The steam coming off the black coffee always fogged up the left lens of my reading glasses first. Arthur hated that I didn’t care. He stood by the kitchen island this morning with his arms crossed over his chest, staring down at the drying rack like it had personally insulted his mother.
That rack held exactly one item. A chipped gray stoneware mug with a jagged handle that looked like it had been glued back together by a blind carpenter using tree sap.
It had been sitting there every single morning for forty-one years. Arthur had bought me a dozen fine bone china mugs from some boutique downtown last Tuesday. They cost twelve hundred dollars for the set. They sat in the upper cabinet behind the glass door, looking like little white church steeples, untouched and entirely useless.
Arthur cleared his throat the way he always did when he was about to lecture me on aesthetic harmony. He was fifty-eight now, wearing his retirement khakis and a polo shirt that still had the dry-cleaning tag looped through the bottom hem.
He told me the chipped thing was an embarrassment whenever his old golf buddies came over for Sunday brisket. I didn’t look up from the newspaper crossword. I just dipped a spoon into my sugar bowl and stirred.
He told me he didn’t understand why I was so stubborn about a piece of trash. I took a sip and let the heat settle against my tongue before I answered him.
Back in the fall of 1984, the floors at Miller’s Diner in Spartanburg had a layer of grease that stuck to the soles of your shoes no matter how many times old Arlene scrubbed them with Pine-Sol. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together between us. Arthur had walked in wearing a denim jacket with frayed cuffs and asked me if I wanted a refill of chicory coffee.
He didn’t have enough cash in his wallet to pay for the slice of cherry pie, let alone a proper ring. He slipped that heavy gray mug across the Formica table because he had stolen it from the diner supply shelf ten minutes earlier just so we could have a proper toast to our first real date.
It was cracked even then, right along the rim where the glaze had bubbled during the kiln fire. He told me he figured we could start our collection from the bottom up.
Arthur stood there in the kitchen this morning tapping his leather loafer against the linoleum. He told me he threw out three bags of old junk from the garage yesterday and he was sick of looking at my sentimental garbage cluttering up his kitchen.
I folded the newspaper in half very slowly. I smoothed the crease with the side of my thumb.
He told me I was living in the past and that normal people let things go when they upgrade their station in life. He asked me why I couldn’t just use the porcelain like a civilized person.
I told him the mug was the only thing in this house that didn’t come with a lien attached to it. He blinked at that, his mouth parting just a fraction of an inch as the words took their time sinking through his thick skull.
Three weeks later.
The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. Arthur had spent the afternoon down at the county records office trying to figure out why his pension check hadn’t cleared the direct deposit. He came back through the back door with his face the color of wet cement, his breathing ragged and short.
He slammed his leather folio down on the counter so hard the salt shaker jumped. He looked at me sitting at the kitchen table with my reading glasses sliding down my nose.
He demanded to know where the deed to the property had gone. He demanded to know why the title search on the lake house came back with my maiden name listed as the sole primary owner free of any encumbrance.
I didn’t blink. I took another slow sip from the chipped gray mug sitting right in front of me on the oak wood.
He shouted that he was half-owner by marriage and that I couldn’t just execute a transfer without his signature notarized by a court clerk. He reached out his hand to grab the paperwork he thought was hidden in the desk drawer by the telephone.
I didn’t move an inch. I just watched his fingers hover over the mahogany wood before he realized the drawer was locked with a brass key he didn’t own.
He asked me when I managed to pull the deed out of the joint registry without him noticing the filing fee on our monthly statements. I told him I used the cash from the sale of my mother’s cedar chest back in ninety-two before we ever merged our checking accounts.
He stared at me like I had grown a second head right there in the breakfast nook. “You’ve been planning this for forty years?” he whispered, his voice cracking on the final syllable.
I shook my head and set the mug down on a small square coaster. “Not forty years, Arthur,” I told him, keeping my voice lower than a murmur. “Just since you started buying bone china to replace the things you thought were too cheap to keep around.”
He backed up two steps until the back of his knees hit the edge of the kitchen stool. He looked at the twelve new mugs sitting pristine and empty behind the glass cabinet doors, and then down at the little gray cup resting between my hands.
He finally understood that some things aren’t priceless because they’re valuable, and some things stay broken because they were the only parts of the foundation that were ever real.
