The Coffee Table That Came to My Porch

So there I was in the fog, with the engine running and my own mailbox lying on its side in the headlights.

I got out and looked at the fender. It was dented, not badly. I stood the mailbox up against the post stump like a drunk against a wall. Then I got back in, and drove the truck up the lane at about four miles an hour, and put it in the machine shed.

Lorraine kept her car keys on a nail beside the kitchen door. They were still there, nineteen months on, because I had never found the strength to move them. I hung mine next to hers.

Then I stood in my kitchen in the dark. The clock on the stove said 5:20.

I did not turn on a light.

Alton is always at the co-op by five to start the pot, and he carries a flip phone he refuses to replace. I dialed the number from memory.

It rang twice.

“Ervin,” he said.

“I won’t be in this morning,” I said. My voice sounded like somebody else’s. “I won’t be in anymore. I can’t, I’m not able to see the road. I ran over my own mailbox. I’m sorry. You boys go ahead.”

There was a pause long enough for me to hear the coffeemaker behind him.

“All right,” Alton said.

Then he hung up.

That is the entire conversation. I stood there with the phone in my hand, and I will tell you the honest thing, which is that I was hurt.

Nineteen months, and he said all right. Like I had told him I’d be late for a dentist appointment.

I sat down at the kitchen table. I did not make coffee, because making coffee in that kitchen at that hour had never been something I did alone. When Lorraine was gone I had found it easier to wait for the pot at the co-op.

I thought: this is what it will be now. Six o’clock will come, and I will not be anywhere.

I listened to the hall clock for most of half an hour. Pete, my blue heeler, came and lay across my feet. He does that when the house is wrong.