Page 63 of After His Eulogy
“You are doing okay. I want you to know that I think you are doing okay.”
“I don’t feel like I am doing okay.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been the steady one. The one telling you we’re going to figure it out. The one telling you to call Mendez. The one in the kitchen. And now I can’t write a paper.”
“You can do both. You can be the one in the kitchen and you can also be the one who cannot write the paper. They are the same person.”
“Okay.”
“You do not have to be the steady one all the time.”
“Okay.”
“You are not the steady one because I need you to be. You are the steady one because you are the steady one. You can be the steady one and also have a Tuesday afternoon.”
“Okay.”
“This is your Tuesday afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“Have it. Have your Tuesday afternoon. I’m here. The Tuesday afternoon is the thing. The paper is the Tuesday afternoon. Have it. I’m not going anywhere this afternoon. I’m here. You can have a Tuesday afternoon with me here.”
I close my eyes. I close my eyes and I lean my head back against the couch and I let his hand be on my knee. I do not say anything for a few minutes. He does not say anything either. He is just there, on the couch, with his hand on my knee, while I have my Tuesday afternoon. After a while I say, “Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me something.”
“What.”
“Anything. Tell me about your day. Tell me about… I don’t know. Tell me something I do not know.”
He thinks. He thinks for a minute. He’s someone who, when you ask him to tell you something, takes the question seriously. He does not just tell you the first thing that comes to mind. He thinks about what you might want and he tries to give you that.
“My mother used to make a soup,” he says.
I open my eyes.
“What kind of soup.”
“I don’t know what it was called. It was a soup. It had carrots and barley and some kind of stock and a piece of meat in it. She would make it on Sundays in the winter. The apartment would smell like it for two days afterwards. I would eat it for lunch on Mondays and Tuesdays before school. The soup was the thing I associate with being in her kitchen. With being a kid in her kitchen.”
“Okay.”
“I have not had the soup in two years.”
“No.”
“I cannot ask her for the recipe.”
“No.”
“I have been thinking about the soup. The last few weeks. I have been thinking about it because I have been thinking about what it means that I cannot ask her for the recipe. It is a small thing. It is one thing. There are a thousand things like it. The recipe is just the one I have been thinking about.”
“Okay.”
