“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“We’re holding hands at the zoo.”
“We are,” I confirmed.
“Was this on the itinerary?”
“This is an unscheduled addition,” I said.
“The itinerary has room for unscheduled additions?” he asked.
“The itinerary has always had room. I just haven’t used it.”
He turned his hand under mine and laced our fingers together. We sat at a zoo café holding hands over the crumbs from a Flamingo Wrap and half a grilled chicken sandwich while a man in a flamingo costume waved at passing children. It wasn’t elegant or cinematic.
It was so much better than that.
We left the zoo at 1:20, five minutes behind schedule, because Benji insisted on reviewing every item in the gift shop, and the gift shop produced a twenty-minute negotiation over a stuffed manatee (“It looks like Potato.”) and a giraffe keychain that he attached to his car keys with ceremonial gravity.
“For Makena,” he said, holding up the keychain.
“Makena doesn’t know you exist.”
“Makena and I have a bond that transcendshuman understanding. This keychain is a physical manifestation of that bond. Also, she approved me . . . with her tongue. That’s binding.”
I drove us home. Benji sat in the passenger seat with his stuffed manatee (I’d bought it while he was in the bathroom, and the look on his face when I handed it to him in the parking lot was something I was going to carry for a long time) and his giraffe keychain and a contentment that I could feel from the driver’s seat.
“Peter,” he said as I pulled into the complex.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for today.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean it,” he said. “Not just for the zoo, but for calling Bill and for getting us backstage and for taking me into the water room with the manatees and onto the platform with Makena and into the parts of your world that you don’t show people. Thank you . . . for all of it.”
“It was a date. Dates involve planning and sharing.”
“Dates involve trying, and you tried in the most Peter way possible. The result was the best morning I’ve had in a very long time, possibly ever.”
I parked and turned off the engine.
We sat in the quiet cab with the photo of Davidon the visor and the man beside me holding a stuffed manatee.
“David used to say I planned the spontaneity out of things,” I said. “He said I’d schedule a sunset if I could figure out who to call.”
“David sounds like he was right about a lot of things.”
“He was right about that. I do plan the spontaneity out. I can’t help it.”
“Peter.” Benji unbuckled his seat belt and turned in his seat, the manatee in his lap, his face serious. “You planned a date that included a private veterinary tour, a personal introduction to your giraffe surgeon colleague, hand-feeding a giraffe who recognizes you because you saved her child, and holding a manatee’s face in a room that the public doesn’t even know exists. That’s not planning the spontaneity out. That’s making the spontaneity specific. It’s curated spontaneity. It’s spontaneity with a whiteboard, and . . . it wasperfect, because it was you.”
He leaned across the console and kissed me.
It was longer than the quick one this morning.
