Cup of Decaf

“I hope that’s decaffeinated, Harold.”

He looked down at the cup in his hand as if he hadn’t just been drinking from it, as if he’d never seen it before. Then he looked up at his wife.

Edith, in her nightgown, looked like everything he’d wanted for years. The gown was cream-colored, a soft and vaguely gleaming material that snagged on the rough skin of his palms but felt good as it slid across her skin. He’d asked at one point, and she’d told him what the stuff was called, but damn if he knew now. It was like Edith, though, that stuff. Fancier than he’d dreamed he could have when he was a boy, and his mother had worn a vast tent of flannel in unbelievably ugly colors because the cloth had been marked away down in price. But not frivolous, his Edith or her nightgown, not satin or silk or anything that cost a week’s salary and only wrinkled and tore and spotted. Nothing cheap and nothing gaudy about her. He stretched out his arm and she walked over to stand inside the curve of it. He pulled her close.

“I think it is,” he said, holding her close and breathing her in.

“I think it’s not,” she said. He never drank the decaf stuff unless she made him do it.

She put her arm around his shoulders, bent to nuzzle in his short-cropped hair. “My crazy man,” she said softly. “How are you gonna sleep now? And what kept you so long anyway?”

“Paperwork.” He’d sat and stared at it in his office until he couldn’t fool himself any more that he was working. But he had been trying to do paperwork, so it wasn’t a lie.

He hated to lie to Edith. He was no good at it anyway.

“Uh-huh,” she said now, unconvinced.

“I saw Kay today,” he told her, though he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t until, well, until he had to. “A man’s been killed in her restaurant.”

She held him tighter as if to comfort Kay through him. “Oh, poor woman.” She kissed the crown of his head.

“Strangest thing,” he said, “so strange, Edith, but when we were talking I kept, kept thinking…all those years ago…”

“I remember.”

He was sure she did. She had been the one to get up and answer the door, 3:00 in the morning on a school night, and she’d made Kay sit down on one of their teetering chairs pulled up to the sink, while Edith cleaned the blood off her face and she wept. Harold remembered that he’d been embarrassed that he was stuck in his robe and pajama bottoms while his good pants and jacket hung plain as day over another chair and his books and briefcase lay tidily on one quarter of the little round table. And he remembered that he’d gradually forgotten about it as he listened to Kay weep out her shame and anger and fear.

“Leave him,” Harold growled. “He’s not worth it. A decent man don’t hurt his wife,” and it was a measure of the hour and his anger that he didn’t even notice the slang as it left his mouth.

Kay’s face was so naked when she looked at him that a number of unwelcome truths became clear to all three of them. He’d sort of known, as they worked together over the college papers he found so hard to write and the college mathematics she found so hard to do, with occasional questions or answers from Edith–he had sort of known that Kay was smiling at him awfully warmly, nudging her seat closer to his, but his wife had been right there the whole time, hadn’t she? There was nothing wrong in it, and it had been pleasant to see the admiration in Kay’s eyes.

Well, he could kick himself. Though the person he really wanted to kick was the bastard who’d given her that black eye.

He wondered, all these years later, if that moment of utter embarrassment for all of them was partly why she’d gone back that night. She didn’t leave the bastard for almost a year, when she was pregnant with Harry and Edith had already had Cal.

He leaned into Edith, rested his cheek against the soft snaggy cloth, rubbed it back and forth a little. His eyes were shut.

“Oh, baby, come to bed, forget all of it,” she said, and he nodded but didn’t open his eyes or move away from her warmth.

Must’ve been decaf after all, he thought when she took the cup out of his hand. ‘Cause he sure could sleep now, he knew he could.