Anatomy Of Us TYMI Book Two CHAPTER TWO: What Are We?

The drive to the Conservatory took forty minutes when Kali

wasn't paying attention to the drive, which was most of the

time, because the road knew itself by now — every curve of it

memorized in his hands the way the deposition binder had

been memorized in Allen's mouth all morning, dates and

permits and numbers recited without once reaching for a

note.

Kali had sat in that gallery for five hours and said almost

nothing, and somehow it had been one of the more

exhausting days of the last two months, which was saying

something, given the last two months.

He let himself in through the kitchen door instead of the front

one, the way he'd been doing since he was tall enough to

reach the handle, and found his mother exactly where he

expected to find her — standing at the island with a glass of

wine she'd poured twenty minutes ago and hadn't gotten

around to drinking, reading something on her tablet with the

specific focus she brought to anything that wasn't actually

urgent.

"There he is," Mari said, without looking up. "How was the

inquisition."

"It wasn't an inquisition. It was a deposition."

"Same energy." She set the tablet down and studied him

properly, the neurosurgeon's assessment running

underneath the mother's. "You look tired. Sit. Eat

something."

There was already a plate covered on the counter, because

there was always already a plate covered on the counter, and

Kali didn't have the energy to pretend he wasn't going to eat

it. He pulled out a stool and sat, and his mother uncovered

the plate and set it in front of him without comment, and for a

few minutes the kitchen did what it had always done, which

was simply hold him.

"Allen did well," Kali said eventually, around a mouthful of

his mother's rice. "Sinclair — the board's counsel — she

tried the age angle first. He recited case law about

accelerated certifications like he'd written it himself."

"He probably could have." Mari refilled her glass, an inch, the

amount of someone who liked the ritual more than the wine.

"And the rest of it?"

"The rest of it was fine."

"Kali."

He looked up. His mother had a particular way of saying his

name that meant she already knew there was a rest of it, and

was simply waiting for him to decide whether he was going

to tell her himself or make her extract it.

"She asked whether being together compromises how we

run the hospital," he said. "Whether the board can trust two

people who love each other to actually check each other's

judgment."

"And what did he say?"

"He told her to ask the outcomes data. Said it doesn't have

an opinion about who he loves." Kali heard himself say it and

felt, again, the specific thing that had moved through his

chest in the gallery when Allen said it — not surprise, not

anymore, but something adjacent to awe that he suspected

was never going to fully wear off. "On the record. Under oath.

He just said it."

His mother was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet she

used when something had landed somewhere she wasn't

going to perform. Then she said, in the tone of someone

changing the subject without actually changing it: "Selene

and Quinton are coming Sunday. I'm doing the seating chart

tonight, because your father has opinions about who sits

near the window and I'd like to resolve that before Thursday."

"Okay."

"I need to know what to put on Allen's place card."

Kali paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. "His name."

"His name, obviously. I mean underneath his name. On the

little line. 'Allen Yara, Co-Founder' feels absurd for a family

dinner. 'Allen Yara, Kali's—'" She gestured, open-ended, the

specific gesture of a woman who had raised a son for thirtytwo years and had never once needed a word for something

she could simply see. "What. What is he."

"Mom."

"I'm not being difficult. I'm asking a logistics question. I have

a caligraphy pen and a decision to make." She looked at him

with the patient, merciless warmth she'd been aiming at him

his entire life. "You've had him under oath answering harder

questions than this one today. Surely you have a word."

Kali opened his mouth. Nothing arrived to fill it. He closed it

again.

"That's what I thought," Mari said, not unkindly, and went

back to her tablet, and left the seating chart, and the

question, sitting there on the counter between them like

something that had been waiting a lot longer than a Sunday

dinner to be asked.

Allen arrived at 8:40, which meant he'd left Kingfall Heights

the moment his last post-deposition call with Marcus Webb

ended, which meant he'd been thinking about today in some

register Kali hadn't been given access to yet. He found Kali

on the back porch — the porch, the one with three acres of

dark garden stretching out from it and a half-moon doing

very little to light any of it, the one where a version of both of

them had once decided to build a hospital at 2 AM and hadn't

fully understood yet what else they were deciding.

"Your mother let me in," Allen said, in the specific tone of a

man reporting a fact for the record rather than making

conversation, the same instinct that had recited permit dates

from memory that morning without once being asked to.

"She likes telling people that. Makes her feel like a coconspirator."

"She is a co-conspirator." Allen sat on the railing across from

him, not beside him, close enough that Kali could see the

specific tired quality still sitting in his shoulders. Five hours

of Sinclair's patience would exhaust anyone; it had simply

taken Allen longer to show it. "You've been quiet since the

car."

"I wasn't in the car with you."

"You texted like someone who wasn't in the car with me and

was still thinking about something." Allen looked at him.

"What's the something."

Kali considered several ways into it and discarded all of them

as too small. He settled, eventually, for the actual sentence. "My mother wants to know what to put on your place card for

Sunday dinner."

Allen's expression did the thing it did when a variable arrived

that he hadn't pre-loaded. "My name."

"Underneath your name. The little line. She said 'Co-Founder'

feels absurd for a family dinner." Kali looked at the garden

instead of at him, which made this marginally easier, in the

specific way that looking at gardens instead of people had

been making things easier for him his entire life. "She wants

to know what you are. To me. In a word she can fit on a card."

The quiet that followed had a different texture than Allen's

usual quiet. Not withheld. Working.

