10 Pages of Story 1 “It’s Not Too Late to Love Again”
Story One
MARGARET COLLINS
“Where Love Once Lived…
and Lingered Still”
The coffee was already brewed before the sun had fully committed to the day.
Margaret Collins had been waking before dawn for as long as she could remember, a habit born not of restlessness but of ritual, the kind of deep, ingrained routine that forty-five years of shared mornings had built into the very architecture of her days. Harlan had always slept a little later. She had always risen first, moving through the kitchen with quiet purpose, filling the carafe, setting two cups on the counter, listening to the first birds begin their tentative conversation with the waking world.
She still set two cups.
It had been ten years. She still set two cups.
She noticed it every morning, the second cup, blue-rimmed, sitting beside her own white one like a faithful companion, and every morning she made the same small, private decision: to leave it there. It wasn’t grief, exactly. Not anymore. It was more like acknowledgment. A quiet nod to the life she had lived, to the man who had filled those mornings beside her, to the particular comfort of his presence that no amount of time had entirely erased.
The kitchen smelled of dark roast and the faint, sweet remnant of the orange she had peeled the night before. Through the window above the sink, the backyard revealed itself slowly, the dogwood she and Harlan had planted for their twentieth anniversary, still faithfully producing its pale blooms each spring; the birdbath he had set in the corner of the garden, which she kept filled and which attracted, on mornings like this one, the most reliable and cheerful of visitors.
A cardinal perched on the birdbath rim now. Red as a flame against the gray-green of the early morning garden.
Margaret wrapped both hands around her cup and watched him.
She had always found birds to be good company. They asked nothing of you. They simply went about the business of being alive, with such complete and unselfconscious dedication to that single purpose, and something about watching them steadied her in a way she had never found the need to explain.
You are settled, she told herself, as she did most mornings. You are fine.
And she was, mostly. This was important to acknowledge. She was not a woman undone by her circumstances, she had never been that kind of woman. She had managed Harlan’s illness with a steady hand and a full heart. She had buried him with dignity and love and the particular grief of someone who had loved well and known it. She had rebuilt her days into something orderly and sufficient: the Tuesday bridge club, the weekly call with her daughter Claire in Philadelphia, the Friday morning walk with her neighbor Josephine, the stack of library books that rotated faithfully on the nightstand.
It was a good life.
It was a quiet life.
She pressed her lips together and turned from the window.
The cardinal had gone.
The Forty-Five Years
People who have not been in a long marriage sometimes ask, with genuine curiosity and a slight miscalculation of tact, what it is that holds two people together for so many decades. As if the question had a clean answer. As if forty-five years could be summarized in a principle.
Margaret had never found a satisfying way to answer this, in the years when people still asked. She and Harlan had not been held together by any single thing, not by passion alone, which burns too hot to sustain a life’s worth of mornings, and not by mere comfort, which is too static a word for something that was always, in small ways, growing. They had been held together by the accumulated weight of choosing each other, over and over, in all the ordinary moments that constitute the actual texture of a shared life.
By the cup of coffee he brought to her desk on the evenings she worked late, without asking if she wanted it, because he already knew. By the way she had learned, over decades, the exact quality of silence that preceded his most important thoughts, the slight stilling, the particular way his hands settled, and had learned to wait it out with the patient attention it deserved. By thirty years of falling asleep in the same bed and finding, each time, that the presence of another person’s breathing in the dark was a form of grace she had no adequate words for.
By the way he had held her hand in the oncologist’s office, on the day they received the diagnosis, with the particular steady pressure of someone who was frightened too but had decided, without discussion, that frightened was not the same as giving way.
She had thought, in the first years after his death, that what she missed most was the large things. The conversations. The shared history. The particular way he could make her laugh at the precise moment she most needed to.
She had been wrong.
What she missed most was the weight of his hand in the car. The reflexive gesture of someone reaching for what was beside them without looking, reaching simply because it was there, and had always been there, and the reaching was by now as natural and unconsidered as breathing.
She still sometimes reached for a hand that wasn’t there.
Ten years later.
She still sometimes reached.
Josephine Banks had been Margaret’s neighbor for twenty-two years and her close friend for nearly as long. She was a small, energetic woman of seventy-five who wore bright colors with the conviction of someone who had earned the right to them, and whose opinions arrived with the same lack of apology as the woman herself, direct, warm, and generally correct, which was the most irritating thing about her.
“You need to get out more,” Josephine said on their Friday walk, approximately six weeks after what would become a significant morning in Margaret’s otherwise unremarkable winter. They were moving along the path that skirted the edge of Millbrook Park, their breath making small clouds in the cold air, their pace unhurried but steady.
“I get out plenty,” Margaret said. “I’m out right now.”
“With me. That doesn’t count.”
“Why doesn’t that count?”
“Because I’ve known you for twenty-two years and we’ve had all the same conversations.” Josephine said this without any particular sting, just the frank affection of long friendship. “You need new conversations, Maggie.”
Margaret was quiet for a moment. The path curved toward the small pond at the center of the park, its surface pewter-still in the winter light. A pair of geese moved across it with unhurried dignity.
“I’m sixty-two years old,” she said finally.
“You’re seventy-two.”
“That’s what I said.”
Josephine laughed, a full, bright sound that scattered a few sparrows from the nearby hedge. “No, it isn’t. And even if it were, so what? My cousin Rosalie met her second husband at seventy-eight and they’ve been insufferably happy ever since.”
“I’m not looking for a husband.”
“I didn’t say husband. I said new conversations.” Josephine cast her a sideways look. “Though I notice you went straight to husband.”
Margaret did not dignify this with a response.
But later, walking home alone through the gray winter afternoon, she thought about Josephine’s words longer than she had intended to. Not the part about the husband, that was Josephine being Josephine, stirring things just to see what rose to the surface. But the other part. The part about new conversations.
She tried to remember the last time she’d had one.
She couldn’t quite place it.
