The Second Cup
My name is Margaret Briggs. I’m seventy-one years old.
And at exactly 6:18 on a Thursday evening in October, at a dinner table in Scottsdale, Arizona, my only son looked across a roast chicken I had cooked and asked me when I was finally going to leave.
But that’s the middle of the story.
Let me start where it started.
On a porch.
With a cup of tea.
Harold and I were married for forty-four years.
We met at a church picnic in Flagstaff in 1979. He was twenty-six. I was twenty-five. He was a high school shop teacher with sawdust in his hair and a laugh you could hear across a parking lot. I was a bookkeeper at a lumber company. He came to buy two-by-fours for his students and stayed an hour arguing with me about the price.
He asked me to dinner. I said no.
