David

The snow that fell outside the shop’s windows was so dense that we could have called it a blizzard if it hadn’t seemed so apathetic. There was almost no wind and the temperature outside was barely below freezing. The fat, sticky flakes attached to their neighbours until there were entire little clumps of snow tumbling through the still, warm air. The first layer of this new snow melted against the salted parking lot pavement and the subsequent layers built up to form a spongy, light-grey slush.

In the shop, I sat with my coworkers on chairs that were supposed to be reserved for customers. Our masks hung from our ears or were tucked under our chins like neckbeards of tired blue fabric. We each nursed a coffee or tea of some kind and watched the falling snow with a uniform set of mixed feelings. There was something undeniably blissful about being warm and dry while watching dismal weather. I assume that this is and always has been a universal human experience. I have no doubt in my mind that it was a tangible connection between ourselves - a bored trio of retail employees sitting in a suit shop - and the first caveman who watched sleet pummel the ground a few feet from where he sat.

But our feelings were mixed, like I said.

‘This is going to be a slow day,’ said Chelsea.

‘Absolutely nobody is going to go out in this,’ said Parker with his customary certainty. He slouched into his chair and let out a long, loud yawn.

As if to make mockery of this minor prophet, a pair of headlights pushed through the curtain of damp and came to a halt in front of our doors.

‘Just watch,’ said Chelsea. ‘It’ll be a really old person.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘It’s always seniors who decide that a new pair of Dockers is worth the risk.’

Parker issued a small, appreciative laugh and straightened in his seat.

The headlights died and the driver of the little Toyota SUV opened his door and stepped cautiously into the soupy slush below. From where we sat, all we could see of him was that he was wearing galoshes, proving Chelsea right. For reasons best known to God, it’s only the elderly who seem to understand the value of overshoes. 

The driver pushed the RAV4’s door closed and began the slow, tricky business of approaching the curb. As he walked, he kept one hand on the hood of his SUV and the other on the grip of his walking stick. He glanced up as he approached the shop as if to see how far off lay the shore of the Styx. 

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. ‘I know this guy.’

‘One of your regulars?’ Chelsea asked.

‘Not very regular,’ I said. ‘But I did meet him through here. I bought him coffee one time.’

‘You bought a customer coffee?’ Parker repeated with a grin.

‘He was a good storyteller,’ I said. ‘I wanted to hear more, so I took him to MacDonald’s on my day off and he told me his whole life’s story.’

‘On your day off?!’ Parker laughed again, this time more heartily. ‘Classic.’

I took one last swig of my coffee before putting my mask on properly. ‘It was worth it,’ I said. ‘His story is worth listening to.’

‘What made it so interesting?’ Parker asked.

‘Here we go,’ said Chelsea, putting on her own mask as the customer slowly trudged in through the first set of doors.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said, getting to my feet and moving to open the inner doors. ‘Good afternoon!’ I said cheerfully, ‘Welcome back, Mr. Scarf!’

The customer stopped and beamed at me, his watery eyes peering over his ill-fitting mask. He said nothing at first as he collected his thoughts.

I decided to save him the embarrassment of potentially having forgotten my name, so I lowered my mask momentarily. ‘It’s Owen!’ I said with a big smile.

‘Owen,’ he said, pronouncing my name with slow, warm care. He touched his own mask. ‘It’s hard to recognize people with these things,’ he said, embracing the offered excuse.

I nodded, still holding the door. ‘Isn’t it?’ I agreed.

He nodded and continued to stand perfectly still in the vestibule, clearly organising his memories so that he could understand who I was and how we knew each other. It didn’t seem to perturb him that my coworkers and I were all watching him as he oriented himself for almost a minute. At long last he nodded again as if to say, “now I remember what I came in here for” and his galoshes stirred, slowly sliding themselves across the tile floor, one after the other.

‘I’ll tell you what I need,’ he said. He took my arm as he came into the store and squeezed it. The door swung slowly closed behind us as I waited for him to satisfy our collective curiosity. He tapped his waist significantly. ‘I need a belt,’ he said.

‘You know,’ I said, employing one of my most overused quips, ‘I think we have one or two of those kicking around.’

‘I thought you might,’ he said.

We progressed across the shop toward the standing unit where our belts were displayed. Mr. Scarf had first taken my forearm in a gesture of greeting, but continued to hold it as we moved, balancing himself between his walking stick and I. We made light conversation about the weather and his wobbly hip as he browsed the belt selection with total disinterest.

