The Last Table

The diner sat between a shuttered freight depot and an all-night truck weigh station. Outside, September rain was turning the asphalt into black glass, reflecting the faint pulse of an amber hazard light three miles down the bypass.

They had chosen the booth in the corner where the vinyl had cracked along the seam and been repaired with brown electrical tape. Neither had touched their coffee in twenty minutes.

"You didn't turn the porch light off when you left," Martha said. She wasn't looking at him; her index finger traced the cold perimeter of the diner's ceramic saucer.

Julian glanced up from his hands. "The timer is set for sunrise. It goes off on its own."

"It blinks," she said. "The sensor has been broken since November. Every twelve seconds it cuts out and then clicks back on. You notice it from the bedroom if the blinds aren't closed tight."

"You could have closed the blinds."

"I did," she said softly. "Every night."

A waitress walked past carrying an empty glass pot, her sneakers squeaking faintly on the wet linoleum near the entrance. She didn't offer to refill their cups. Diner staff with enough years on the graveyard shift develop an instinct for tables where interruptions are unwelcome, or worse, pointless.

Julian turned the sugar shaker half an inch to the right so it aligned with the stainless-steel napkin dispenser. He had spent fourteen years measuring things down to sixteenths of an inch on job sites, and now his hands looked for right angles where none existed.

"If you take the northern pass," he said, "the road work near Clarenville starts at seven in the morning. You'll lose forty minutes if you don't clear the bridge before dawn."

"I am not taking the pass," she said.

"It's seventy miles shorter."

"I don't care about the seventy miles, Julian."

He looked at her then—really looked at her—beneath the flat white glow of the ceiling strip. Her coat was still buttoned to the throat, wool damp with rain from the four-yard dash between car and door. She looked neither angry nor tired. She looked settled, in the terrible way concrete settles into an irrevocable slab.

"What do you want me to do with the tools in the shed?" he asked.

"Keep them. Or sell them. I don't have a shed."

"Your father gave me the bench plane. The Stanley No. 4."

"He gave it to you because you used it. He didn't give it to the marriage."

The sentence hung between them without landing. It had no sharp edge, which made it heavier. Julian picked up his spoon, looked at his distorted reflection in the shallow bowl of it, and set it down.

"We could have talked about this in March," he said.

"We did talk about it in March," she said quietly. "We talked about it on the porch while the rain came down on the gutters you hadn't cleaned. You said we were just tired. You said everyone is tired after four years of winter."

"I believed it."

"I know," she said. "That's why I didn't say it again."

Outside, an eighteen-wheeler geared down as it approached the junction, its engine brake rattling the double-paned window against its aluminum casing. The amber light on the bypass flickered through the mist.

Martha reached into her coat pocket and placed a set of brass keys on the laminate table. There were four of them on a plain steel ring: the front deadbolt, the cellar padlock, the back screen, and the small key to the post office box in town.

She didn't push them toward him. She simply withdrew her hand and put it back into her pocket.

"The post office box is paid through December," she said. "If anything arrives for me, don't forward it. Just let the clerk return it to sender."

"Martha."

She waited. For ten seconds, twenty seconds. The clock over the pie carousel clicked forward a minute.

"Drive carefully," he said at last.

She nodded once, slid out from the taped booth without brushing against the table edge, and walked to the cashier register. She paid for two coffees with a five-dollar bill, told the waitress to keep the change, and pushed the glass door open into the dark.

Julian remained in the corner. He picked up the brass keys, felt their cold weight against his palm, and listened to the starter motor of her station wagon catch, cough once, and settle into a low, steady idle before turning out onto the empty bypass.