Page 81 of After His Eulogy
I sit at the table and look at the maple. The buds are pink and tight. They’ll open in maybe two weeks. The leaves will come and the tree will be a tree with leaves and we’ll have been here for two months by then.
He gets home at five-forty. I hear the car. The door. His keys hitting the dish on the small table by the door. Then him coming down the hall, and his hip clipping the doorframe at the kitchen — the same small thump it has always made, in two apartments and now this house, because he never accounts for the angle and never will. He leans in the doorway and looks at me at the table.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Carrots done?”
“Yes.”
“How was your day.”
“Quiet. I peeled carrots. Read for an hour. Walked. Came back. Peeled more carrots.”
“Sounds about right.”
“How was yours.”
“It was a day. A day at a job.”
He comes over. He puts his hand on the back of my head. Doesn’t bend down to kiss me yet. Just keeps his hand there for a second.
“Tomas.”
“Yes.”
“I missed you.”
“You saw me at six-thirty this morning.”
“I missed you all day.”
“Adam.”
“Yeah.”
“I missed you too.”
He bends down. He kisses the top of my head.
He cooks. I sit at the table and watch. He’s methodical with the soup. He’s been doing it once a week for six weeks, treating it like a project. He’s honest that he doesn’t remember the soup precisely — the soup he’s making is, at best, a translation of a memory. Even if he gets it perfect by some standard of perfect,he has no way of knowing if it tastes like what his mother actually made. He could be making a different soup. He could be inventing one.
He browns the meat. Cuts the onion. Carrots in. Barley in. Covers it with the stock. Lid on. Sets a timer for an hour and a half. He turns to me.
“Come here.”
“I’m right here.”
“Come here.”
I get up. I go to him. He pulls me against him by my hips. He kisses me — a real kiss, not a head kiss. Unhurried.
“Tomas.”
“Yeah.”
“The soup needs an hour and a half.”
