Instead I pick out the phrases I like most, the ones that make me want to agree with him, answer him, ask him. I was nervous, I read again, and I want to say: I was, too. No excuse, and I think: No, but I forgive you. Before 7 a.m., and I wonder: What time do you get up in the morning? What time do you have to be at your weird calculator job?

I enjoyed watching you work. I love that word, enjoyed. It sounds small and polite, but it contains something big, passionate. In my head I see it as it should be, I think. The en- and the -ed should be small, but sturdy. Like bookends, or like hands, supporting something that’s lean and tall, but fragile and new. A fawn’s legs. J-O-Y.

It’s a photograph he’s enclosed, or a photocopy of one, but I can tell that the original is black and white. On the bottom right corner I can see a snippet of a label, something that must’ve gotten caught in the copier, a YPL that I know must have an N before it. Photo archives in the New York Public Library. That’s the trip Reid took after work. To the library.

It’s a ribbon cutting of some sort, though it must be a pre–big scissors and smiles moment, men in dark suits standing around behind a long, thin line of fabric. Behind them is a newer version of the building that had, only a few days ago now, been covered in scaffolding. But if you let your eyes drift up, up and over, you can see it. Top left corner. Three-quarters of the sign we squinted at. Not freshly painted, I don’t think, but newish. Clear and bright, and though I can’t see it all, I can see enough of what we’d missed on the street. The script I’d strained so hard to see is for a brand of men’s clothing, nothing I’ve heard of before, but I can picture the clothes, somehow, from that script—cap lines and ascender lines almost the same, swooping cross-strokes that nevertheless stay within the boundaries. Organized and elegant and aspirational.

Beneath it, the line of lettering that had faded almost completely, that I almost hadn’t known was there. An unassuming, narrow all caps. What’s written there makes me smile, and I wonder if it made Reid do the opposite. I wonder what this line of text means to him.

it reads.

A literal sign, but maybe the other kind, too.