Dinner at Steve's

When he got back, it was as if she had never been there. As he turned the key in the lock, a hollow echo came back at him from inside the apartment. The hall was cold, he shivered inside his coat. It never was the same as he would imagine it, but still he knew what had happened. The door swung open easily, he stepped inside, a little hesitant, and closed it behind him, as if he didn‘t ever want it closed. There was nothing inside that he could remember. Everything had been swept away. He walked to the window, and recognized the view. A little street, curving gently away behind him, identical houses on both sides, plain flat roofs with cold chimneys, and three identical windows on the front, one for each floor. Streetlights hung over the cracked pavement, only dimly lit in the early dark of evening. Directly across the street, on the front stoop of his house, sat the same man who sat there every day, wrapped in the same pink bedspread. His dog lay snoozing on the cement walk at the foot of the stoop, just as he always did, just as they always did, every day. Even then. He turned his back on the window, the only thing familiar, and faced the room. He knew it would all come back to him, what each thing meant, but for now her attachment to it all had been severed, and nothing reminded him of her. She had been there for so long that everything in his life had taken on meaning based on her, and now she was gone. But it was as if she had never been there to begin with. He shrugged off his coat, dropping it on a chair, and went into the bathroom. He took off his clothes and turned on the shower, very hot, and stood in the rising steam. Watching himself vanish in the mirror.



Dinner at Steve's was usually the high point of his Friday. It was a tiny place, what they called a “sports bar", the walls layered with banners and pennants and quite a few years worth of team pictures. He slid into a booth, the waitress brought him a beer, and he ordered porkchops. All around him, people crowded against the bar, or into booths, or around the few small tables that balanced across the floor. It was noisy, and the noise and the crowd served to hide him. lt occurred to him that he had never taken her here. lt wasn’t the kind of place she would have liked. Or maybe he just wanted to keep one thing for himself, one place she would never touch, so that, in leaving him, she could never leave it. He sipped his beer, and when his chops came, he ate slowly.