The Things We Keep

The spinach in Julian's refrigerator had turned to slime three weeks ago, a fact he discovered only because Maya needed somewhere to store the wine for their monthly dinner. This was the first time she'd been to his apartment since Sarah left.

"You're keeping it, then?" Maya asked, gesturing to the fedora on its hook by the door. It was Sarah's favorite hat, the one she'd worn to their wedding, stained at the brim from champagne and rain.

"I don't know why I can't throw it out," Julian admitted. "It's just a hat."

"It's not just a hat, Jules."

They moved to the living room, where Barnaby—the cat Sarah had rescued from a shelter during that terrible winter when her mother was dying—blinked at them from his perch on the windowsill. Barnaby had chosen Julian over Sarah in the divorce, a small mercy that felt like punishment.

"He still waits by the door on Tuesdays," Julian said. "That's when she used to come home from pilates."

"He'll stop eventually."

"Will I?"

Maya didn't answer. She was his oldest friend, the one who'd held him while he cried himself to sleep those first weeks, who'd texted him every morning to make sure he got out of bed. She knew better than to offer false comfort.

His iphone buzzed on the coffee table. Sarah's name lit up the screen. This was new—the reaching out, the casual texts about mail forwarding and shared subscriptions. The careful approximation of friendship.

"Are you going to answer?" Maya asked.

Julian stared at the screen until it went dark. "I think she wants to know if I'm okay now. I think that's the condition of us being civil."

"And are you?"

He looked at the hat again, at the slime in his refrigerator, at the cat who waited for a woman who wasn't coming home. "No," he said. "But I'm starting to understand that not-being-okay is its own kind of survival."

Maya poured more wine. They sat in the quiet of his half-empty apartment, two people who had loved each other in different configurations for fifteen years, learning how to exist in the spaces they'd made. Some things, Julian was beginning to realize, you didn't throw away. You just learned to live with them taking up room, like the hat, like the spinach, like the particular shape of missing someone who was still alive.