That was one of the gaps.
I’d been eating functional meals for two years, food that served the purpose of sustaining a body without any particular interest in the experience. Peter-food, David used to call it, shaking his head while he watched me eat a turkey sandwich over the sink for the third night in a row.
“You eat like a man fueling a machine,” David would say.
He’d then take the sandwich out of my hands and make something with it that involved heat and seasoning and a plate and the expectation that food should be enjoyed rather than administered.
Benji had started leaving plates in the fridge.
Not every night, but often enough that I’d stopped being surprised by them and had started, ifI was honest, looking for them. He’d learned things from Rod. Not complicated things, but competent things. He made a garlic shrimp that was better than it had any right to be, a chicken and rice that was seasoned with a confidence suggesting he’d made it more than once, and a soup that appeared one Sunday with a Post-it saying, “Made too much. Don’t read into it. — B.”
I’d eaten two bowls while pretending I hadn’t.
He brought the kittens into the living room in the evenings. That was another gap. On the nights he wasn’t working, he’d open the bathroom door and let the Destiny’s Child kittens swarm into the apartment like a tiny, furry invasion force. The hours that followed would be a controlled catastrophe of fur balls exploring every surface, while Princess Consuela watched from her carrier with the horrified disgust of a dowager observing peasants at a carnival.
I should have objected.
The kittens had a schedule, and the schedule did not include “rampage through the living room while Benji films them for TikTok.”
But Hiro loved it.
That was the thing I couldn’t argue with.
When the kittens came out, Hiro came alive. He’d chase them with his lopsided, three-legged gallop, and they’d climb on him like he was a jungle gymor some kind of wobbly medieval steed. He’d lie on the rug with three kittens on his back and one on his head and Beyoncé perched on his remaining front leg like a tiny calico figurehead. His tail would wag with the steady, happy rhythm of a dog who had forgotten, for a few minutes, that the world had ever hurt him.
I watched Hiro with the kittens one evening from my desk.
I’d been trying to write and failing.
I’d suddenly realized the apartment sounded different. It wasn’t louder, but there was a difference in quality that made it somehow fuller. The silence I’d cultivated had been clean and controlled and exactly what I’d needed to survive my first brutal stretch of grief, but it had also calcified somewhere along the way into something less like peace and more like preservation. I hadn’t noticed because there was no one around to show me the difference.
Now, there were kittens on my dog and a man on my couch narrating their adventures to a phone camera and a hairless cat who judged everything from behind a mesh door. My apartment sounded like a place where things were alive rather than a place where things were being maintained or held back or suppressed.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
So I did what I always did when I didn’t know what to do with something. I wrote it down, closed the laptop, and went to the kitchen to make tea.
Benji was on the couch with Beyoncé in his lap and his phone in his hand, scrolling through comments on the latest video. He’d changed out of his work clothes into the boxers and inside-out T-shirt that constituted his evening uniform. His hair was doing its usual post-shift thing, which was to abandon any pretense of style and go wherever gravity and product residue took it.
“Peter,” he said, without looking up. “Beyoncé’s video has forty-two thousand views.”
“Which video?”
“The one where she opens the bathroom door while I narrate it in the voice of Jane Goodall.”
“You didn’t sound like Jane Goodall. Besides, that’s offensive. She was a legend.”
“I was honoring her, Peter, and I sounded exactly like her. Even my pitch was perfect.” He let out a pouty huff. “Beyoncé’s execution evolved. This time she did a thing with her tail at the end that makes it look like she’s taking a bow. It’s generated eleven hundred comments. Someone called her ‘the Houdini of cats.’ Someone else said she should have her own show. A woman in Ohio wants to adopt her.”
“Beyoncé is not going to Ohio.”
“Obviously Beyoncé is not going to Ohio. Beyoncé is going to a carefully vetted local family that meets your rigorous adoption standards and ideally lives close enough that I can visit, but the point is thatOhio wants her, Peter. She’s a national figure.”
“She’s a kitten who can open a door.”
“She’s a kitten who can open a doorandtake a bow afterward. That’s range.”
I made my tea.
