I never thought a cup of coffee could cause so much trouble in a family.
But then, I never thought I'd have to defend the right to have supper with somebody after my husband died.
My name is Winona.
I'm sixty-four years old, and I spent thirty-four years working in emergency rooms.
I learned to notice things other people missed.
A change in skin color. A hand that wouldn't stay still. Somebody saying they were fine while their eyes said something else.
Retirement didn't take that out of me.
Neither did grief.
My husband, Dwight, died two years ago in November.
Some mornings, I still woke up expecting to hear him in the bathroom, coughing while he shaved.
Then I'd look at his side of the bed.
Empty.
That was how the day started.
Our house was in Seagoville, a little outside Dallas. We'd lived there long enough for the trees to grow over the driveway and the kitchen cabinets to need replacing.
Dwight had always promised to fix them.
He'd promised plenty of things he never got around to doing.
I didn't blame him for that anymore.
The brown recliner beside the living room window was harder to get used to.
It was where he watched the evening news, nodded off during football games, and complained about the weather like he had a personal arrangement with the man responsible for it.
After he died, I left it where it was.
I dusted it every Saturday.
I never sat in it.
That probably sounds foolish.
You can tell yourself something is just furniture, but the mind doesn't always listen to reason.
Last June, my neighbor Carla decided I'd spent enough time alone.
She knocked on my door with a flyer for a grief group at the senior center.
"I think you ought to come with me," she said.
"I'm doing fine."
She looked past me into the quiet house.
"Then you can come help the rest of us do fine."
I should have known I wasn't going to win that argument.
The following Thursday, I went.
The meeting room smelled like burnt coffee and floor cleaner.
Somebody had arranged folding chairs in a circle, and a woman near the window was handing out name tags.
I wrote Winona in the space provided.
Carla looked over my shoulder.
"Your handwriting looks like it belongs on a prescription bottle."
"That's because I spent half my life reading doctors' handwriting."
She laughed.
I laughed too.
It surprised me how much effort it took.
That was where I met Wendell.
He sat two chairs away from me and didn't say much during the meeting.
He looked to be in his mid-sixties, with gray hair, a broad frame, and hands that seemed too large for the paper cup he held.
He was a widower.
He'd retired from the electric co-op after working there for years.
When people spoke, he listened without interrupting.
I liked that.
Some men can't stand a quiet moment. They have to fill it with a story about themselves.
Wendell didn't seem to need that.
The meeting ended, and everyone began collecting their purses and jackets.
I was struggling to pull my cardigan over my shoulders when he stepped closer.
"Would you like me to get the door?"
"I can manage."
"I figured you could."
He held it anyway.
That was our first conversation.
Nothing special.
I didn't go home thinking I'd met somebody important.
I went home thinking I'd been out of the house for two hours without looking at the clock once.
The next week, I returned.
Wendell was there again.
He had two coffees.
He handed me one before I had even taken my seat.
"Two creams," he said.
I looked at the cup, then at him.
"You remembered?"
"You told Carla last week."
I hadn't realized he'd been listening.
It was a small thing.
Small things had been missing from my life for a long time.
After Dwight died, people brought casseroles, sent cards, and called to ask if I needed anything.
I appreciated all of it.
But eventually, the calls became less frequent.
People returned to their own lives.
I couldn't blame them.
Still, nobody remembered how I took my coffee because nobody had needed to remember.
Wendell did.
We started talking after the meetings.
Sometimes we discussed our spouses.
Sometimes we talked about the weather, the price of groceries, or the trouble of getting older without anybody asking permission first.
He never told me I should be over Dwight by now.
He never told me I needed to move on.
He just sat beside me and let me talk.
That mattered more than I wanted to admit.
The third week, he came to my house.
My porch light had been flickering for months.
Dwight had meant to replace it, but then he got sick, and later there were hospital visits, appointments, and medicines to keep track of.
After the funeral, I couldn't bring myself to care about a lightbulb.
Wendell noticed it when he walked up the steps.
"That thing been acting up long?"
"Long enough that I've stopped noticing."
He looked at it for a moment.
"Mind if I take a look?"
I gave him a screwdriver from the kitchen drawer.
Twenty minutes later, the light worked.
I stood in the doorway watching him test the switch.
"Well, look at that," I said. "I ought to have called you months ago."
"You didn't know me months ago."
He said it so simply that I didn't know what to say.
So I invited him to supper.
I had baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans.
He ate two helpings and thanked me for the meal.
The following Sunday, he came back.
I cooked again.
After that, Sunday supper became our habit.
I didn't announce it to anybody.
There was no reason to.
He'd arrive in his old truck, sometimes carrying a loaf of bread or a bag of peaches he'd picked up somewhere along the road.
I'd set another plate on the table.
We'd eat, talk, and wash the dishes together.
He never acted like he was doing me a favor by being there.
I liked that most of all.
My knees had been giving me trouble for years.
Thirty-four years on hospital floors had left me with aching joints and a habit of rubbing the backs of my legs when I'd been standing too long.
One evening, I told Wendell that I was probably going to end up in a wheelchair like my mother had.
I meant it as a joke.
He didn't laugh.
"Does your doctor know how much pain you're in?"
"Doctors know everything until you ask them to fix something."
That earned a smile.
He asked me what made my knees worse, and I told him about the stairs at the senior center and the way cold mornings made everything stiff.
He listened.
Then he asked about my mother.
I told him how she'd been near the end, how she needed help getting around, and how she'd tried to pretend she could still do everything herself.
"I was always telling her to sit down," I said. "Then I'd get angry when she wouldn't."
"Sounds like she was stubborn."
"She raised me. What did you expect?"
He laughed at that.
Later, I told him about the kitchen in the house where I'd grown up.
Mama had painted it a bright yellow, the color of buttercups in spring.
I remembered the chipped enamel table, the old curtains, and the way the afternoon sun made the whole room look warm.
Wendell asked me to describe it again the next time we talked.
Then he asked about it a third time.
I thought that was odd.
But people who had lost someone sometimes held on to small memories. I understood that better than most.
What I didn't understand was why Wendell never invited me to his home.
Whenever I asked where he lived, he'd mention the area beyond Ferris.
Whenever I asked if I might see his place sometime, he'd find a reason to put it off.
"I'm still getting things sorted out, Winnie," he told me one Sunday. "It isn't ready for visitors."
"Is the roof falling in?"
"Nothing like that."
"Then what's the trouble?"
He rubbed his thumb across the handle of his coffee cup.
"Give me until Christmas."
I stared at him.
Christmas was months away.
I was sixty-four years old. I'd raised two children, buried a husband, and spent decades watching people invent reasons not to tell the truth.
I knew how excuses sounded.
And I knew I didn't like that one.
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: The Sawdust on His Jeans and the Yellow Paint on His Hands Made Me Wonder What He Was Doing Behind That Closed Door
My Husband Had Been Gone Two Years, but the First Man Who Made Me Feel Alive Again Had Something He Wouldn’t Explain
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