‘Show me your sweaters,’ he said at last. ‘I want a cardigan.’

So on to the sweaters. Then the khakis. Then the belts again. Then we looked at the galoshes, not because he wanted any - he simply wanted to see if we carried them because “you can’t find them anywhere, you know” and it was enough to find that we had them so he’d know where to find them next time he needed a pair. Then back to the belts, but nothing caught his eye so we proceeded towards the door, still much engaged in our conversation. I tapped the handicap button and the door obligingly popped open and we pushed into the vestibule and then out into the snowstorm.

The thought never seemed to occur to Mr. Scarf that he had achieved nothing by this expedition, probably because it wasn’t true. As he settled into the driver’s seat of the RAV4 and stowed his walking stick beside him, he turned on me with a satisfied smile.

‘Thank you,’ he said. 

‘The pleasure was entirely mine,’ I assured him earnestly and, making sure that he was belted in, I closed the car door.

I hastened back into the shop before I could get too thoroughly drenched.

‘Just a social visit?’ said Chelsea.

‘I guess,’ I said. I took a couple tissues and wiped the slush from my shoes to save the leather from the salt.

My coworkers were ready now to hear what was splendid about the old man’s story. Masks were slipped back off and coffees sipped and gazes expectantly directed toward me.

I considered waving the matter away. I considered giving a short version. I could say “He had a beautiful marriage.” or “He’s just a very wise man.” or “He taught me a thing or two about life.” and left it at that. Or, rather than a cryptic, lazy response, I could simply excuse myself, saying that it was too long a story and that I doubted my ability to do it any justice at all.

‘Come on,’ said Chelsea, apparently reading my mind. ‘This is a long story sort of day.’

~ ~ ~

He was a very clever man (I began). I suppose he still is in a different sort of way. When he was young, he actually had a whole following. His essays were published in all sorts of prestigious places. He would write about philosophy in such a way that the average person could understand it easily and inevitably come away agreeing with him. When he wrote about socio-political issues, there would be politicians and pundits the world over commenting on his latest essay within twenty-four hours. He was famous and popular and there were multiple, distinct knots of young men and women who would orbit around him, feeding from the limelight that his proximity would splash upon them.

He told me a story about this time he was sitting in a cafe reading a book. He was 24 or 25 at the time. He said that he was deeply enthralled with what he was reading, marking the text with his pencil and making little notes in the margins of the pages. He was so occupied that he didn’t see the coming and going of other persons until he looked up to take a sip of his long-cold coffee and realised that he recognized every one of the cafe’s patrons. They were either friends, or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends. Most tried to act as if they were there for the biscotti and the conversation of their peers, but several unabashedly grinned and waved at him.

Maybe David (his full name is David Scarf) was a bit conceited and it was just his vain imagination that he had so large and passionate a fanbase, but I did look him up after he told me all of this and it turns out that he was genuinely very well known. He also lived in an Ivy League college town where there would have been lots of students who could have been impressed and attracted to the possibility of a celebrity relationship. 

So who knows, I guess? I actually believe David. I’ve had lots of people try to impress me with their stories and if there’s one thing that David didn’t try very hard to do, it was make himself look grand. He was very comfortable being vulnerable and honest, even when it made him look bad. So even though he’s old and details might have gotten muddled in the recounting, I suppose that - for myself - I trust him.

David met Hannah Jane in the spring of his 25th year. She was a very pretty woman. He carries a little black and white photograph of her in his wallet and he shows it to people. He showed it to me. She had very severe features, especially for one so young. Her eyes were large and her chin jutted just a little and her nose was kind of pert, if that’s the right word; small, sharp and a little upturned. Her hair was so light that it was almost white and it was very tidily gathered into a bun that rested against the nape of her neck.

David told me that the reason she always kept her hair up was because of the seizures.

When David met Miss Jane, she was a nineteen year-old freshwoman who had come from the city to study ecology, with a particular interest in ornithology. At that time, she hadn’t had a seizure since she was fourteen, but nevertheless lived in fear of them.

She told David about the seizures the very first time they met. She said ‘I’m an epileptic,’ just like that. 

He told me ‘I didn’t mind at all to hear that she had epilepsy. I was much more concerned with the fact that such a witty girl was pursuing something so uninspired as birds.’

We can be like that, I suppose. We love a person and are appalled to find that something that is incongruous to our own character is not incongruous to theirs. 

