For forty-six years my husband drank coffee, black, before dawn. I drink tea, always have. Two pots, two mugs, same kitchen table. His last year, without saying why, he switched to tea. I thought it was the medication. He died in January. I kept his mug on the counter until March, then moved it to the cabinet. Last week I reached behind the Folgers for a new tin and found one I didn’t buy. A metal tea tin, sealed with tape, heavy.
Inside were 365 teabags, counted and stacked. A paper tag wired to the handle, his handwriting, shaky, dated November, two months before he died. The tag says one for every morning you wake up without me. I practiced so I would know how it tasted, but I wanted you to have the days I couldn’t stay.
The kitchen had that cold, grey feel it gets around five in the morning before the sun clears the ridge behind the barn. I stood there with my hand still stuck behind the red plastic lid of the Folgers, my fingers brushing against cold metal I hadn’t felt before. Arthur had always been a creature of fixed points. You could set your watch by the way he scraped his spoon against the rim of his heavy stoneware mug three times, exact, before setting it down in the sink. For nearly half a century, his morning smelled like burnt chicory and hot grease from the stove burner, while mine smelled like loose chamomile or whatever green tea I had ordered from the catalog out of Bangor.
We shared a table for forty-six years, but most mornings we sat in separate worlds, him staring out the east window at the woodpile and me watching the steam rise off my cup.
When he started drinking the black tea from the red boxes in his last spring, I didn’t think much of it. His stomach had been giving him fits, and the doctor in town had told him to lay off the acid. Arthur just grunted when I offered him a cup of mine, told me it tasted like lawn clippings, and brewed his own in a chipped tin mug he kept behind the bread box. I let it go. By then, his breath was getting short just walking out to the pumphouse, and arguing about tea bags felt like picking at a scab that wouldn’t heal. He died on a Tuesday when the frost was three inches thick on the porch rails.
The house stayed cold for weeks even with the oil heater running full blast, and I spent the first month just walking from room to room, touching the back of his chairs like I expected him to jump up and ask me what I was looking at.
By March, the silence had settled into the floorboards. I finally washed his heavy coffee mug, the one with the faded tractor logo on the side, and put it on the top shelf next to the mixing bowls where the dust wouldn’t settle on it quite so fast. I told myself I was turning a corner. But grief isn’t a straight line out in the country. It loops back on you like an old logging road that looks like it goes somewhere until it ends in a patch of briars. Last week, the coffee was running low, and I reached up high into the pantry cupboard behind the spare cans of stewed tomatoes and the big red coffee tub. My knuckles hit something square and heavy.
I pulled it out into the dim light of the kitchen. It was an old round biscuit tin with faded blue flowers on the lid, wrapped twice around the middle with yellowed masking tape so it wouldn’t pop open. It weighed a lot more than biscuits. I took it over to the table and sat down, my knees clicking the way they do now when the damp gets in the joints. I had to use the tip of my paring knife to slice through the tape because Arthur had laid it down thick and true, the way he used to tape up the seed boxes in the root cellar every autumn. The lid came off with a dry pop.
Inside, packed so tight they looked like they had been pressed in with a press, were tea bags. Not the loose kind in a pouch, but hundreds of the little paper bags with strings, all standing on their sides in neat little rows like fence pickets. I pulled one out. It wasn’t the brand I bought at the store. It was a cheaper kind, the bulk pack from the feed store down by the tracks. I started taking them out, laying them in little piles of ten on the oilcloth table cover. I didn’t know what I was counting for at first. My hands were shaking, and I dropped the third little pile into my lap before I got my breath steady.
When I reached the bottom of the tin, there was a square of brown grocery bag paper folded twice and tied to a short piece of baling twine looped through the handle of a spare tea strainer. I didn’t want to pick it up. I knew that handwriting. It was Arthur’s hand, but it wasn’t the hand that used to sign the tax forms or write out the feed orders. It was cramped and leaning hard to the left, the letters small and shaky like he had been writing while the truck was bouncing over washboard gravel. I turned it over in my fingers twice before I could bring myself to read the ink.
One for every morning you wake up without me, it said. I practiced so I would know how it tasted, but I wanted you to have the days I couldn’t stay.
The kitchen went dead quiet except for the pilot light on the stove clicking off and on. I sat there with the brown paper in my hand, staring at the little rows of white tea bags spread across the oilcloth. Three hundred and sixty-five of them. He must have spent weeks sitting right at this table after I went to bed, or while I was out tending the chickens, counting them out two by two, folding the twine, taping the lid so the air wouldn’t get to them and make them go stale before his time was up. Arthur was never a man for poetry. If you asked him why he loved you, he would tell you you were a good hand with a garden or that your biscuits didn’t run to grease. He didn’t talk about his feelings because his father had told him men who talk about their feelings usually end up with nothing to show for it.
I remembered back in October, when the leaves were coming down in yellow heaps against the foundation, I kept finding empty tea boxes in the bottom of the trash bin out by the back door. I had asked him about it while he was sitting by the wood stove rubbing his shins.
“Are you sweet on tea now, Art?” I asked him, holding up an empty box by the corner.
He didn’t look up from his paper. “Just testing the water,” he said.
That was all he said. Just testing the water. I thought he meant his stomach was acting up again. I didn’t know he was sitting at the kitchen table every night after the house went dark, boiling water on the back burner just so he could learn how long to let the bag sit before the brew got too bitter for my liking. He liked his coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in, but he had figured out that I liked mine pale with just a splash of cream and two minutes of steep time, no more. He had measured it all out in his head while I was sleeping upstairs.
I looked at the tin again, the blue flowers rubbed off on one side where it must have sat against the back of the pantry shelf for months without me ever noticing. A man who won’t tell you he loves you because he thinks the work speaks for itself will spend three days counting out paper bags in the dark just so you don’t have to reach for an empty shelf on a Tuesday morning when the snow is blowing against the glass. That was Arthur’s way. He couldn’t stop the dying, and he couldn’t fix the way his lungs felt like dry paper every time he took a deep breath, but he could make sure that when January came and went, I wouldn’t have to boil water for a stranger’s drink.
The sun finally cleared the ridge outside, throwing a long, thin stripe of yellow light across the linoleum right where his boots used to sit. My throat felt tight, the way it does right before a hard rain when the air gets heavy and won’t move. I didn’t cry right then. Out where we live, you don’t waste water on things you can’t change. But I reached down and picked up the first tea bag from the pile nearest my hand, the little white string dangling down over my thumb.
I filled the kettle at the pump and set it on the front burner, listening for that low, hollow hum it makes right before the steam starts to whistle through the spout. I didn’t put his mug down on the counter. I didn’t need to. As I dropped the bag into my own chipped yellow mug and poured the boiling water over it, I could see him sitting across from me as plain as day, blowing across the top of his black coffee just to take the edge off the heat before the sun was even up.
There are three hundred and sixty-four bags left in that round tin behind the Folgers. I counted them again this morning before the light came over the trees, just to be sure he didn’t miss a day. The first empty paper tag is lying right here beside my saucer, white and small against the dark wood, marking the start of a year I thought I was going to have to walk through by myself.
