Every Saturday morning, I bought two coffees from the same little café off Grafton Street. One flat white for me, one oat latte for my wife, Nora. The habit started when she was alive and still believed weekends were small holidays if you treated them properly. We would sit near the window, watching people hurry past with shopping bags and dogs and umbrellas turned inside out by the wind. Nora always said Dublin looked most honest in bad weather.
When she died, I stopped going for three weeks. I barely left our flat in Rathmines except to buy milk and bread I didn’t eat. The first Saturday I went back, I ordered one coffee and stood there feeling as if I had betrayed her. It sounds foolish, I know. There are bigger betrayals in the world than ordering a single drink. But grief makes strange laws, and that morning mine said: she is gone only if you stop making room for her.
So the next weekend, I ordered two again.
The young man behind the counter, Adam, had served us for years. He didn’t ask questions. He just placed both cups on the counter and turned the second one so Nora’s name faced me, the way he always had. I carried them to our table by the window. Mine I drank slowly. Hers I left untouched until the steam disappeared and the cup went cold in front of the empty chair.
I did that for nearly eight months.
People imagine grief as crying, but most of mine was administration. Closing accounts. Answering kind messages. Donating clothes I couldn’t bear to look at. Learning how much rice to cook for one. On weekdays, I could perform being alive quite well. I went to work near Grand Canal Dock, nodded in meetings, laughed when the joke was clear enough. But Saturdays belonged to Nora. I bought two coffees, sat for half an hour, and walked through St Stephen’s Green with both cups gone cold in my hands.
One wet November morning, the café was packed. There was no free table, not even ours by the window. I was about to leave when an elderly woman sitting alone at a small table pointed to the chair opposite her.
“You can sit there if you don’t mind company,” she said.
I nearly refused. I had become protective of my sadness, as if sharing a table might dilute it. But my hands were full, and the rain was coming down hard, so I thanked her and sat.
She looked at the two cups. “Waiting for someone?”
I said the sentence I had avoided saying to strangers. “No. My wife passed away.”
The woman didn’t flinch or offer one of those polished phrases people use when they are frightened by sorrow. She simply nodded and said, “I’m sorry. What was her name?”
“Nora.”
“And what did Nora like?”
That question nearly broke me. Not how did she die, not how long were you married, not are you managing. What did she like? So I told her. Nora liked sea swimming even when the water was bitter. She liked the top deck of the bus. She liked correcting the endings of films. She liked the first daffodils in Merrion Square and the smell of toast in hotel breakfast rooms. She liked me, somehow, even when I was quiet for whole evenings.
The woman smiled. “She sounds like someone who knew how to be here.”
Her name was Maeve. Her husband had died twelve years earlier. She told me she used to set his place at the dinner table every Sunday until her daughter got angry and said it was unhealthy. Maeve said maybe it was, but it got her through the first year, and the first year is not about looking well. It is about staying.
Before she left, she tapped Nora’s untouched coffee
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