“I know.”
“And the water should be just off boiling. Not—”
“Peter.”
“Stopping.”
I got out of bed, then found my boxers on the floor beside the dresser and my shirt in the hallway,which made the color rise in my neck because I wasn’t used to leaving a trail throughout a home.
The stove light was still on.
The Post-it notes were on the fridge.
The whiteboard was on the wall.
Everything was exactly where Peter had placed it.
But the light hit differently, the air held differently, and the hallway felt shorter, as if the apartment had contracted overnight, pulling its rooms closer together and making the distance between his life and mine something we could cross in a few steps rather than a journey requiring months of cross-country traveling.
I made the coffee. Four tablespoons. Water just off boiling.
I pulled two non-blue mugs from the cabinet.
“Use the blue one.” It was Peter’s voice, from the bedroom doorway, where he stood stark naked, his glasses halfway down his nose, and a yawn parting his lips. Hiro sat at his feet. His face was quiet and serious and carried something underneath.
“The blue one?” I asked, because in the quarter year we’d lived together, no one—not even Peter—had used the blue mug.
“The blue mug. Use it, please.”
It was David’s mug, the mug whose handle always faced right, whose position was non-negotiable, whose existence was less that of a kitchen item and more of a sacred object.
“Peter,” I said, my voice catching.
“It’s a mug. It holds coffee. I’d like you to use it.”
“It’s notjusta mug.”
“I know that.” He stepped from the doorway, around Hiro, to lean against the kitchen entrance. “That’s why I’m asking you to use it.”
I stood there with the French press in one hand and suddenly understood what was being offered.
It wasn’t the mug.
It was the space the mug occupied.
With it came entry into the innermost ring of Peter’s life, where the things that mattered most were kept and protected and never shared with anyone else.
He was sharing it.
I took the blue mug from the shelf, poured the coffee, and held it in both hands. I felt the coffee’s warmth through the ceramic and thought about a man in Portland buying a blue mug on a Tuesday because he knew it would make another man smile. I thought about that same someone carrying it across a country and through unbearable grief and into a kitchen where it sat for two years waiting for its owner to be ready to let it mean something new.
And I still couldn’t believe I was holding it.
Peter walked to the island and sat on his stool.
I set the blue mug in front of him, poured myself coffee in the not-blue mug, and sat across from him.
“Peter,” I said.
