Page 71 of After His Eulogy
I nod.
“That is what I can give you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Is that enough.”
He turns the chair. He looks up at me.
“Yes,” he says. “That is enough.”
“Okay.”
“Griffin.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever you decide.”
“I know.”
“Whatever you decide, I am going to be…“
“I know. Reed. I know.”
“Okay.”
I keep my hands on his shoulders. He keeps his hand on mine. We stay like that for a while, in his apartment, with the desk and the laptop and the empty top of the dresser and the bed in the bedroom made flat. We stay until I bend down and put my forehead against the top of his head, and he close his eyes. Six weeks.
I file six weeks. I file late March. I file no Ph.D.I file decide.
Outside, somewhere, a car starts. Somewhere a person is making dinner. Somewhere my sister is at her kitchen tablegrading papers — waiting for me to call her again, waiting for me to tell her a date, waiting for me to be the brother I am, in whatever life I am about to have. I close my eyes. We stay there.
TWENTY-FIVE
REECE
It is week four when I notice. It is week four. Three weeks since Mendez called back, three weeks since the verdict, three weeks since Griffin said I will decide and meant it. It is the middle of February. The snow on the ground has been on the ground for a month and is no longer white. The semester is grinding into the part where everyone is tired and nobody wants to be in the seminar room and I have started to feel the deadline of late March in my body. It is week four when I notice he has stopped calling his sister. I had not been keeping track. I had not been keeping track because I had not thought I needed to. Griffin calls his sister every week. Sometimes twice. He has done this since I have known him. The sister is a fact of his life the way the desk is a fact of his life. The sister is named Sara and she has two kids and she lives in Chicago and she is a tax accountant for a regional bank. Griffin talks to her on Mondays usually, occasionally on Sundays. The talking is a thing that happens in his apartment in the evenings or sometimes when I am there, where he goes into the bedroom and closes the door and is on the phone for thirty or forty minutes, and I read on the couch.
She has not been on the phone since I have been keeping track. I notice on a Wednesday. We are at his apartment. He is making coffee. I am at the table with the laptop, writing a response paper for the second seminar, the political theory one. I have been writing it for an hour and the writing is going badly. I lift my head to look at him and I think when did you last talk to your sister. I think it without deciding to think it.
I think I have not heard you on the phone with her in three weeks. Maybe more.
I think I would have heard. I have been here. I have been here on Mondays. I have been here on Sundays. The phone has not rung for her and you have not called her and I have not heard you say her name in a while. I do not say anything.
Two more days go by and I do not say anything. I do not say anything because I am trying to figure out what saying something would mean. Griffin has been deciding. Griffin has been in the deciding for three weeks. He’s been quieter than he is. Not bad. Not visibly struggling. Writing his new paper, going to seminar, sleeping next to me — going through the motions. But he has been doing them with a kind of quiet I have started to recognize as work. The kind of quiet that means something is happening underneath that is taking up all the energy. I know this kind of quiet because I have done it. I did it for two years before he found me. I know it when I see it now. He has been doing the version of what I did. He has been carrying something he is not handing me. He has been making the decision in private. Not calling Sara is the visible piece of it. I think it means he has decided.
Or it means he is in the part of deciding where you start practicing.
On Friday I tell him I want to go to the lake.
“What.”
“The lake. Saturday. We get a car, we drive up to the lake, we walk on the beach for an hour, we get dinner somewhere on the way back.”
He looks at me.
“It is February.”
