Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

They’ll find in the refrigerator part of what was to be today’s breakfast he prepared the night before. A bowl with soy yogurt and cranberry compote he made a large batch of so he could have it every morning for one to two weeks and a sliced banana. That’ll also be dumped. They’ll also find in the refrigerator a small plastic container of cut-up fresh fruit. Sometimes he prepared three containers of fruit at once, usually the same fruits equally distributed in the containers, lidded them and took them out one at a time with the bowls the next three mornings.

A salad fork for the fruit and tablespoon for the bowl of cereal will be on the one placemat on the table, a folded-up cloth napkin under them. He put the utensils there the previous night before he went to bed, something he did every night if he knew he was going to have breakfast at home the next morning. The napkins and placemat will be a little stained with food, since he also used them for his last two lunches, and they’ll drop them into the washing machine in the kitchen. They won’t find anything in the washing machine when they open it or anything in the dryer next to it. He did a wash two mornings before and folded up everything and put it away. The spoon and fork they’ll put back into the utensil drawer under a kitchen counter.

The coffeemaker on the short counter between the stove and sink will also have been prepared the night before: water, filter paper and grounds. Alongside the coffeemaker will be the mug he planned to drink the coffee out of and a thermos he was going to pour the rest of the coffee into after he filled up the mug.

He didn’t pick up his newspaper by the mailbox this morning, so it’ll still be there. They’ll pick it up the next morning with the next day’s newspaper. They knew his morning routine almost by heart now. They’d seen it when they were there and got up early enough and he talked self-mockingly about it on the phone several times. “It’s crazy,” he said, “but since your mother died this is what I do.” If he hadn’t gotten sick he would have made sure the living room door to the porch was locked, gone outside through the kitchen door and locked it, taken a short run with maybe a brief stop or two on the roads’ shoulders when cars were coming his way, got the newspaper at the end of the run, unlocked the kitchen door, hung the keyring on one of the hooks by the door, turned the coffeemaker on, taken the container of fruit and bowl of soy yogurt, compote and banana out of the refrigerator, or done that before he left the house, got the jar of sodium-free granola off a kitchen shelf and spooned some of it into the bowl, set the bowl and container of fruit on the placemat on the dining table, poured out a mug of coffee and put it on a coaster on the table, poured what was left in the coffeemaker into the thermos, shut off the coffeemaker, let the cat in by now if he wanted to come in and given him a fresh bowl of water and a plate with wet food on it, which he would have got out of the refrigerator or opened a new can of cat food from the kitchen cabinet that had all his canned foods, or if there was very little food left in the can from the refrigerator, done both; brought the newspaper to the table if he hadn’t already left it there when he came back into the house after his run, taken his first Parkinson’s pill of the day if he hadn’t already taken it, and sat down at the table and started to eat his breakfast and drink his coffee while he read the newspaper, starting with the capsule weather forecast for the Washington edition at the top right corner of the page.

They won’t find any dishes or utensils or pots or pans or anything like that in the kitchen sink or dish rack. He washed the little there was last night and put them away. The paper bag of paper, plastic, metal and glass for the single-stream recycling pickup this Friday will be next to the trash can in the kitchen. On top of the dryer will be the book he was reading last night in the living room easy chair and which he put there by the door so he wouldn’t forget to take it with him to the Y the next day. They’ll find in the refrigerator an aluminum pie pan, covered with aluminum foil, the dinner he would have had tonight. He’d cooked two chicken breasts and some root vegetables together in the oven last night. Then, standing beside the stove and without cutting up the chicken breasts but waiting till they were no longer hot, he ate with his fingers about half of what was in the pan. The dinner was so good, and he was also a bit tired of cooking something different almost every night, that instead of freezing what was left in the pan, he’d have the same dinner tonight. They’ll re-cover the pan with the same foil they found on it and throw all of it out too.

Dining room will be tidy, everything — chairs under the table, place mat, napkin, eating utensils — in its place. He rearranged the fruit in the fruit bowl the day before so it’d look neat and nice. Living room will also be tidy, except for an empty juice glass on the end table next to the easy chair, which he drank two glasses of red wine out of while he was reading the previous night. The empty wine bottle will be on top of the recycling bag. They’ll think it was so unlike him to leave a dirty glass on a table overnight, and he must have forgot to bring it into the kitchen to wash it. They’ll figure out, if not this week then the next, which day the garbage gets picked up and which day all the recyclable stuff, and also to put the trash cans and things on the street early that morning or the night before. They’ll bring the juice glass to the kitchen and probably have to soak it awhile in soapy water to get the dried residue off the bottom of it. There’s no scrub brush in the house to get in that glass, and a sponge with detergent on it never got rid of all the residue.

Their beds haven’t been touched, other than for the cat taking morning and afternoon naps on them, since the cleaning woman cleaned their rooms and straightened their covers and pillows the last time she was here.

They’ll have some work to do in his bedroom. He made his bed after he got up. They’ll strip it and wash the linens with the two towels and washcloth from his bathroom, and in another wash the patchwork quilt Abby and he had a woman in Maine make for them about thirty years ago. They’ll throw out his personal items in the medicine cabinet above the sink: comb, hairbrush, toothbrush, nailbrush, shaving soap, and maybe his shaving brush and razor and package of razor blades. Or maybe they’ll include the shaving brush with the other things of his — clothes, shoes, slippers, his one tie, and so on. . coats, sport jacket, belts, his one dress shirt, which he ordered from L.L. Bean several years ago and never took out of the plastic bag it came in — they’ll give to organizations like Goodwill and Purple Heart. What also might go will be what remains of their mother’s skirts and shirts in his bedroom closet and which they told him a number of times they didn’t want. They never took any of her clothes other than two mufflers, and those only when it was very cold outside and they needed something warm around their necks, and some head scarves he never saw them wear and two knitted wool caps she brought back from the Soviet Union before he met her. For the last three years he’s been gradually giving her clothes to the same organizations. There are two empty drawers in their dresser that were once filled with her belongings. His old terrycloth bathrobe, hanging on a hook on his bathroom door, is too ragged to give away, so they’ll dump it. They’ll also probably throw out the shopping bags of tax receipts of the three previous years that are in his bedroom closet and seemed to spill over to the floor every time the cat got in there. They’ll probably keep, once they see what year it’s for, or at least till they speak to his tax accountant, the bag of receipts for this year. They’ll also give to Goodwill or Purple Heart the two ten-pound weights on his night table that he exercised with most mornings, and the two fifteen-pound weights they’re resting on, which he stopped exercising with a year ago when he bought the ten-pound weights.