Desiderata

Excerpt

Albert Chura is an early riser. Joyce awakens to the buzzing of his lawnmower. The days are getting longer, and already her room is filled with sunlight. Outside, the pale spring leaves have matured into a deep summer green. Ed’s white birches – he planted them along the front edge of the yard — are in full leaf. Once again Joyce has her privacy, after a long winter of feeling exposed.

She dresses and goes downstairs to make coffee. From the front porch she gives Albert a wave. After he finishes he’ll come inside for a cup. He always compliments her coffee, though she knows it’s nothing special. She simply follows the directions on the can. It seems a ridiculous thing to learn at her age, but widowhood is full of such lessons. Ed, who rose before dawn, would have his first cup alone in the dark. He’d put on a fresh pot when he heard Joyce on the stairs.

She sets out milk and sugar for Albert – she takes hers black – as he raps at the back door. “Morning,” he grunts, wiping his work boots on the mat. Albert is seventy-two, the age Ed would have been, and his boots look nearly that old.

Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh is the author of three novels: The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping and elsewhere. She will be the visiting writer at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in spring 2010.