Cold Coffee

The coffee was bland, weak, and watery, yet he sipped at it as though it might yield some clarity. Seated caddy-corner from his wife at the kitchen table, he tried not to look directly at her swollen face. She cried silently, tears streaking down her cheeks and falling, unheeded, into her lap.

“What’s wrong?” he asked again, though her answer—another tremulous sob—was no more illuminating than the first.

He stared at her, willing her to speak, to lash out even, but the silence between them grew thicker, pressing against the walls. He raked a hand through his hair, and his eyes wandered to the half-full mug.

“What’s wrong?” he asked once more.

The coffee had gone cold, but that wasn’t the reason it tasted so wrong. He couldn’t recall the day—struggling to trace the hours of his work shift. His memory felt as thin and stretched as a threadbare sheet.

Something should have stuck: a conversation with a coworker, a song on the radio during his drive home. But there was nothing, only the hollow echo of the present moment.

The doorbell rang, and he flinched.

“I’ll get it,” he muttered, but his wife was already on her feet, her sobs momentarily stilled. She moved with a quiet urgency, opening the door before he could even rise.

“Mom,” their daughter-in-law said softly, her arms encircling his wife’s trembling frame. “I came as soon as I could.”

They clung to each other, the two women, and he stood awkwardly in the doorway to the hall, watching the tableau. His daughter-in-law glanced at him once, her eyes sharp and unreadable, and cut straight through him.

The chill of her gaze tightened around his chest like a vise. What the hell did I do? he thought.

He turned and started down the hallway, eager to escape the uneasy intimacy of the moment. As he reached the end of the hall, their voices drifted after him, faint and uneven.

“What funeral home is he at?” his daughter-in-law asked.

The words struck him mid-step. He froze, his hand braced against the doorframe.

There was a strange, fleeting sensation like the floor had shifted beneath him. He turned slightly, just enough to catch his wife’s murmured reply.

In the quiet, a single thought screamed through his mind: What funeral?