Every Saturday morning, for nearly eight months after Maeve died, I bought two coffees from the same little café near Smithfield. One flat white for me, one cappuccino for her. I know how it sounds. I knew how it looked too. The paper cup sweating in my hand, the second lid untouched, the barista placing both down without asking because grief, after a while, becomes part of a shop’s routine. I would carry them across the square, sit on the same bench if it was dry, and put Maeve’s cup beside me like she had only stepped into the pharmacy and would be back in a minute, giving out that I had let her coffee go cold.
Maeve and I had done that walk every weekend for eleven years. We lived in a small flat in Stoneybatter, over a place that always smelled faintly of chips and raincoats. On Saturdays, we would wander down through Smithfield, sometimes as far as the Liffey, arguing gently about nothing important. She believed every dog in Dublin was secretly underfed and needed admiring. I believed we were always late for something, even when we had nowhere to be. Coffee was our small ceremony. Hers had to be cappuccino, no chocolate on top, because she said chocolate dust was “a distraction dressed up as a kindness.”
She died in January, two weeks after her fifty-ninth birthday. It was quick in the cruelest way: a pain in her chest while she was folding towels, an ambulance, a corridor in the Mater, a doctor with kind eyes who had clearly practised the walk from bad news to worse news. For days afterwards, I kept finding evidence of her unfinished life. Her bookmark in a crime novel. Her glasses beside the kettle. A shopping list that said bread, toothpaste, basil, as if basil still mattered. People came and filled the flat with soup, flowers, and helpless love. Then they went back to their lives, as they should, and I was left with a silence that seemed to have moved in permanently.
The first Saturday after the funeral, I found myself standing at the café counter before I realised I had left the house. The young lad behind the till asked if it was the usual. I said yes. When he handed me two cups, I nearly told him there had been a mistake. Then I didn’t. I took both coffees and went outside, and for the first time that week, I felt I had done something that belonged to the life I still recognised.
So I kept doing it. Rain, frost, sun, I bought two coffees. Sometimes I took Maeve’s to the bench in Smithfield. Sometimes I brought it to Blessington Street Basin and watched the ducks make fierce little politics on the water. On her birthday in March, I carried it all the way to Glasnevin Cemetery and stood by her grave with my shoes sinking into the grass. I told her about the neighbour’s new baby, about the leak in the bathroom, about how I had finally thrown out the basil because it had become less herb than accusation. Her coffee cooled in my hand until it felt like a stone.
People think grief is made mostly of crying, but for me it was made of habits with nowhere to go. I would reach across the bed at night and touch the empty sheet. I would turn to tell her something funny and find only the fridge humming back at me. The second coffee was not madness. It was scaffolding. It held up the shape of a day until I could stand inside it.
One Saturday in September, a woman sat at the far end of my bench. She was maybe in her thirties, with red eyes and a coat too light for the weather. I noticed she had no coffee, which in Dublin on a damp morning looked almost like an emergency. Maeve would have noticed too. Maeve would have nudged me until I did the decent thing and pretended it was my idea.
I don’t know what came over me. I lifted the untouched
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