David tried to get her to care about the things he cared about, and she listened attentively while he lectured her about why even the noblest theories of cultural reform must depend for their success upon the public’s competence in personal epistemology (or whatever). He says that sometimes he would lose his train of thought because she was watching him so intently as he went on. 

‘What is it?’ he asked, all self-conscious and flustered. 

‘I couldn’t pretend to care about that if I tried,’ she said. She smiled her perfect smile of white teeth and flawlessly curved pink lips.

When David told me about that, he said: ‘You know what I did? I stormed away. I couldn’t imagine that there was a person who didn’t think that everything I said was perfect and original and worth hearing. Yet here was this girl - the prettiest, funniest creature I had ever met... The sight and sound and, you know, even the smell of her would make my heart explode into beating far too fast.’ To emphasise this point, he punched his old hand into the palm of the other over and over again with surprising force. I thought that he would topple out of his chair with the effort. ‘Like that,’ he said. He went on: ‘I felt sure that I would die before I was thirty just because she would look over at me one time too many and my heart would just give up and say “I quit, Sir!” and I would fall over, dead as a dodo.’ He paused in his recounting and stared off into space. I didn’t want to interrupt that moment, because I could tell that he was remembering. The wrinkled casing of humanity before me with its slow cadence of speech and its wobbly hip could still clearly remember the petty frustrations of young love.

Finally, he resumed the story: ‘I wanted her to be impressed by the things I had to say, because I was a boy, Owen. I had become comfortable and popular just through the things I said and wrote and it didn’t occur to me that I might be more than that. I thought that my entire identity lay in those words and ideas that I carefully arranged in my head and put onto paper. If she didn’t like those, then she must not like me.’

Sometimes when Mr. Scarf is telling you a story, he takes your forearm (like he took mine when he came into the shop, but not for balance) and he squeezes it gently but firmly. It’s for emphasis. It’s his way of underlining a point.

At this point in his telling me about young Miss Hannah Jane, he took my arm in his hand and squeezed it. ‘Owen,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you. At that time, I didn’t care if nobody else in the world liked me. Hannah was the only one I wanted to like me, and that was all I wanted out of life.’

They got married while she was still in college. Mr. Scarf was making enough by his writing to support them both while she continued with her studies. 

She didn’t make any changes to her degree program. She wanted to study birds and carried on doing so. David didn’t begrudge her that either. Her refusal to pretend to be interested in his pet topics had allowed him to see that she did like him; not his books or essays or clever speeches. To her, that was all merely work that a man was doing and she was no more interested in falling in love with David over his essays than she would love a farmer for how neatly his rows of barley had been planted.

David paused at this bit and said, in a very stern voice: ‘When we got married, Owen, I promised Hannah that I would love her in sickness and in health.’ He squeezed my arm very hard for those last five words.

‘I said the same thing when I got married, Mr. Scarf.’

He locked eyes with me for a long minute and said a gruff ‘good man,’ before returning to the story.

When they had been married only four months, Mrs. Hannah Scarf had a “grand mal” seizure as it was called. She was at home studying at the time and David didn’t even know about it until he came home and found her lying in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor. I guess she hit her head during the seizure and had flailed about in the blood for a few minutes before the seizure stopped.

I don’t know much about seizures or epilepsy or brain damage. Neither did David really, though obviously he knew a lot more than I do just because of his relationship with Hannah. Apparently, even doctors today still admit to there being unsolved mysteries in the topic of epilepsy and I suppose that there would have been even more back when David and Hannah were first married.

Hannah sustained permanent brain damage from her seizure. Because nobody witnessed it, it’s not clear if she had gone for any significant amount of time without breathing, which could have caused the damage. It’s also very possible that the damage was done by the sharp blow to her head that had caused all the bleeding. Nobody knew, and no amount of wondering did anybody any good, because the damage that had been done would never be reversed.

David told me: ‘She would just sit there in her chair. She couldn’t talk and she couldn’t understand the things I told her. I tried to teach her sign language, because I thought we could communicate like that somehow, but there was nothing there. Not even for a one-sided conversation. She just stared at me and sometimes her eyes would roll away to look at something else, just as I was trying to tell her that I loved her and was going to stay by her no matter what.’

