Page 68 of After His Eulogy
He sits. He sits on the chair, not the couch. I sit on the couch. The kitchen is doing the thing it does at seven, which is have something on the stove that is going to need attention in about ten minutes. The thing on the stove is a pot of beans I had been planning to feed him. The beans are not ready. Nothing is ready. He has come over earlier than I had been expecting and I am sitting in a kitchen with a pot of beans that wants attention and a man who has been carrying a sentence.
“I saw a car today.”
“Okay.”
“On the way home from Carrigan. Walker, then up the small street with the garage. The car was parked at the curb in front of the auto-body place. Gray sedan. Driver in the seat. Phone in his hand. Not looking at me.”
“Okay.”
“It’s the second time I’ve seen a car like that in this town. The first time was in November. I didn’t tell you about it then.”
He looks at me.
“I want to tell you about it now. I saw a car in November. Wednesday afternoon, in front of the elementary school. Same model, different color, lighter gray. Driver with a phone. I’d alsoseen a similar car on Mason on a Saturday morning the week before. Two cars on two days. I didn’t call Mendez. I’d been planning to call Mendez. I wrote myself a sentence in my head that saidit is one car, two cars on two days is two cars on two days, and I kept walking. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t tell Mendez because I didn’t want to give up Saturday with you.”
I sit with that for a second. I sit with it because it is large and I am not going to swallow it whole. He has sat in his apartment for three months knowing he saw a car in November and he has not given me the sentence until now.
“Reed.”
“I know.”
“You sat with that.”
“I sat with it. I have been sitting with it. Today on Walker my body did the same thing it did in November and I knew I was not going to keep sitting with it.”
I look at him. The pot of beans on the stove makes the small sound a pot of beans makes when it has decided to be a pot of beans that wants attention. I get up. I turn the burner down. I come back. I sit on the couch again.
“Tell me what you saw today. The whole thing.”
He tells me. He goes through it the way he went through the November car: where, when, what color, what model if he could read it, what the driver was doing. He didn’t change his pace. He didn’t look back until he’d crossed the street two blocks later. The driver wasn’t looking at him then either. When he got back to his apartment he sat at his desk for ten minutes and decided not to call Mendez tonight. He decided to come over here and tell me first.
“Why,” I say.
“Because I am supposed to tell you. We agreed I was supposed to tell you. I would have told myself in October thattelling Mendez was the only telling that mattered. I would have called Mendez first and told you nothing. I am not doing that. Not telling is what got me into this. I am telling you first. Then I am telling Mendez.”
“When are you telling Mendez.”
“Tomorrow. Or whenever he calls. Day twelve. He is supposed to call this week.”
“And until then.”
“I keep the same patterns. I don’t change my routes. Changing routes is a thing that gets noticed. I walk the way I walk. I come over the nights I come over. I don’t check over my shoulder more than I’ve been checking. I act exactly the way a person acts who hasn’t seen a car. The way I’ve been acting since October.”
“Okay.”
I sit with this. I sit with the practical part of it, which is that he has thought about it on the way over, and the structural part of it, which is that he has come to me with it. He has come to me with the thing he would have hidden in October. The not-hiding is the new shape of the thing. I have been told, by him and by Mendez and by my own three months of watching, what the new shape is supposed to look like. Now I am inside it.
“I want you to tell me if you see another,” I say. “Even if you decide before you get to my door that it’s nothing. Even if you’ve decided by the time you sit down on this chair that you’re pattern-matching from a place of nervousness. I want to know.”
“Okay.”
“Even the cars you do not think are cars. Even the things that are probably not anything. The things you would have sat with in October. I want them. I will sit with them with you.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t say anything else. I sit on the couch. He sits on the chair. The beans are quiet on the stove now that I’ve turned theburner down. Outside the apartment a person walks past on the sidewalk and the sound of the footsteps goes by and goes away. Reed has his hands on his knees. He’s sitting the way he’s sat for three months when something is hard — forward, elbows on his thighs, hands open. I get up. I come around the coffee table. I sit on the arm of the chair he’s in. I put my hand on the back of his neck. He leans his head against my hip. We’re in the living room of my apartment in the way two people are in a room when leaving has been ruled out. I haven’t said anything. He hasn’t said anything. The room knows.
After a while I get up. I go to the kitchen. I stir the beans. He follows me a minute later. He stands in the doorway and watches me stir. We do not talk about the car for the rest of the night. The not-talking is its own shape now, the shape of a thing we have already handled together, the shape of a thing that is going to come up again at the kitchen table tomorrow when Mendez has not yet called and the day after when Mendez has not yet called and the day after that when, eventually, Mendez does call, and Reed picks up the phone.
