The Best Kind

The stories I tell are inspired, always, by truth. In each character I create, slip the details, whether odd habits or favorite songs or crooked smiles, of people I’ve known somewhere. I think I am imagining and most of the time that imagination is infected with memory. I know that J and M have become part of characters—J in the devotion with which Parker prepares his meals and the careful, unspoken dedication Nadio has to his family. M in the strength with which Keeley fights and the truth Nadio searches for. And now I am writing a story that has impossibly and unexpectedly become a love story and once again I think of them. And I miss Sunday mornings in a sunny kitchen when J made coffee and M leaned on the counter and they planned a day and let all of us in on this perfect pair they’d made. I hear rumours that today is a special day for them and anyway, it’s a Sunday morning and they’re on my mind.