Coffee
There is a thing that happens when—
Never mind.
I was going to say something. I had a thought that felt like the beginning of a real one, with a shape, a direction, and a place to land, and then it did not. It just stopped. Like a sentence someone started writing and then left the room.
That has been happening a lot.
It was Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Tuesday. The light through the kitchen window looked the same both days.
I had stopped checking my phone for the time because my phone was face-down on the granite counter beside my dad’s, and I was not going to be the one to pick either of them up.
That was our arrangement. The phones and I had an understanding.
The granola bar was still on the counter too. Zane had moved it at some point, set it on a plate, like putting it on a plate would make it into a meal. I did not eat it. I moved it back next to the phones so they could all keep each other company.
Zane made coffee at seven and left a mug at my elbow on the porch bench. By nine the mug was cold. By ten he had quietly replaced it with a new one. He did not say anything about the first one. Neither did I. We were both pretending the coffee was the project.
The hummingbird feeder was filled lower than yesterday.
I had a system now, checking it. Not on purpose.
Just the way your eyes find the same thing in a room every time you walk into it.
I did not know the exact measurement, I only knew the before: filled to the brim, a promise kept for twenty-one years by a man six minutes away.
Now there was a line of air at the top, and below it, the syrup was still bright and clear and the birds were still coming, and the hook was still holding, and none of that was his job anymore but nobody had told the birds.
They had lost their source of provision.
Another tragic irony I tried not to think too much about.
The bully with the crooked tail feather came at eight-fifteen. On schedule. I sat on the bench in his plaid blanket, and I watched it and I thought about nothing at all.
That was not true. I thought about the phone on the granite.
I thought about it from the porch, from the sofa, from the foot of the stairs in the dark at two in the morning when Zane was asleep and the house was doing that thing houses do when the people who belonged to them are gone. Settling. Sighing.
I had stopped going upstairs. I did not decide this.
Just stopped. The sofa was fine. The porch bench was fine.
The floor, once, near the sliding door where the morning came in first and the light was pale and did not ask anything of me was fine.
The spaces that did not belong to him were easier.
He had not sat at the porch bench enough to leave a shape in it yet.
Zane had made the bed. Twice, I think. He smoothed the duvet and turned the lamp off and stood in the doorway of the bedroom looking at me on sitting on the stairs like he was calculating something.
Like if he found the right angle he could solve it.
He did not say anything. I did not say anything.
He went to bed eventually. I watched the ceiling.
One night, late, I heard him. From the dark of the hallway, I heard him start to count. One. Two. Three. Then silence. He stopped at three.
I pressed my back against the wall, and I listened to the silence and I thought: that is the sound of Zane figuring out there is no one to count for anymore. I don’t know if he knew I was there. I went back to the sofa. I stared at the ceiling until the light changed.
I was not sad. I want to be precise about this because there is a difference and I know what sad feels like, I’ve lived in sad the way you live in weather, I know its seasons and its pressure systems and the particular way it sits on your chest at three in the morning.
This was not that. I knew grief, too. Of course, I knew grief, I was raised on it.
There is a part of me that considers pain my friend.
I know that sounds sick. Maybe it is. But I know her so damn well.
She is dependable. She will always come over for dinner, right on time, with a bouquet of dead flowers in her hands.
She stays after we eat, refusing to be the guest who always leaves first. She lingers around the kitchen island with a glass of wine, watching me while I do the dishes.
She will say hi to me in the grocery store.
She will hold onto me in the dark, her fingers draped around my shoulders, and she will not cloud the busy air with more white noise.
She is a ghost that only knows how to haunt. But she hugs me closely. She knows my favorite songs. She knows what goes through my mind when the moon shines. She knows everything about me.
I thought I had gotten rid of her. I thought I had finally, after all this time, shown her to the door.
But pain is not the kind of friend who leaves when you stop calling.
She showed up this week uninvited, frostbite on an unprepared, exposed limb, and she has not moved from my father’s kitchen since.
