Two Cups of Coffee, Every Morning

Every morning at 6:15, Mr. Ellis sets two cups of coffee on his porch table. One with milk, one black. He sits in the left chair and drinks the black one slowly while the street wakes up.

The cup with milk stays full. At seven he carries both inside.

His wife, June, has been gone for two years. Everyone on the street knows. Nobody says anything. I think most people find it sad, or a little strange, and they look away the way you look away from someone crying on a bus.

I’m twenty-six, I work nights, and I’m usually coming home when he’s setting the cups down. One morning in March I was too tired to be polite, and I just asked.

“Mr. Ellis, who’s the second cup for?”

He didn’t seem offended. He looked at the cup like he was checking it was still there.

“It’s for June,” he said. “But not the way you think.”

He patted the right-hand chair, so I sat down.

“Forty-one years, I made her coffee. She liked it too milky — practically warm milk with a rumor of coffee. I used to tease her about it. And every morning she’d take one sip and say, ‘Perfect.’ Even the mornings it wasn’t. Even the morning I used salt instead of sugar.”

He laughed, and it turned into something else for a second, and then back into a laugh.

“After she passed, I stopped. Couldn’t stand the kitchen. Couldn’t stand the mornings. Three months, I barely got out of bed. My doctor wanted to give me pills. My son wanted me to move in with him.”

“What changed?”

“I found a note in her recipe box. She knew she was sick before I did, you know. She’d written: Make the coffee anyway. Somebody will need it.”

He nudged the full cup toward me.

“So I make it. And I sit here. And most mornings nobody comes, and that’s all right. It gets me out of bed. But every once in a while, someone sits in that chair who needed it.”

I picked it up. It was too milky. Practically warm milk.

“Perfect,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment, then nodded like I’d passed a test I didn’t know I was taking.

I sit there most mornings now. Some days we talk. Some days we don’t. Last week, a woman from number fourteen who just lost her husband walked by slowly, and Mr. Ellis looked at me, and I got up and went inside and made a third cup.