Page 91 of Puck You Both

"Call Maman. She'll pretend she doesn't know. It makes her happy."

She hangs up, and then it's just me and the apartment. It's very clean in here. And very quiet. The sponge is drying out in my hand. I should get up, put music on, call Mom, call a therapist. Anything but sit on my own floor, in my own head.

A knock on my door puts my misery on hold, and I wait for the second one to make sure I heard it right.

Nobody knocks on my door. The delivery guys text. Patrick has a key. I get up, my knees protesting, and cross the living room braced for a neighbor or somebody's lost pizza, crack the door open, and blink. Then blink again.

Wall fills my doorway the way he fills a net, which is entirely. Off-day hoodie, red hair ruffled on one side like he drove with the window down. And in his hands, and I do need a second to trust what I'm looking at, a foam cheesehead, and a bouquet.

I'm using the word loosely. Gas-station carnations, dyed a shade of blue no flowers have ever once been, plastic sleeve, price sticker still on, $6.99.

I look at Wall, and he lets me stare for a moment. "You're in Milwaukee," I say, finally.

"You're very observant."

I make a show of rolling my eyes. "It's my day off from you people."

He holds out the cheesehead. "For morale."

I reach out on instinct, and then it's on my head. Wall gives it one small nod, like a delivery confirmed.

I point at the carnations. "Are these for me or for a funeral?"

"They were the last ones. It was them or a car air freshener."

"You drove ninety minutes to bring me gas station flowers?"

Wall puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs his massive shoulders. "Your texts had a frequency problem."

"My texts were hilarious."

"They were. That's the problem."

I have to turn around and walk back inside, fast, because my eyes are doing something and he's not going to stand in my hallway and watch it happen. He never typed anything, because he'd already put the phone down to go find his keys.

"Well," I announce to my living room, arms out, voice doing its best. "Welcome. That's the couch. That's my plant. Tour's over. I have water, beer, and four kinds of protein powder, so really, it's a full bar."

Wall’s not listening. He's already in my kitchen, opening one cabinet, then the next, hunting for something, and what he comes up with is the only vessel I own with a neck: a protein shaker. He fills it at the tap, unwraps the carnations, stands them up in it, and sets the whole arrangement in the middle of my counter. Then he steps back, tilts his head, and moves it a centimeter to the left.

The worst bouquet in the state of Wisconsin, in a shaker that will smell like vanilla until the end of time, in the middle of the cleanest counter in America.

I open my mouth to say something about it, but there's nothing in there, so I dawdle to my couch and plop down. Wall folds himself down next to me. The couch wasn't built with him in mind, his knees ending up somewhere around the coffee table. He settles anyway, thorough about it, and then he looks at the dark TV and says nothing.

I grab the remote and put on my comfort show, the Québécois one, where a contractor named Gaétan has spent eleven seasons getting betrayed by other people's renovations. It's in French. Wall doesn't speak French. He leans forward a little and watches anyway.

A few minutes in, Gaétan starts shouting at an open cabinet.

"Why is he yelling?" Wall whispers, like we’re in a movie theater.

"He's disappointed in the hinges. It's a whole arc."

He nods and keeps watching.

So this is my day now. There's a cheesehead on my head and a goaltender on my couch, and the strange part is how hard this is turning out to be, sitting next to a person without performing a single thing for him. He drove ninety minutes on his day off to watch a man grieve hinges in a language he doesn't speak, on a couch that fits two-thirds of him, and I keep waiting for him to get to the point of the visit.

It takes me way too long to understand that this is the point.

Gaétan finds water damage behind a shower wall and lets everyone know how he feels about it. And somewhere in the middle of his grief, quiet, at the television, I start talking.