The coffee gets cold again. Third cup today, and like the others, I forget it exists until the warmth has leached away. Grandma would have scolded me for wasting good coffee. “Drink it while it’s hot,” she’d say, reaching across the kitchen table to touch my hand. “Life’s too short for cold coffee.”
I let out a bitter laugh that sounded similar to a sob. Life was too short, wasn’t it? Six months, three days, one hour, and seventeen seconds too short, to be exact.
Her chair still sits across from mine, the wooden seat worn smooth from twenty years of Saturday morning conversations. The scratch near the left leg from when we moved it into the house. The small coffee stain on the right arm that never quite came out, no matter how much we scrubbed.
I keep expecting to hear her key in the lock, to see her bustling through the door with another bag of groceries she “just happened to pick up” because she was “in the neighborhood.” She was always in the neighborhood. Always had a reason to stop by, to check in, to sit in that chair and tell me about Mrs. Peterson’s new garden or how the price of tomatoes was highway robbery these days.
The silence is deafening now.
I reach for my coffee cup, muscle memory from countless morning conversations, and find it cold again. The sunlight streaming through the window catches the dust motes dancing in the air, and for a moment, they look like falling snow. Grandma loved the snow. Said it made the world clean again, gave everything a fresh start.
My phone buzzes. Another condolence message. I’ve stopped reading them. They all say the same thing anyway. “She’s in a better place.” “At least she didn’t suffer.” “Let me know if you need anything.”
What I need is to hear her laugh one more time. To smell her perfume – the same brand she’d worn since 1985 because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” To feel her hand on mine as she tells me everything will be okay, like she did when I was seven and broke my arm, or seventeen and had my heart broken for the first time, or twenty-two and going through a quarter life crisis.
The chair creaks slightly as the house settles, and for just a second, I forget. For just a second, I think it’s her, shifting her weight as she launches into another story about her book club or the new recipe she wants to try.
But it’s just the house settling. Just the wind. Just the world turning without her in it.
I get up to make another cup of coffee. This time, I tell myself, I’ll drink it while it’s hot.
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The absence of sound. Hoping to hear your grandmother readjusting herself in her favorite chair. Well done.