There was another long pause. I had been studying the tabletop in the MacDonald’s as Mr. Scarf told that part of the story because I didn’t know where else to look, but when he stopped talking, I looked up to examine his face. I had expected to see him overcome with emotion, maybe even shedding a tear as he was describing the loss of his beloved young bride. Instead, his face was calm. He was staring at the tabletop just as I had been, as if he too was listening to a story about tragic young love. 

‘What did you do then?’ I asked feebly.

‘I returned to who I had been before. Hannah made me see that I was more than my ideas and with her gone, I just… I just became my ideas again. Whatever part of me was worth more than my work had only been able to get its head out of the water because she was holding me up. Without her…’ He shook his head ruefully.

His wife needed constant care. David was with her a lot initially, but was neither skilled nor patient with the duties of a nurse. He hired a young, absentminded woman to live with them and see to Mrs. Scarf’s every need. 

The girl was a recent graduate from nursing college but, after only a couple of hours in a hospital, decided that she had made a grave mistake. I guess that’s why we do so much placement work for students nowadays. She saw an advertisement for a live-in care provider and, thinking that this must be a calmer, less bewildering line of work than being in a hospital, she applied. She was a slow study and took a few weeks to grasp the finer points of caring for her solitary patient. However, once she knew what she was supposed to do, Janet Baxter was the most loyal and conscientious little nurse that ever you could hope to find.

Hannah had had many friends before the seizure, and immediately following the injury there came a veritable wave of sympathy and compassion that was poured out upon the Scarf household. Quickly though, people moved on. They “got over” the plight of David and Hannah and once again found reason and company for good cheer and the continuation of their self-interest.

There was only one woman who continued to visit Hannah, and her name was Ethel Klein. She was the same age as Hannah and had actually been the person who introduced her to David. She wasn’t in school for birds, though. She was taking philosophy. She was reading the books David was reading and all of the essays he was writing.

David was greatly comforted by Ethel’s many visits. He didn’t know to what degree his wife was aware of those around her, but he liked to think that in some small way she would be cheered by the company of her friend.

However, it didn’t take long before Janet, the nurse, started forming her own ideas about this Mother Teresa character. She started noticing that Ethel rarely felt compelled to visit her sick friend when she knew that Mr. Scarf would be out. She also started to notice that, though Ethel’s chair would be turned to Mrs. Scarf, it was to the latter’s husband that she directed all her attention. David says that Janet would eventually tell him all of this, but is adamant that he didn’t notice - let alone encourage - any of it at the time.

Things stayed about the same for three or four years. Mr. Scarf told me that he and Mrs. Scarf “grew apart” during this period. I thought that this was an interesting choice of words, because his situation didn’t really fit with what I picture when I hear that a couple is “growing apart”. 

So I asked him. I was like, ‘How could you be growing apart when you no longer had a relationship?’

And he took my arm again and said, ‘I promised, Owen. Do you remember what I promised? What did I tell her?’

‘In sickness and in health,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘In sickness and in health. But I didn’t do a very good job of being her husband in those days. In those days, I was at home less and less. I decided that if I couldn’t have a wife, then my work would have to do. You know what I mean. I thought that I could be happy that way.’

But he wasn’t. He says that his work made a poor wife. It had been enough for him before Hannah came along, but now it was constantly disappointing. He says it was like wanting a Coke and going into the fridge and taking out a can and finding that it’s completely flat.

‘What is missing? All the ingredients are there, aren’t they? All the sugar and flavouring is there, but without that fizzy sensation, it simply isn’t worth drinking.’

He stayed away from Hannah more and more. He says that the sight of her just started reminding him of what had been taken from him. Mentally, I guess he started associating that beautiful young face with those moments of sorrow. You guard yourself from things that hurt you and he was guarding himself from her. He would leave first thing in the morning and return late at night, often eating out for all three of his meals. 

The bedrooms were rearranged pretty early on. Mrs. Scarf got the master bedroom to herself with Janet down the hall in the guest room. David moved across the hall into the second bedroom - the room that they had earmarked for a nursery. They had painted it a powder blue when they first moved in and he never had the interest or energy to change that. He would sleep on a sofa in there and if Janet and Hannah were still sitting up when he got home at night, he would never join them. He would just go directly into his room and read until he fell asleep.

A bunch of his friends threw him a party for his thirtieth birthday. It was outdoors at some place called The Governor’s Gardens. The gardens went on and on with hedges and ponds and cascading beds of flowers that seemed to loom over the crushed seashell pathways. His friends paid for a caterer and apparently it was a pretty posh affair. 

