𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑷𝒂𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈

Saturday, February 14. 46 days left.

She'd said it two weeks ago and he still didn't know what to do with it.

Not the information. The information was simple. She was gay. She'd said it across a table in a diner with a crooked clock and he'd said okay and eaten his pancakes and that had been the right thing to do, he was almost certain, because she'd looked at him afterward with something that might have been relief and he'd held that look carefully, the way you held a wet brush, steady, no sudden movements.

The information was fine. What was not fine was the thing the information had done to him, which was complicated and specific and had no name he could find in English or Malayalam or the private language he used when talking to Theodore at 2 a.m.

Here was the problem.

The contract said no romance. The contract said April 1st. The contract said they were two people who had agreed to die together, and romance or any form of attachments was irrelevant to that arrangement the way curtains were irrelevant to a house that was being demolished. You didn't decorate something you were planning to destroy.

He had not been decorating. He had been sitting in a booth, eating pancakes, existing across from a woman who existed across from him, and that had been enough. That had been the whole thing. She was his breakfast person. She was the reason he got dressed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She was the name on a napkin and the voice on the other end of a silence he'd learned to live inside of, and none of that required knowing who she loved or how she loved or whether the way she looked at him sometimes, quickly, when she thought he wasn't watching, meant anything beyond the ordinary mechanics of two people who spent time together.

And then she'd said I'm gay, Fayiz and something inside him had shifted, the way a painting shifted when you added a colour that changed everything around it, and he'd spent two weeks trying to figure out what had moved and why and what it meant that it had.

The first week, he'd been angry. Not at her. At himself. Because the feeling that arrived when she said it was not okay, not that's fine, not the supportive neutrality he'd performed with his face and his fork and his triangle of pancake. The feeling was closer to a door slamming shut. A door he hadn't known was open. A door he hadn't been walking toward, except apparently he had been, apparently his feet had been moving without telling him, and now the door was shut and he was on the wrong side of it, which was fine, which was the correct side, which was absolutely fine.

The second week, the anger had turned into something worse: a question. Not about her. About himself. About what the door meant. About why he'd been walking toward it. About the fact that he'd loved Rifa, had loved Rifa with everything he had, had left his country and his family and his name for Rifa, and that love had been real and consuming and total, and now here was a woman he could not love, the contract forbade it, her sexuality precluded it, the calendar doomed it, and he wanted to put his fist through every canvas in the studio because wanting was supposed to be something he'd finished with.

He hadn't put his fist through anything. He'd painted instead. Every night for two weeks. Standing in front of canvases in the cold studio with Theodore asleep on the good cushion, painting things he couldn't explain: the booth, the counter, the crack in the vinyl where her thigh rested, the view from his seat looking across at her seat, the salt shaker, the sugar bowl, the particular angle of winter light that came through the diner window at 8:15 and hit the table between them.

He was painting the diner. Not her. The diner.

He told himself this distinction mattered.

The breakfasts continued. Tuesday. Thursday. The usual booth. The usual orders. She pulled her toast into strips. He cut his pancakes into triangles. They talked. They were silent. They did the thing they'd always done, and neither of them mentioned the word she'd said or the woman who'd left a card or the seven minutes of silence that had preceded the telling, and the not-mentioning became its own kind of weather, familiar, manageable, something they walked through together without acknowledging the rain.

He told himself this was fine.

Theodore was unconvinced.

☕︎

February 14th was a Saturday. There was no breakfast on Saturdays. The contract said nothing about Saturdays.

He went anyway.

He was standing on Duckworth Street with Theodore and the painting, wrapped in newspaper because he didn't own wrapping paper and because newspaper felt right, felt like something his mother would have done, felt like something Charlie would have done, though he tried not to think about why he knew that, when Saoirse came out the back door of the diner.

She was carrying a rubbish bag in one hand and a small package in the other. She saw him and stopped. The rubbish bag hit the ground. The package stayed in her hand.

"Hi," she said. Then, to Theodore: "Hi." Theodore received more warmth in the greeting. Fayiz did not take this personally.

"How are things?" he asked. Meaning: how are the boys. How is the debt. How is the thin coat and the mother and the brothers who don't work.

She understood. Her face tightened, then released. "Better. I got more shifts. Dottie didn't even ask why, she just..." She shrugged. "She just gave them to me. I think she knows something but she hasn't said. She's like that." A pause. "And Declan actually answered his phone. Cleared some of it. Don't know how. Don't want to." She said it like she meant it.

"Dottie knows everything. She's been absorbing information through the walls for forty-three years."

Saoirse almost smiled. It got halfway there and then retreated.

"I wanted to..." She looked at the package in her hand. Looked at him. Looked at the package again. The colour was starting. The flush at the collarbone. The climb. "This is stupid. This is really stupid. But you... what you did, in the alley, you didn't have to do that, and you kept your word, you didn't tell anyone, and I wanted to..."

She held out the package. It was small, wrapped in tissue paper that had been folded with care, the kind of care that meant the wrapping had been done more than once.

"It's not a Valentine's thing," she said, quickly. "It's a thank-you thing. I know that's... I know the timing is... please just take it before I die."

He took it. Unwrapped it. Inside was a sketchbook. Small, palm-sized, leather-bound, the kind sold at the stationery shop on Water Street that he'd looked at once through the window and had not gone inside because twelve dollars was twelve dollars.

It was not new. The leather was slightly worn at the corners, the way things got when they'd been handled, considered, possibly purchased weeks ago and carried around waiting for the right moment.

"Saoirse."

"It's nothing. It's a book. You can draw in it or not draw in it. I don't..." She was looking at a point just past his left shoulder. The flush had reached her ears. "I just thought you should have somewhere to put the napkin drawings. The ones you do at breakfast. I've seen them. When you're waiting for her and you draw on the napkins and then crumple them up before she gets there. I've seen you do that."

He stared at her. She had been watching him draw. She had been watching him draw Mollie's hands on napkins and crumple them before Mollie arrived, and she had noticed, and she had bought him a sketchbook, and she was nineteen and she owed three hundred dollars and she had spent money she did not have on a leather-bound book for a man she could not have.

His chest did something he didn't expect. Not the door. Not the thing from two weeks ago. Something simpler, the feeling of being seen by someone who had no reason to look that carefully except kindness.

"Thank you," he said. "This is... thank you."

She nodded. Fast. Then she stepped forward, quickly, before she could talk herself out of it, and pressed her lips to his cheek. One second. Less. The briefest possible contact, like a stamp, like a period at the end of a sentence. She smelled like the diner: coffee, toast, industrial soap.

Then she was gone. Back through the door. The rubbish bag still on the ground. Theodore sniffed it once and dismissed it.

Fayiz stood in the alley with a sketchbook in one hand and a painting in the other and the ghost of a nineteen-year-old's lips on his cheek and thought: I am holding two gifts. One I bought. One I was given. I don't deserve either.

He put the sketchbook in his jacket pocket. Picked up the rubbish bag. Left it by the bins. Walked around to the front of the diner with Theodore and the newspaper-wrapped painting and pushed through the door.

The bell rang.

• • •