For a long time after Dwight died, I didn’t go anywhere except the grocery store and church and the cemetery out on Highway 175. My knees made sure of that. Thirty four years on hospital floors will grind your knees down to gravel. By sixty four, I couldn’t kneel in the garden anymore. Some mornings I had to go down the porch steps sideways, like a crab.

My neighbor Carla finally lost patience with me last June.

Carla is seventy one and lives across the street. She’s been widowed eleven years, and she wears bright pink lipstick to the mailbox, and she does not believe in sitting around.

“There’s a grief group at the senior center,” she said, standing on my porch with her purse already on her arm. “Tuesdays at ten. Coffee’s terrible but the people are nice. You’re coming.”

“I’m not much for groups.”

“You’re not much for anything these days, Winona. Get your shoes.”

So I got my shoes.

There were about a dozen of us in a little room with folding chairs and a big coffee urn and a box of Kleenex on every table. A cheerful young woman named Brooke ran it. She had Carla write my name tag in big black marker.

WINONA, in letters about two inches high.

“Lord, Carla,” I said, peeling the backing off. “I look like a kindergartner.”

“You act like one, too,” she said, and slapped it on my chest.

That’s where I met Wendell.

---

He was sitting across the circle from me. Big man, quiet, wearing a pressed plaid shirt buttoned all the way to the top. His name tag said WENDELL in neat block letters that he must have written himself, because they were straight as a ruler.

He had the biggest hands I’d ever seen on a man. Careful hands. When he held his little styrofoam cup of terrible coffee, he held it like it might break.

When it was his turn to talk, he said his name was Wendell Haskins. He was sixty six. He’d retired from the electric co op after thirty eight years as a lineman. His wife, Ruth, had passed fourteen months before.

“ALS,” he said. Then he stopped. He looked at his coffee cup for a long time. “That’s all I got today. Sorry.”

Brooke said that was fine. That was more than fine.

I watched him while the others talked. I couldn’t help it. His color was fine, but he had the look I used to see on family members in the ER waiting room at three in the morning. Like somebody who’s been holding his breath so long he’s forgotten how to let it out.

The second week, I came in late. My knees had been bad that morning and the porch steps took me a while. By the time I got there, everybody was already sitting down.

Wendell stood up when he saw me. He walked over to the coffee urn and came back with a cup and handed it to me.

“Two creams,” he said. “Right?”

I stared at him. “How’d you know that?”

He shrugged and sat back down. “You took two creams last week. I was paying attention.”

I didn’t know what to say. Dwight drank coffee with me every morning for thirty nine years, and to this day I’m not sure he could have told you how I took it.