He was not at the table.
This was the first Sunday of the weekend and the table was set — Petra’s Sunday configuration, the fuller setting, the weekend-morning quality of a table that had been laid with the particular care the weekday breakfasts didn’t receive — but the end with the documents and the coffee and the daily papers was empty.
I stood in the doorway.
Not long — a moment, the registration of absence after the accumulated expectation of his presence. The table set. The coffee made, the smell of it, the pot at the center of the table. The Sunday light coming through the window at the angle that belonged to Sunday mornings, lower and more golden than the week, the late autumn doing something new with the quality of the morning hours.
The garden was different this morning.
Not