Hannah was there. Janet had put her in a dress of mauve that David had bought her when they were on their honeymoon and, having gained no weight at all in the intervening years, she fit it perfectly. She and David sat together for much of the evening until Janet came over to say that it was time for Mrs. Scarf to be in bed. That was probably around 10:00 or so. David sat with a glass of brandy cupped in his palms and watched as his wife was wheeled away. 

‘Owen, I felt so horribly alone. I was surrounded by all these friends and all I wanted was that my wife would be able to look over her shoulder and smile at me. Maybe tell me that my essays didn’t interest her. Maybe laugh or walk over to hold my hand or anything. Just a smile, you know, would have been enough.’

But Hannah did none of those things. She passed out of sight and David was left alone with his brandy and his misery.

‘I heard people talking. I couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see me because of all the damn bushes and things, but I could hear them just fine. There was a man and a woman. I knew the man was one of the graduate students who had viewed me as a sort of mentor for years. The woman was Ethel Klein.’

Ethel said, ‘I just never know how he’s doing.’

The young man (whose name David couldn’t remember) said, ‘Imagine feeling like you’re somehow obliged to stay loyal. To that.’

‘I admire it. He could have moved on ages ago and nobody would have blamed him for it. It shows a certain resolution of character. It’s noble.’

‘It’s a needless martyrdom. It borders on the ridiculous.’

‘He really, truly loved Hannah so much though,’ said Ethel.

And that was when David realised who they were talking about.

‘But does he love her now? You kind of wonder, don’t you, how real it could possibly be. Is it possible that there’s actually something that goes on between them?’

‘Well…’

‘At some point, with their disparity in sentience… you know what I’m saying?… it borders on bestiality, Ethel.’

Ethel scolded him.

But she also laughed.

David threw his glass into the cockleshells at his feet and stormed away.

‘Of course I was angry because that horrible, drunken little asshole had said something really terrible. But I was also angry because I had been wondering for a long while if maybe the fizz that was missing from my marriage to my work was sex. I had only been sexually active for a very small window of my life so far and I wondered if I needed to get back in the saddle to create a… a workable equilibrium.

‘Owen, I thought I knew roughly where to find a prostitute and so I went looking for one. It took me a couple hours because I didn’t know what I was doing, but then I found myself in a hotel room with a woman who smelled like cigarettes and lilacs. She said that her name was Gina.’

I was glad that the MacDonald’s lunch rush was long gone and we were alone for this part of the story.

‘She had me sit on the edge of the bed while she made herself at home. She went into the bathroom for a minute and then came back wearing just her underthings. She walked up and sat on my lap. I had a chance to look at her close up - her face and her shoulders, her breasts and her stomach, her hips and thighs. Owen, it wasn’t that she wasn’t young and beautiful, it was just that she was a person. Her limbs were all goose-pimpled because she was cold and the only reason she had cleavage at all was because her bra was working its ass off.

‘I had been anticipating something almost cartoonish. A sexual encounter that, while horribly wrong, was at least perfectly pleasurable. In my mind I had this idea that a prostitute would be totally shameful but totally worth it. I guess I had been expecting a sort of plastic, brightly-coloured lover. I wanted an object, but I was stuck with a person instead. Here I was with Gina shivering in my lap. If I was to have sex with her, I’d have to convince myself that I had some right to it; some relationship that could make the sudden introduction of sexual intimacy make sense.’

Maybe it’s because David had spent so much of his life as a virgin that he had these lofty ideas or maybe it was because of his relationship with Hannah. Maybe it was the spirit of the eternal God stopping him from doing something that he would regret. At any rate, he didn’t go through with it. He gave the young woman her fee and sent her away. He spent the night alone in that hotel room.

On the first day of his thirtieth year, David rose from a fitful and restless sleep and took a cab home.

Janet was in the kitchen and David swept right past her, ignoring her polite “good morning” and enquiring expression. He shut himself in his room and slumped into his couch. He stared straight ahead of him, trying to force down the revulsion that rose like bile in his throat. Apparently he couldn’t just add arbitrary sex to this false marriage with his work to make it palatable. Apparently he was still condemned to his eternal dissatisfaction.

‘I yelled and Janet could hear me from the kitchen. I said “Damn, damn, damn!” and I put a book through the lamp that I had on my little desk. Glass everywhere. But then I did what I always did. I picked up my work and tried to drown myself in it.’

