M. K. Stelmack - Coming Home To You

He managed a belated nod because it hurt too much to talk right now. Still, to show he was taking their breakup with grace, he sipped from his coffee with its swirl of whipped cream.

Linda tapped her upper lip, and he wiped the froth off his mouth. A routine exchange honed over the last eight months of starting most days with a simple forty-minute coffee together.

Not anymore.

“You’re a good man, Mel,” Linda said.

Not the first time he’d heard that. His third girlfriend had been the first to use that line when she’d dumped him for a guy who’d been arrested for stealing antifreeze at a convenience store.

After the fifth breakup, he figured he might be a good man, but also an unlucky one. He’d been engaged to that girlfriend. She’d had three kids from a previous relationship, and an instant family was convenient and predictable. Then she’d become pregnant with another man’s child.

“But—” Linda started.

Mel disliked the word but . It undid everything good just said. Nice try but... I see what you’re saying but... Thanks for applying but... You’re a good man but...

“—but I feel...I feel you want to be with someone, anyone, and you’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

He would do whatever it took. Marrying a good woman was what he’d wanted pretty much all his fifty years, and Linda was a good catch. A retired nurse with a good pension. A full-time volunteer and grandmother. A widow with a good head on her shoulders and beautiful blond hair, which she did up, even this early in the morning.

She straightened, establishing more space between them and said, “And I refuse to settle. I know what it is to love. I want it again. And...and so should you.”

He was willing to spend the rest of his life with her. If that wasn’t love, what was?

“I wasn’t settling,” he mumbled to his coffee, finally speaking.

“You’re taking it awfully well, then,” Linda said. “I mean, look at you. Even now, I’m breaking up with you and you don’t seem to care. You’re staring at your coffee, or out the window at traffic.”

He forced himself to make eye contact with Linda. He’d probably often looked away from her throughout their relationship, giving her the impression he didn’t care. In reality, he was afraid if he gazed too long, if he fixed too much attention on her, she’d get scared and leave. Maybe he’d done that in all his relationships: wanted, yet hid his wanting. In the end, they’d all left, anyway. And it was always the women who broke things off because he’d neither the heart nor the guts for it himself.

“It’s not that,” he tried to explain. “It’s... I do care,” he finished lamely. “I’m sorry I didn’t show it right.”

Whatever the right way was.

Linda ripped at her coffee lid, the soft brown plastic whitening before giving way. “I suppose I can hardly blame you for not being emotional. Tim Hortons is hardly the place—” she waved a hand over the crumpled wrappers and bags on the table between them “—for this. I didn’t intend to say this to you today. It just sort of...spilled out. I’d been thinking about Craig. I guess after Craig died... I guess I just wanted someone to fill the space. We’d been together for thirty-six years, after all.”

So. She wasn’t over Craig. As usual, he’d missed the signs. He wasn’t even sure what the signs were. Shorter kisses? A few less dates?

She gave a wavering smile, probably to show she bore him no ill will and hoped he felt the same. Which inevitably led to the other line all seven women had trotted out. He braced for full impact.

“I hope we can still be friends.”

What to say to that? What did it really mean? He’d called up his second ex to ask her out to the theater a couple of weeks after they broke up and she’d said, “Mel, don’t you get it? We’re not together anymore.”

When he’d invoked the friend clause, she’d said that wasn’t how it worked. Decades later, he still wasn’t sure how it worked.

The motor home had reappeared on the highway, signaling once more its intention to come toward the Tim Hortons. He waited for the indicator to switch. It didn’t. The unit—a full thirty feet long—swung into the opposing lane, forcing an exiting truck to brake to avoid a crash.

“No,” Mel murmured. “No.”

Linda sighed. She must think he was answering her. He pointed out the window.

The RV slowed and entered the narrow two-way lane into Tim Hortons, and then headed right toward them.

People noticed now.

The early eastern light banked off the windshield of the RV and temporarily prevented Mel from seeing the driver. Whoever it was would have to make an impossible right to clear the restaurant on the left and navigate past the vehicles parked to the right.

This morning, the Spirit Lake Funeral and Crematorium hearse, with its extended rear, was right beside the entrance. Jim Creasley, the owner of the hearse and the funeral home, strode from the counter to the plate-glass window. Mel’s family had gone to him when their mom had passed a couple of years ago, and when Mel’s stepdad had died twenty years prior to that.

Jim was dressed like he was going to a—well, he was dressed for work, which, given the early hour, probably meant he had to drive a ways. He was known throughout central Alberta, hundreds of miles in all directions, for his compassion.

“If that brainless driver hits my vehicle,” he said, “there’ll be another coffin in the back.”

The RV clipped the back end of Jim’s hearse and knocked it into the adjacent red car, which triggered a shout from a beefy young woman in a safety vest at the coffee counter.

She tore outside, Jim a step behind.

“The driver’s a woman. A senior,” Linda said, her head cranked to see up past the painted brown tones of the coach to the driver’s seat. Sure enough, an older woman wearing aviator sunglasses was at the wheel, hauling on it for all she was worth.

Jim rounded the corner, waving and cursing as the motor home crept along like a giant steel sloth. As if watching an action movie, Mel stared, fascinated, disbelieving.

Around him, people found their voices.

“Get out of the way, Jim.”

“Brake!”

“She’s not going to make it.”

“Is she insane?”

The driver suddenly pitched to the side. Someone, another female, maybe the passenger, had pushed her and wrenched the wheel away. Mel caught a glimpse of a paperback, an arm covered in something white and lacy, and then the RV lurched to the left—too far to the left. The grille of the house-sized coach bore straight toward Linda and him.

The coach suddenly surged forward. Mel, half lifting Linda, ran for the safety of the counter. Brick, glass and steel groaned and splintered behind them. The impact brought the drama to a final, shuddering stop.

Mel shot from Linda’s side, through the still-intact side door of the Tim’s and ran to the coach door, slipping in ahead of Jim and the owner of the red car. Mel drummed on the door and rose on his tiptoes to see through the window at the top. No luck.

“Hello? Everybody all right in there?”

The door clicked a release and eased open, the running board steps automatically descending, to reveal the passenger. She stood on the top step of the coach and was clad in a full-length white nightgown, so long it trailed behind her like the train of a wedding gown. Her face was drawn and pale, and she clasped a black-and-yellow classic paperback to her chest.

He stepped onto the lowest step and tipped back his cap.

“Hello. I’m Mel. Let me help you.”

* * *

DAPHNE WAS COLD. The book trembled in her shaking hand, and the blood drained from her skin as it ran to her heart, which was pounding so loud that she could feel the vibrations in her ears. She was in shock.