What We Keep

The spinach stuck in Marcus's teeth should have made me laugh. Instead, it made me want to weep into my gin and tonic, the ice already weeping itself into the water. Six years later, and he still hadn't learned to check a mirror after dinner.

"You still have that cat?" I asked, gesturing at his phone when a photo flashed across the lock screen—a tuxedo cat now gray at the whiskers, sleeping in what looked like Marcus's bed.

"Barnaby," he said, thumbing the screen dark. "He's fourteen now. Sleeps on my pillow every night. Sometimes I think he's waiting for you to come back."

The water in my glass rippled. I thought about all the water under bridges, all the things we'd drowned in apartments we'd shared. The goldfish we'd bought on our first anniversary, the one that died three days later when Marcus forgot to change the water. How I'd found him at 3 AM, weeping over the toilet bowl as he flushed it, more broken over a twenty-cent fish than he'd been when I moved out.

"Remember how we said we'd get another one?" Marcus asked, like he could read the current traveling through me. "A replacement goldfish. A replacement us."

"Some things don't have replacements," I said.

"No," he said, and his eyes were suddenly very bright. "Some things you just keep. Like Barnaby. Like how I still can't eat spinach without thinking of that dinner we made the night before you left, how you stood at the sink and I watched the water run and run and neither of us said anything."

The bartender set down another round. I thought about the way water could hold memory, how tears were mostly water, how the human body was water and blood and bone, and how some of us were mostly water anyway—shapeless, taking the form of whatever container held us.

"I'm married now," I said, and it felt like confessing to murder.

Marcus smiled, and finally his tongue found the spinach. "I know," he said. "He's a lucky man. But Barnaby still sleeps on my pillow."

Outside, it began to rain. Water falling from the sky, and somewhere in the city, a cat slept on someone's pillow, and somewhere, a goldfish swam in circles, and somewhere, a woman ate spinach and didn't check the mirror, and somewhere, we were still young enough to think we could keep anything forever.