Offal Record

Dear Garret, Okay, so I have decided to answer your letter the way you answered mine, in writing, from a tower, like a person with a plan. You will forgive me if I get some of the details wrong. My memory of that Saturday is mostly sound effects and mortification.

I want to start with the part you already know, because I need to tell it my way to understand it myself.

You entered the Offal Eating Championship. You, a man who once asked me if haggis was a beverage. You put on the little numbered bib and stood at the folding table in the square with nine strangers and a stopwatch, and you ate, Garret. You ate tripe like it owed you money. I was there because Lena from the clinic dragged me out for the atmosphere, the bunting, the brass band, the whole civic circus of it, and I was standing near the front with a cup of terrible coffee when you climbed onto the stage.

I did not recognize you at first. Let me say it plainly, to be honest about that. I recognized you at the moment you turned to the crowd, mid-chew, holding a fork like a tiny sword, and shouted my name. My name! Your full mouth, the microphone, three hundred people. "Courtney!" you bellowed, and then, because the universe has a sense of humor, you added, "This record is for you!"

The record was, at that point, forty-two minutes. The previous champion had managed thirty-nine. You had broken it with three minutes to spare and two bowls still in front of you, and instead of savoring your triumph you were using it as a declaration of intent, in public, while covered in broth.

The crowd turned to look at me. I had three options. I could wave. I could faint. I could drop my coffee, which I did, and then do a sort of sideways shuffle behind a man selling pickled things, which I also did. So I did all three, technically, in sequence.

The announcer loved it. "A dedication, folks!" he said, and the brass band struck up something jaunty, and you raised your fork to the general region of the pickled-things man's stall, which was nowhere near where I was crouching. It was, without competition, the most embarrassing thing anyone has ever done in my direction. And I once had a patient sing me the entire chorus of a love ballad mid-cleaning, so the bar was high.

But here is what I have been turning over all week. Nobody has done anything absurd for me before. Not once, in thirty-four years. I have been asked out by a man checking his watch. I have been serenaded by voicemail. I have never had someone eat offal in my honor in a public square while the mayor's cousin held a stopwatch. That is a sentence I never expected to type, and yet.

* * *

Now the second thing, the thing you probably hoped I would not notice.

After the event, when you were being interviewed by the local paper and I had made my escape, I walked past the row of scooters by the brewery fence. Yours was there, and there was a dark puddle under the front wheel, spreading in that slow, apologetic way that liquids do when they are the heralds of bad news. A wheel cylinder, I later learned from the repair shop, had sprung a leak. Your scooter had been quietly dying while you ate tripe for my honor.

You did not ride home, did you? You walked. Four kilometers, in the dark, smelling of offal and dignity, and you never mentioned it. You told me the next day, at the coworking coffee thing, that you had "taken the scenic route." Garret. The scenic route. Your wheel cylinder was in cardiac arrest and you strolled home through the industrial district like a romantic poet with a limp.

I found that out a few days later, when I passed the repair shop and saw your scooter up on the stand. The mechanic, who knows everyone's business, told me the whole story in ninety seconds and then charged me nothing for it because I once fixed his molar. Small towns are like that. Even small towns in Russia that nobody can pronounce.

And that is when the strange feeling started. The feeling of curiosity, the kind I must emphasize is not nothing, because for the past three years I have looked at men the way I look at dental x-rays. Professionally interested. Mildly amused. Nothing moves. And then you stood on a stage and yelled my name with your mouth full, and something in my chest went click.

I have been trying to work out what the click was. I think it was this: you are ridiculous, and you are also completely sincere, and those two things together are rare. Most people pick one. You picked both and then walked