Missed the Funeral

Anymore, when I start writing something, even if I have an idea of where I want to go with it, I'll get a page or so written up and then just not no where to go from there, and come to a full stop. Sometimes I'll walk away from it, thinking, "Well, I'll come back to this later." When I finally do, I'm as adrift as I was before. More often than not, I'll simply close the word processor and return to whatever useless nonsense that I was doing. That's the case with this. I had the idea of a long gone son returning to a dusty hometown for the reading of the will. Instead of closing it out, I thought, "I guess I'll put it up here." Not much to it, though.

The reading of the will was scheduled for two o’clock. Steven had gotten off of the bus at eleven fifteen and looked up and down the almost deserted mid-midmorning downtown. Needing some place to kill time, he bought a paper at a battered red newspaper dispenser and pushed against the door of a closed-seeming bar. It gave, and he slipped into the dusty twilight inside. A narrow shotgun bar from the pre-war era, a long silvered mirror and a wood bar ran against one wall into the interior. The left side of the room contained scalloped, blood red vinyl booths. There were two old men sitting at the far end of the bar, several stools apart. A woman in her early forties was tending the bar, standing a short distance from the two men. She leaned against the bar back, reading a battered paperback thriller. Steven sat on a stool halfway down the bar. The woman put her book facedown on the bar and walked over to him.

“Hey – can I get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.” The woman moved over to the Bunn machine and poured a cup of coffee into a chipped white porcelain mug. She placed it on a napkin in front of him. She moved back to her book.

“Could I have some cream as well?” Steven asked. He tugged his tie loose a fraction.

The woman looked at him. “Sure.” She put her book facedown on the bar again, and moved towards the far end of the bar, bending over and reaching into the small refrigerator under the bar back. She came back to Steven with a paper carton of 2% milk and put it down in front of him.

~

Meanwhile, across town, Susan stood in front of the mirror, putting on makeup. Her two children ran screaming through the hallway just beyond the door, and with an effort of will, she managed to ignore them. They were not easy to ignore, and the effort was made more difficult in her distracted state. Since her father died, she’d had a terrible time sleeping – not that she’d slept that well before he’d died, either. With her mother out of town and Steven MIA, Susan had been the only one able to sit with him in the hospice during the final few days. Being a stay at home mother allowed people to assume she was available to take care of any odd job that happened to come up – never mind that it required her to find someplace to dump the kids for hours during the day, and trusting a fairly useless husband to take care of them and not burn the house down while she was gone. Did anyone concern themselves with the work she had to do? No, of course not. The clothes still needed to be washed, the meals still needed to be cooked (or, more often, bought) and the kids still needed to get to day care.