So, no. This was not sadness, nor did it feel like the grief I have always known.
This was like someone had reached in and taken the frequency out.
Not the life, just the signal. Everything was running, the engine was on, the lights were on, I was answering the phone when the phone rang and speaking in the right words and signing the forms everyone needed signed. The machine was operational.
But somewhere between the operational parts, there was just. Nothing. A room with the furniture taken out. I kept walking into it and standing there, surprised every time by the echo.
10:17 AM. The man from the funeral home had an ink smudge on the knuckle of his right index finger. He used a Montblanc rollerball to write down the details of my nightmare.
“The transport from the medical examiner’s office was completed, Ms. Garcia,” he said. His tie was maroon with small gray diamonds. There are twenty-four diamonds visible above the edge of the wooden desk. “We have the authorization forms for the preparation. If you’ll just initial here, and here.”
My hand took the pen. The signature was standard. My capital S has the regular loop at the peak. I have signed so many things in the last two weeks. I have signed everything. I have signed my past, my future, the present. The beginnings and the endings.
“And regarding the interment,” the man said, shifting a cream-colored folder from the bottom of his stack to the top.
“Mr. Garcia was very thorough. The plot at Saint Jude’s was secured in ninety-eight.
The contract was updated in January. He selected the Appalachian oak with the brushed bronze hardware.
The service format is fully detailed here, scheduled for Thursday.
We simply need your confirmation on the start time. ”
The paper was heavy, eighty-pound stock. Tom’s signature at the bottom of the January amendment is larger than usual, and sloppier, the tail of the M dragging into the date line.
He did not even leave me the choosing.
“Twelve is fine,” I said. I don’t know why it mattered. Time is a liar. Twelve is three and five is nine.
“Excellent. And the floral selections, he specified white hydrangeas, white lilies.”
“Yes.” Hydrangeas were my mom’s favorite. Lilies were his.
“Are you sure you don’t need a moment, Ms. Garcia? We can pause.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “The time is fine; the flowers are fine.” It was not like I had any experience in planning funerals. I did not even remember my mother’s funeral.
At home, I write what I can remember on the back of an old envelope.
Twelve. Blue. White. January. Then I looked at what I had written and understood that my father had sat in that same office, or one like it, months ago.
He had chosen the flowers. He had paid in advance.
I looked at the envelope for a long time.
Then I put it next to the phones and the granola bar, and I went back to the porch, and the bully with the crooked tail feather was still there, still eating, still completely unbothered, and I pulled the plaid blanket tighter and I watched it until Zane came out with another cup of coffee I wasn’t going to drink.
And I watched the hummingbirds. When the hummingbirds went home to sleep, I watched the feeder.
Then I watched the air and then I watched the inside of my mind.
The red sugar water in the cylinder was four and a half inches below the brass rim. Zane’s boots were by the door, exactly parallel, the laces tucked inside the ankles. He moved through the living room without getting dizzy because he was not being haunted.
“Seren.”
Zane was standing four feet away. His fingers were hooked into the front pockets of his jeans, the denim white at the seams from wear.
His eyes were moving across my face, tracking from the left brow to the corner of my mouth, searching.
He’s searching because he thinks I’m hiding from him, but I was not. This is what there is. He can see it.
“I made some rice,” he said. His voice was down in the register he uses when he is worried my mind will drown. “With the chicken from yesterday. It’s on the stove.”
“I’m not hungry, Zane,” I told him.
“You haven’t had anything since the hospital, Seren.”
“The logistics for Thursday are done,” I said, looking past his shoulder into the living room window, toward the third shelf of the bookcase. The spines are alphabetical by author. Moriarty. Morrison. Mukherjee. “The oak casket has been chosen. The flowers are ordered.”
He did not move. He waited for five seconds, then six. The silence has a density now; it felt like the gray insulation foam they spray into basement headers.
At 11:00, he stands near the sofa where I am lying under the plaid blanket. He clears his throat, the sound small and dry.