"Boyfriend," Allen said finally, testing it the way he tested

surgical approaches, out loud, to see if it survived contact

with the air. "That's — insufficient."

"That's what I thought. Fourteen years doesn't fit in

'boyfriend.' It sounds like something that started in March."

"Partner, then."

"Partner sounds like a law firm."

"It's also accurate. We are, in fact, partners. Co-founders.

Colleagues. The relationship has professional dimensions

that 'boyfriend' doesn't capture and that are, arguably, more

load-bearing to the actual structure of our lives than—"

"Allen." Kali was smiling now, despite himself, despite the

whole absurd exhausting day sitting underneath it. "It's not a

legal brief. It's a place card."

"A word has a function," Allen said, with the particular

stubbornness he brought to being told his precision was

unnecessary. "What does this one need to do? It needs to tell

your mother's caterer where to put my name on a piece of

card stock. It needs to survive your father asking your aunts

what it means. It needs to be true in a boardroom and true at

a wedding and true whenever your cousin decides to

interrogate it publicly on a group text, which she will. A word

is a tool, Kali. I'm trying to find out what job it's supposed to

do before I hand you one."

"It's not a *tool*, Allen." Kali said it exasperated and fond in

exactly the proportions the sentence had been arriving in for

fourteen years. "It's not supposed to do a job. It's supposed

to be true."

"Then tell me what's true and I'll find the word that matches

it. That's the same process. I'm just doing it in the correct

order."

Kali looked at him — at Allen sitting on the railing of the

porch where all of this had actually started, the fortress fully

open now, still arguing methodology in the middle of

something that didn't require any — and felt the exhaustion

of the day fold over into something else. Something that had

room in it for this. For him.

"Okay," he said. "What's true."

"You are the person I have organized my entire life around

since I was fourteen. Every decision that mattered, I made

with the shape of you already factored in, whether or not I let

myself know that's what I was doing. There isn't a version of

my life that predates wanting to be wherever you are. That's

true."

Kali's throat did something complicated. "That's not a word.

That's a paragraph."

"I'm aware. I said I'd find the word after." Allen was quiet for a

moment, looking at the same dark garden Kali had been

using as a place to put his eyes. "We're not new. 'Boyfriend'

implies new. We're not just professional. 'Partner' implies a

firm. We're not — " he paused, and something in the pause

had the quality of a man setting down a tool he'd been

gripping too hard. "We're us. That's the whole sentence.

We're us. We've always been us. Every other word is just a

smaller version of that one, trying to fit through a door that's

too narrow for it."

Kali didn't say anything for a moment. The garden held its

dark. Somewhere past the tree line, one of the biodomes

gave off its faint, steady glow, the way it always did, patient

and unbothered by whatever the humans on the porch were

working out for themselves. "We're us," Kali repeated, quiet, turning it over. "You've been

sitting on that for a while, haven't you."

"Since approximately 2:15 this afternoon. Sinclair asked her

version of the same question and I didn't have the informal

answer ready. Only the deposition-safe one." Allen looked at

him. "I've had a few hours to work on the informal one."

"You built me a place card answer during a lunch recess."

"I built you the correct answer during a lunch recess. The

place card is incidental."

Kali laughed — really laughed, the sound of it loosening

something in his chest that had been tight since 8:15 that

morning — and crossed the porch, and Allen met him

halfway, which was the whole pattern of them now, neither of

them waiting at the far end of anything anymore. "We're us,"

Kali said again, against his mouth this time, not a question. "I

can live inside that word."

"It's not a word. You said so yourself."

"Don't get pedantic with me on my parents' porch, Allen."

"I'm always pedantic. You knew that going in."

"Fourteen years ago. Yes. I was warned."

His phone buzzed against the porch railing at 9:20, and then

again thirty seconds later, and then a third time in a way that

had a specific, recognizable rhythm to it — not urgenthospital rhythm, but urgent-Jay rhythm, which was its own

category of emergency and typically resolved itself with

significantly less bloodshed.

He checked it. Group thread. Jay, Mar, and — for reasons Kali

chose not to interrogate — Vivian, who had apparently been

added at some point without anyone's memory of adding her.

Jay: Ok so. what's the label

Jay: For the community page. people are ASKING

Jay: I need language. boyfriends? partners? soulmates? I can work with

soulmates but I need a RULING

Jay: Kali. KALI. i can see the read receipts

Allen leaned over to read the screen without asking

permission, which was itself a category of relationship Kali

did not need a word for either. His mouth did the thing that

was not quite a smile and was entirely a smile.

"Tell her," he said.

Kali looked at him. Then at the phone. Then typed, with the

specific economy of someone who had just spent forty

minutes discovering exactly how much could be carried by

exactly how little, four words, and sent them before Jay

could escalate to a phone call.

Kali: We're us. Don't push.

The reply came back in under ten seconds, which was, for

Jay, a personal record in restraint.

Jay: ...Okay that's actually really good

Jay: I hate that I like it

Jay: I'm using it

Maurice: Told you not to push

Jay: Hush it Mar!

Kali set the phone face-down on the railing and looked back

out at the garden, at Allen still sitting close enough that their

knees were touching, at the whole absurd exhausting perfect

day finally, finally settling into something he could set down.

"We're us," he said again, mostly to himself this time, testing

the shape of it the way Allen had taught him to test

everything now — out loud, to see if it survived contact with

the air.

It did. It was going to survive a great deal more than that, he

suspected, and for the first time all day, thinking that didn't

feel like a hope. It felt like data.

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End of Chapter Two

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