Big hands. Reading glasses on a cord. A flannel shirt in July.
He didn’t talk the first three weeks.
At our second meeting, he handed me a coffee.
“Two creams, right?”
I was surprised he’d remembered.
I hadn’t told him.
He’d watched me fix the first one.
Soon he fixed my broken porch light, and I invited him to dinner.
He brought a pie from the gas station and apologized for it the whole meal.
Sunday evenings together became our tradition.
Pot roast. The news. Him washing, me drying.
Nobody in that kitchen knew it yet, but those Sundays were about to cost me my son.
My knees had gotten bad after decades on h*spital floors.
One night I joked that I’d end up in a wheelchair like my mother.
Gene went unusually quiet.
He asked how tall my mother had been.
I thought it was an odd question.
