"What doessourcedmean."
"It means he went to the place. You know the place."
I knew the place. The place was a specialty grocer on the east side that Henry visited with the focus of a man conducting important business and the ease of a man who had simply decided that good ingredients were not a luxury but a baseline,which was such a Henry position to have that I had never once questioned it.
"Okay," I said.
Charlie was quiet for a half,second. The reading kind of quiet , the kind where he was measuring something he wasn't going to say yet.
"Good," he said. "Seven."
He hung up.
I looked at my phone. Then at the throw blanket, still on the floor. Then at my phone again.
I was fine.
Henry and Charlie's house did what it always did , it worked in a way that shouldn't have been possible and was anyway, all clean lines and novelty mugs and throw blankets on every couch surface and the accumulated evidence of two people who had stopped negotiating and just become a place together. I had loved this house from the first time I'd been in it. I had also, from the first time, found it quietly devastating, and the ratio of those two things had been shifting lately in a direction I was trying not to map.
Felix arrived four minutes after me.
I knew this because I was in the living room when the door opened and Charlie said his name in the hallway, easy and warm, and I found something on the bookshelf to look at. There were good books. Henry had opinions about books the way he had opinions about groceries , not loud, just correct, and accumulated with intent.
I was reading a spine when Felix appeared in the doorway.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
This was us now. Two letters. Adequate. We had constructed an entire functional existence out of two letters and correct line positioning and the very precise distance of two people who knew exactly where the line was and were maintaining it with the focus of men who understood that stepping over it would cost them something they weren't ready to pay.
I was not ready to pay it tonight. Tonight I was performing. Tonight I was Shay O'Brien, who was good at rooms and good at people and good at making everything feel light, and I was going to be that person through dinner and through whatever came after dinner and I was going to do it well.
"Something smells extraordinary," I said, to the room, to no one specific.
From the kitchen: "Coq au vin," Henry said. "Forty,minute braise."
"Henry. You can't just saycoq au vinlike that."
"Like what."
"Like it's a normal thing a person makes on a Friday."
Henry appeared in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel and his drink and the expression of a man who had heard this before and found it satisfactory each time. "It's a normal thing a person makes on a Friday."
"You're showing off."
"I'm cooking dinner."
"Forus."
"You're my guests."
"We're your team's problem children. You don't have to coq au vin us."
Henry looked at me for a half,second with the particular warmth he reserved for things he found genuinely amusing and was choosing not to fully express. Then he went back into the kitchen.
Charlie was smiling from the couch. Felix had moved to the bookshelf , the other end from me, a natural, incidental migration, the way two objects in the same space find their own orbits , and was looking at something on the middle shelf with the focused attention he gave everything.
