Page 78 of After His Eulogy
“Yeah.”
“You are going to make me cry in this diner.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry.”
“Pick a different word.”
“I…“
“You don’t have a different word either.”
“No.”
“That’s okay.”
“That’s okay.”
He takes my hand across the table. He keeps eating his pie with the other; I eat mine with the hand he isn’t holding. We finish. The waitress brings more coffee, and we drink it. We pay and leave.
We drive back at four. The sun is setting on the way back. The drive is shorter than the drive there, the way drives back always are. We do not talk much. He has the radio off. He drives. I look at the road. About forty minutes from town he says, “Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“What.”
“Tell me something about her. Anything. One thing.”
I look at him.
“Why.”
“Because I am coming. Because I am going to lose mine and you have lost yours and we are going to carry them next to each other for the rest of our lives. I want to know one thing. I do not need the whole story. I want a thing I can hold. So that when you are quiet at the kitchen table here and I know you are thinking about her, I have a picture. Not the whole picture. One picture. I want to know what to put in the room.”
I look at the road for a minute.
“She held a spoon a particular way.”
“Okay.”
“Three fingers and a thumb. The pinky out. Like she’d been told once as a girl to keep the pinky out and had never stopped. She held it that way her whole life. I noticed it when I was eight. Nine. I noticed it because I’d started copying her without meaning to, and one day my grandmother saidyou eat like your motherand I realized I did. I’d been holding the spoon the way she held the spoon for a year without knowing. I stopped doing it on purpose for a while. Then I started again. I still do it. When I’m alone. I’ve caught myself doing it in this town — holding a spoon over soup with the pinky out, by myself, in my kitchen, twenty years after I copied her without meaning to.”
“Okay.”
He drives. He does not say anything for a minute. Then: “Marisol.”
“Marisol.”
“With the spoon.”
“With the spoon.”
“Okay. I have her now.”
“Okay.”
