“Sit down,” he says. Like I was here last week. Like this is normal. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
I go inside.
The kitchen is exactly the same—same yellow countertops, same round table, same window above the sink that looks out at the barn.
The coffee pot is on.
A single mug beside it.
I pour and stand there for a moment, holding the cup in both hands, letting the warmth bleed into my palms.
The kitchen smells like coffee and dish soap and the faint, permanent smell of old wood, and underneath all of it, if I close my eyes and stop breathing, I can almost catch the ghost of vanilla and lavender and something baking.
Almost. Not quite. She’s fading.
Even here, even in the house where she grew up, the scent of her is going. That’s the thing about the dead—they leave slowly, in layers, and by the time you realize a layer is gone, you can’t get it back.
I take my coffee to the porch.
Sit in the chair beside Earl.
The chair that used to be mine on Sunday evenings, after dinner, while Rose and Bex did dishes inside and Earl and I sat out here and watched the light change and talked about horses and fence lines and the kind of nothing that men are comfortable with.
We sit.
Earl doesn’t rush it.
Doesn’t fill the silence with questions or accusations or any of the things he’d be justified in filling it with.
He just sits in his rocker and drinks his coffee and looks out at his land and lets me be present.
After a long time, I say, “I’m sorry.”
He nods. Slowly. “I know.”
“It’s not enough.”
“No. It’s not.” He looks at me. Those blue eyes—Rose’s eyes, the same impossible blue that I fell in love with the first time a blonde girl turned them on me in a feed store parking lot fifteen years ago. “But you’re here now. So let’s start from here.”
I don’t deserve that.
The grace of it, the simplicity.
Start from here.
Like me being gone is a fence that can be mended by just showing up with the right tools and the willingness to do the work.
Maybe it is.
Maybe that’s all anything takes—showing up.
The hardest, simplest thing in the world.
He tells me about the treatment like he’s giving a weather report.
Stage 3. Started as colon, spread to a lymph node.
Caught it because he couldn’t stop losing weight and Bex bullied him into a doctor’s appointment.
