Remind me again

”Remind me again,” he calls from the stove. ”One eggs or two?”

   “One,” she replies.

   “Two it is,” he mumbles, dropping another egg into the boiling water.

   He winds up the kitchen timer, two minutes, soft boiled. Then turns his back to all that, leans himself against the kitchen counter and looks at her, where she sits by the table, staring straight ahead. Maybe she sees something completely different there, maybe that painting of a lily is to her a real flower.

   “Hey,” she says, “did I ever tell you about when we were in London?”

   He looks out the window instead. There is only the smallest breeze, the trees sway almost unnoticeably in the wind. It’s empty and deserted, no cars passing by on the road. Not even the cat is there, the one that sometimes sneaks around in the ditches.

   “No,” he says. “No, you didn’t.”

   “We overslept on the day we were going,” she explains, with a voice that is still plain and hollow. “It was before you came, you see, so we could still sleep. We almost missed the plane, had to run through the whole airport. I dropped one of my bags, a small one, and didn’t have time to stop and pick it up. My toothbrush was in there. We had to buy a new one.”

   There’s still no cat by the road, so he takes three steps to the table, pulls out the chair opposite her, and sits down in it.

   “We went to a park,” she continues. Now it comes, the excitement in her voice, the words are coming out faster. “There were so many squirrels there, they were everywhere. I was going to buy a waffle and give it to them, but the salesman wasn’t very good at English so I ended up with two, and the squirrels didn’t want them anyway. Only he could feed them, they wouldn’t take anything from me.”

   A short pause follows, she shakes her head slightly.

   “By the way, when’s he coming?”

   He gives her a quick, tired smile.

   “Soon, I would imagine.”

   She smacks her tongue.

   “Oh well,” she says. ”We went to a musical too. I don’t remember which one, but the little I saw of it was good. We had such bad seats, way up behind everyone else. Only saw all these thinning hairdos, but I heard the music. The seats behind us were empty though, so he sat on the backrest.”

   She runs a hand through her own thinning, gray hair and laughs hoarsely.

   “He carved my initials into some bench in that park too, even though I told him that it was stupid and dumb.” She’s slowing down again now, catching her breath. “He always does such dumb things.”

   “Yeah, he did, didn’t he?”

   She’s quiet for a few seconds, wrinkling her nose a bit.

   “We should go there,” she says then. “To London.”

   “Just us two then,” he says. “Not dad.”

   He takes a sip of the coffee, but it’s still too warm.

   “No.” She smiles. ”If he doesn’t come I might get to feed some squirrels.”

   “Do you think so?” he asks.

   “No, but we’ll go to a musical and buy good seats. I’m too old to sit on some backrest.”

   The kitchen timer rings, two minutes have passed and the eggs are soft boiled. He stands up and gets them.

   “Two eggs, wasn’t it?” he asks.

   “Yes,” she replies. “Two eggs.”

   There are only two cups for them, so they both get one rolling egg each on their plates, until the first one is eaten. She winces when he puts the plate down in front of her, and just stares at it as he starts peelings his own eggs on the other side of the table.

   “Hey,” she says.

   She raises her eyes and he manages to make eye contact with her.

   “Did I ever tell you about when we were in London?”

   He smiles, maybe at her, maybe at no one in particular.

   “No”, he says. “No, you didn’t.”