I knocked.
Silence.
I knocked again.
Footsteps , the slow, uninvested kind, the footsteps of a man who was moving because the door required it and not for any other reason.
The door opened.
Shay looked at me.
He was in the same clothes as yesterday , I could tell, the way you could tell with someone you'd known long enough to know their clothes. His hair was doing something. His eyes had the specific quality of a person who had cried and then stopped and was now on the other side of it, in the flat country that came after.
He looked at the dumplings.
He stepped back from the door.
The apartment had the quality it got when Shay wasn't performing in it , quieter than you'd expect, slightly stilled, like a room holding its breath. The television was on. Something was playing , I couldn't have said what, and I suspected Shay couldn't either. The volume was low. The kind of low that meantI needed something in the background so the quiet didn't have a shape.
The throw blanket was on the couch now.
He had moved it from the floor. I noted this without saying anything about it, filed it in the place I filed things I noticed about Shay that he didn't know I noticed.
I sat down.
He sat down.
I put the dumplings on the cushion between us and I found the soy sauce packets in the bag and I set them out and I did not say anything and I did not look at him with the expression that invited things, and I did not do the gentle probe that would open a door he hadn't decided to open yet.
I had learned this from Henry, who had learned it from thirty years of understanding that some things needed to be approached from the side, in silence, with dumplings.
We watched the television.
It was a nature documentary. Penguins. They were doing something , migrating, possibly, or returning, I hadn't come in at the beginning. They moved in a group across a flat white landscape with the specific, collective determination of creatures who had decided on a direction and were committed to it.
Shay ate three dumplings.
I ate four.
The penguins continued their migration.
Neither of us said anything for a while and that was fine, that was correct, that was what the situation required right now. I had done this before , sat in the specific silence of a person who had been through something and needed the company more than the conversation. I had sat in this silence when it wasHenry's silence, and before that when it was my own, and I knew its texture and its requirements.
The requirements were: stay. Don't fill it. Let it be what it was.
I stayed.
I didn't fill it.
I ate another dumpling.
It was maybe twenty minutes before he said anything.
The penguins had navigated something , a ridge, a wind, some obstacle the documentary had built to modest drama , and come out the other side of it, still moving, still together, still pointed in the direction they had decided on.
Shay looked at the television.
"I stopped being loud for him," he said.
