Page 77 of After His Eulogy
He kisses my forehead. He puts his arm around my shoulder. We start walking back.
TWENTY-SIX
REECE
We get back to the car at three. We sit in the car with the heater going. We do not turn it on the highest setting because we have just been in the wind for an hour and a half and even the medium setting feels like too much. We sit. We do not talk. He has his hand on my thigh and I have mine over his.
“Hungry,” I say, after a while.
“Yes.”
“There was a place we passed. The diner with the pie sign.”
“Yes.”
“That.”
“Yes.”
He starts the car.
The waitress is in her sixties and calls us boys. We sit in a booth by the window and order coffee and a slice each, coconut for him, blueberry for me. We sit in the booth and we eat the pie. I watch him eat. I watch him eat the way I have been watching him eat since November, which is to say carefully. Griffin eats neatly and methodically and with attention to the food. He eats the coconut pie and he closes his eyes for a second on the first bite and I watch him close his eyes and I think I get to watch youeat pie for the rest of my life. I think it without deciding to think it.
I think I get to watch you eat pie for the rest of my life. I’m someone who gets to do that.
“What,” he says.
“What.”
“You’re staring.”
“I am.”
“Why.”
“Griffin. I am thinking about pie.”
“Pie.”
“Yes.”
“Reed.”
“What.”
“That is the worst sentence I have ever heard you say.”
I almost laugh. I do laugh. I laugh in the booth in the diner with the pie sign and the sixty-year-old waitress and the gray February sky outside. He laughs too. We laugh in the booth for a minute, the kind of laughing where you are laughing at the laughing as much as the thing. The woman two booths over looks at us briefly and looks away. We laugh until we are done.
“I’m thinking about the rest of my life,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I’m thinking the rest of my life is going to have you in it. That I’m going to get to watch you eat pie. For a long time. That this is a thing I hadn’t let myself think about — that I get to watch you do small things. For a long time. I’d told myself that the most I would ever get with you was the version where I walked past you on a path in October. I’d been making peace with that being all I got. I’m sitting in a diner and I realize I get more than that. A lot more than that.”
He looks at me.
“Reed.”
