Zero Point

The coffee maker had been broken for three days. Dale Kessler had meant to fix it on Monday. It was now Thursday. He stood in his kitchen and watched the water boil in a saucepan, the way he'd been boiling water since the coffee maker died, which was a long time and also not long enough.

His apartment was small. Small enough that he could see everything from the kitchen — the couch with the torn cushion, the table with the stack of bills he hadn't opened, the window that looked out over the parking lot of the gas station where he worked. The gas station was eight miles away. He had driven there that morning in a car that made a noise when it went over thirty miles per hour. The noise was probably nothing. It was probably just the car being old.

He poured the boiled water into a mug and added instant coffee. It was not good coffee. It was coffee. That was the point.

The phone rang at 8:15. His ex-wife, Linda. She had the kids on weekends and the weekends were getting harder. Each one felt like a week compressed into forty-eight hours.

"Dale," she said. "Are you coming to the game on Saturday?"

"The what game?"

"Baseball. His game. He's been asking about you."

"He can ask all he wants. I've got a shift on Saturday."

"You can swap."

"I don't want to swap."

There was a pause. Not an angry pause. Not a sad pause. Just a pause, the kind of pause that happens when people who love each other have stopped expecting different things from each other.

"Okay," Linda said. "Okay. See you Sunday."

He put the phone down. The coffee was cold.

Author Note & Copyright: