Page 18 of After His Eulogy
“Okay.”
We sit on the bench. We do not say anything else for a while. There’s a man on the other side of the river walking a dog. There are two ducks on the water. The light is starting to do the orange thing again. The bench is cold under me and I can feel his hand near the middle of the bench, not touching mine, near it. His hand is just there, palm down, on the wood between us. I look at his hand. I do not move mine. He does not move his. We sit there.
FOURTEEN
REECE
I don’t go to the bench again for a week. That’s the rule I make. I made it sitting on the bench, while we were sitting there not talking, with his hand a foot from mine on the wood between us and the ducks doing what the ducks were doing. I made the rule that I could come once. I came once. The proseminar is not over. The proseminar continues. I sit across from him on Tuesday and on Thursday. We both contribute to the discussion of the readings. We don’t look at each other except when one of us is responding to a thing the other has said — in which case we look at each other like classmates and not like the people we are. Min has decided I am someone she wants to be friends with. Min stops me after class on Thursday and tells me about a paper she’s working on. I listen. I respond in the right places. I notice Griffin notices Min talking to me. I notice him not looking. I notice him deciding not to look. The whole interaction takes ninety seconds.
I work on the response paper that’s due at the end of next week. I make coffee one cup at a time over the cone. I do not call Mendez. It has been twenty-eight days since the coffee shop. I am counting now. I have stopped pretending I’m not counting. Twenty-eight days of not calling Mendez is not a thingthe program is going to be okay with when I do call. The longer I wait, the worse the conversation will be. I know this. I keep waiting. On Friday at four-thirty I’m leaving Carrigan after a different class, a methods seminar that’s not the proseminar. I’m coming down the stairs from the third floor when Griffin comes out of his office on the second floor. We meet at the landing. He’s putting his coat on. He has his bag over his shoulder. He sees me on the stairs and stops with one arm in his coat sleeve.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Where are you going.”
“Home.”
“Okay.”
He finishes putting his coat on. He starts down the stairs. I’m two steps above the landing. He stops at the landing instead of going down. He waits. I come down to the landing. We are on the second-floor landing of Carrigan at four-thirty on a Friday. It’s a Friday in mid-November and the light outside the stairwell window is the gray late-afternoon light that means winter is starting. We are between classes and the building is mostly empty. We are on a landing.
“You weren’t at the bench yesterday,” he says.
“No.”
“Or last Wednesday. Or the Monday before.”
“No.”
“Is that a thing you are doing.”
“What.”
“Is not coming to the bench a thing you are doing on purpose. I am asking.”
I look at him.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“I came once. I told myself I could come once.”
“Okay.”
“And then I shouldn’t keep coming.”
“Why.”
“Griffin.”
“Why, Reed.”
“You know why.”
“I want you to say it.”
