ph.D.and that he doesn’t talk to me much about and that he says is fine. The job pays the rent and the soup and the wallpaper.
