Eulogies

He was always checking his broken pocketwatch – like, maybe one day he would click the case open and it would be working again, like magic. I don’t think I would have been surprised. He brought such a sense of life with him wherever he went. And maybe that’s why it was a shock when he died.


Their tabby cat – I wonder what’s going to happen to him. It was his wife’s cat really, but, he couldn’t get rid of it – couldn’t deal with being entirely alone – after she died, even if he was always more of a dog person. That cat would sit at my feet whenever I was over for dinner and he always gave me hell for encouraging it with scraps but it made his wife laugh.


It’s odd really. I lived in the same complex, the same floor, for two years before ever meeting him. He showed me how to fix the brass plate that fell off every time I shut the door too hard.


I always liked him really, even before I got to know him all that well. He had these eyes – they were so green – and weathered hands from all those years of woodwork. He made his own marriage bed as a wedding gift to his wife, this magnificent thing with a headboard full of vines swirled into Celtic knots and twisted lintels with swans on top. He didn’t make big things anymore by the time I met him, but he still carved little things; trinkets and jewelry boxes, little statues of flamingos or bears or mice. I liked to sit with him on the balcony, watching him chip and shave the excess wood away until the nose of a badger began to poke through.


He took me to Lombardi’s for my 30th birthday. He lent me one of his wife’s old dresses because I didn’t have anything nice enough for a place that expensive. He wouldn’t let me say no – said I deserved something nice to make up for the year I’d had, with the company going under and breaking things off with Sam and, you know, I think he picked up a lot more than I ever told him about.


His wife knitted me a scarf for Christmas. She used to invite me over and we would talk about all the books we’d read while he tinkered with his watches. I don’t think he ever managed to fix any of them.


He was a lovely man and I jumped at the chance to jump his bones but I felt bad once we were actually between the sheets and, ‘no, your wife was such a nice lady and I know I could never measure up – it’s okay if I’m just a replacement, but, please, be honest about it,’ and he kissed my temple and kept an arm around my waist anyway and never pushed any further than that. I tilted my head back and traced the knotwork on the headboard. I don’t even remember falling asleep. I just remember waking up that morning with his arm still heavy on my waist and wondering if those swans on the lintels weren’t about to lift off and fly away. That’s what kind of person he was.