The Guardianship Papers on My Table

Two Cups

The petition said I had been seen walking the road in the dark. Here is what it was.

Every morning at a quarter past six I put on Gus’s old canvas coat, take a flashlight, and walk the half mile down my lane to the mailbox. I carry two thermos mugs of coffee. It takes nine minutes down and ten back, because of the hill.

The morning after Gus’s funeral I walked down in the dark the way I had every morning of our marriage, because he always met me at the mailbox with the paper and the cups. Kurt had come to stay the week. He found the kitchen cold and the back door open, and he followed me down.

I was standing by the cottonwood Gus planted the year we married, holding both mugs. I could not make my wrist tip the second one out. I stood there with it for I do not know how long.

Kurt was thirty-five and the quietest man I knew. He took the mug out of my hand and poured it slowly on the roots of the tree. “That one’s for you, Uncle Gus,” he said. Then he took my arm and walked me up the hill.

I have done it every morning since. I drink one and pour the other. Sometimes I say a few words to the tree about the beans or the wind. That is the woman who was talking to herself before sunrise.

The night I came home from Moriarty I did not sleep. At a quarter past six I walked down with my flashlight and my two mugs and stood at the cottonwood and could not think of one word to say to it. My legs were perfectly steady.

I poured the cup out. I told myself that if the judge wanted to call that wandering, the judge could have the hill.