He almost always stumbled out of their bedroom well before she did, an urgent call to the bathroom propelling him as fast as his dilapidated knees and metal walker could manage. Then to the coffeepot to push the start button, confident that she had scooped in the coffee and poured in the water before she’d gone to bed. Sometimes he’d take a quick nap in his recliner in the little TV room adjoining the kitchen before the bell signaled that the coffee was ready. Sometimes he’d turn on the lamp and read a chapter in his Western.
She’d pass through the door into the TV room and veer right into the bathroom, squinting in the light. She told us that she’d come out of the bathroom one morning recently, before he’d been rushed to the closest hospital by ambulance, before he’d spent those last five days in the hospital, and he’d said, “Why don’t you come here and give me a kiss, Polly?” And she did. She’d kissed him smack on the lips before she went to the kitchen to pour her half cup of coffee and to heat his up a little. She told us: “He must’ve known something was going on, something wasn’t right. We really didn’t kiss much anymore—you know, we’re old people.” She kind of laughed and sighed as tears filled her eyes. “I’m glad I kissed him. What am I going to do without George?”
They’d drink their first cup of coffee, side by side in their matching recliners, reading their library books, or maybe she would read her Bible, or sometimes they’d talk in the hush of the morning about what they were going to do that day: mow the yard, pick tomatoes, go to the Dutch Discount to pick up a few groceries. Then she would start breakfast—almost always two sausage patties and two eggs for him, and a bowl of cereal for herself; sometimes toast, buttered then browned under the broiler, and a spoonful of her strawberry preserves.
She said the first morning she walked into their little sitting room, after we’d all gone home and she was there by herself, she’d cried and cried because he wasn’t there in his recliner. The house was too empty, too quiet. And no one had pushed the button on the coffeepot.
Glenda Breeden for The Poplar Grove Muse