Iliked my life quiet. That’s not a complaint or a confession. It’s not the opening line of a therapy session, though my therapist, Dr. Huang, would probably circle it in her notes and say something like, “And what does ‘quiet’ mean to you, Peter?”
On the surface, it was simple.
I liked my mornings slow, my coffee black, my apartment still, and my evenings built around a routine that didn’t require anyone else’s input. I liked the sound of keyboards pecking and the scratch of a pen on paper. And I adored the weight of a book in my hands and the particular quality of silence that existed at 6 a.m., before the world remembered it had things to do.
I had earned this quiet.
I’d paid for it in the specific currency of losing the person who used to fill it, and if that sounds dramatic, I assure you David would have appreciatedthe phrasing.
He was a fan of dramatic phrasing.
He once described a particularly good sandwich as “a transcendent, spiritual experience between two pieces of sourdough,” and he’d meant every word.
David had been dead for two years, three months, and eleven days. I wasn’t counting—except that I was. I was counting in the way one might count anything that had fundamentally restructured the architecture of his life. I counted, not obsessively or morbidly, but with the passive awareness of a man who knew exactly how long it had been since the last earthquake because the furniture was still rearranged.
But this wasn’t about David.
Not yet anyway.
This was about a Wednesday morning in my Tampa apartment, where I was sitting at my kitchen island at 7 a.m., drinking coffee, reading the paper, while Potato snored at my feet and Hiro watched me with the anxious devotion of a dog who was perpetually convinced I might disappear if he blinked.
“I’m right here,” I told him, the way I told him every morning.
He thumped his tail once, an effortful gesture given that he was balancing on three legs and the phantom pain in his missing fourth made mornings stiff.I reached down and scratched behind his ears. He leaned into my hand with his whole body and made a sound that wasn’t quite a whine and wasn’t quite a sigh but communicated, clearly, “Please never stop doing this, and also I love you, and also I’m anxious about everything.”
Same, buddy. Same.
General Tso was on the refrigerator.
He was always on the refrigerator.
It was his throne, his watchtower, his seat of imperial judgment. From there, he surveyed his domain, which included the kitchen, the living room, and the hallway. He surveyed it with the flat, unblinking gaze of a cat who had seen the worst of humanity (a dumpster behind a Thai restaurant in Clearwater) and had decided, upon being rescued, that the world owed him a debt it could never repay.
General Tso tolerated me.
He tolerated Hiro, barely.
He tolerated Potato, largely because Potato was functionally a piece of furniture and therefore beneath his notice.
He did not tolerate the fosters, a rotating cast of dogs and cats that moved through my apartment like a very furry, very needy tide.
The current foster situation was manageable. It included a litter of five kittens in the bathroom (eight weeks old, healthy, almost ready for adoption), and a beagle named Shortcake who was still recovering from surgery in a crate in the spare room. Shortcake was sweet-tempered and docile. The kittens were agents of chaos who had figured out how to open the bathroom door if someone didn’t latch it properly. I spent approximately fifteen percent of my waking hours doing kitten headcounts.
This was my life.
Coffee. Paper. Animals. Writing.
When the words came.
My life was modest, but it was controlled, and it was mine.
And then Terri called.
I knew Terri. Everyone in the building knew Terri. She was a woman in her mid-fifties who wore polo shirts in the building’s colors, a deeply unfortunate teal, and had the demeanor of a funeral director who’d eaten a vending machine tuna sandwich and was beginning to regret it.
I’d interacted with Terri exactly four times: once during move-in, once about a parking issue, once about a lease renewal, and once when she’d cometo investigate a noise complaint from an anonymous, annoyed neighbor. I’d had to explain that the sound was not, in fact, a broken appliance, but a sixty-pound bulldog whose respiratory system operated on the acoustic frequency of a freight train.
She’d looked at Potato, looked at me, and asked, “Is he always like this?”