David was working on trying to create a contemporary commentary of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. He was going to call it Culture and Anarchy and Cold War. He wanted to see what happened if you isolated Arnold’s thinking from its focus on the affairs of the 1860s and transposed those thoughts onto the sociopolitical climate of the 1960s. It was the kind of thing he did and it was the kind of thing that made people think him clever.

But David Scarf struggled with Matthew Arnold.

‘Arnold wrote in English and Nietzsche wrote in German. I still don’t know which of them is easier to understand and I don’t read German.’

On that day, David was reading one of Arnold’s essays in which the author discusses his view of poetry. It should have been an easy piece to grasp, but David found himself uncharacteristically distracted. He would read a paragraph once, then twice then three times. Then his mind would wander and when he returned his attention to the page, he’d realise that he still hadn’t understood what Arnold was going on about.

‘Dammit all,’ he said.

Rattled by the guilt of the night’s misadventure and unable to be consoled by his mistress, Work, David rose from the couch and took his volume of Arnold into the dining room where Janet had just finished feeding Hannah her breakfast. He told Janet that he was going to read to Mrs. Scarf and Janet went into the kitchen to clean.

In all the years that had passed since her seizure, David had not read aloud to Hannah. He sat down awkwardly across from her and cleared his throat and licked his lips and began.

“I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general.”

‘I felt awkward, Owen. Here I was, reading to my wife and I was blushing and squirming and wondering if I looked or sounded silly. I closed the book,’ (here Mr. Scarf clapped his hands with finality) ‘and I got up to go. I felt a damn fool. What was I doing this for? What did I want from her? But then her eyes, Owen! Her eyes followed me and when I looked at them I thought I had never before seen so intent and curious a gaze. I sat back down and she followed me still.’

So he kept reading.

“They are like persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age; they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want.”

He read to her for hours. His mind calmed down and he was able to understand what he was reading. Every time he looked up, he found Hannah’s pretty eyes were watching him still.

‘And every time our eyes met each other, you know what happened? A small bubble of hope would rise up inside of me. Or maybe a tiny bubble of joy. Or a sharp, lovely little bubble of friendship. You know what that was, Owen?’

I said that I didn’t.

‘Fizz.’

I don’t know if there was some damage that healed inside Mrs. Scarf’s head. Maybe some of her faculties were restored during the years of their “growing apart”. Maybe this was a sort of “waking up” moment for her. Maybe though, she had always had some degree of presence and David had just failed to see it because he wasn’t broken and desperate enough before. He says that it’s that last one.

David had described the three years leading up to his thirtieth birthday as a period in which he and Hannah “grew apart”. He describes the years that followed as the best years of his life. He and Hannah grew wonderfully, beautifully close. He read to her every day without fail. All of a sudden, he couldn’t think what it was that had required him to leave the house so often. He hardly ever left her side. He moved his little desk from the nursery into the sitting room and would do all his writing sitting in front of her where they could look up and see each other just as often as they liked.

He says that they never really figured out how to communicate properly. She was still largely incapable of coordinated movement. However, in a weird way, he said that when they would look into one another’s eyes, they could see each other in a way that was almost like talking. Not at first, you understand. At first, it was just occasional bubbles, like he said. But after years of devotedly investing time and energy in Hannah’s company, he says that talking to her and watching her eyes was enough to fill him to overflowing.

He hit his open palm again, like he had before. ‘My heart!’ he exclaimed.

Hannah didn’t have another seizure until, almost exactly twelve years after the grand mal that had injured her at 21, she had another that killed her completely. 

She wasn’t by herself this time. David was right there and he held her until she stopped shaking and lay perfectly still in his arms. He tried to revive her, but when he realised that she was gone, he gently closed her beautiful, beautiful eyes and kissed each one with tender care. 

He told me that he loves her still. He said, ‘I’m like a can of Coke, Owen. All sealed up and full of the fizz. It can’t escape. Some people told me that I should move on - that I wasn’t forty yet and could remarry now that I was “free”. Can you believe that? People actually said that to me. That I was “free” now.’

He never remarried. 

‘I didn’t need it, you know. Besides, I was a little scared of it. Hannah had filled me with hope and joy and friendship and I didn’t want to risk opening up and letting all that fizz escape trying to find more from someone new.’

~ ~ ~

I took a sip of coffee and directed my attention to the falling snow without.

‘Wait,’ Parker cried, ‘is that it?!’

It was.

Owen Hebbert ~ Sept, 2021