LOVE WAS NOT IN THE CONTRACT
The way silence with him is never empty.
He tells me, at some point, about the summer he is twelve and reads every book on the third shelf left to right in order without looking at titles first, just to see what happens.
“What happens,” I say.
“I read three biographies of Napoleon, a book about beekeeping, two novels in French that I cannot understand, and a very long history of the British canal system,” he says. “In that order.”
I stare at him. “How was the canal system.”
“Surprisingly interesting,” he says. “Genuinely. I still think about the canal system sometimes. At inappropriate moments.”