Absolution at the Diner

Russell shifts atop the plush diner seat, pushes a roughened palm across the tweed of his best Sunday pants. A grunt comes with the motion, aged body protesting before it's been given permission to do so. There's an aching in his knees that hasn't let up in nine days.

The weatherman still isn't calling for rain.

Catherine sips from a cooled cup of tea, pulls the liquid onto her tongue with a noise that would only be obnoxious in the privacy of their own home. Here, it isn't heard over the clatter of pans from the kitchen or the buzzing of lights above their heads. Here, she couldn't care less.

Between them sits a half-eaten piece of dry chocolate cake. There's an icing smear across the ceramic, crumbs decorating a trail toward Russell's mouth. The small, circular plate is placed closer to her.

His arms are longer, after all.

It would be their youngest son's twenty-third birthday, if he hadn't been laid to rest in a too-small casket a decade prior. They've done this every year since, sat in these very seats engulfed by the silence that befell their marriage that fateful night.

Losing Sammy put a divide between them, drew a line right down the centre of their family: Russ on one side with a fistful of whiskey, Catherine with her sober eyes on the other, and their remaining children playing at a balancing act of tiptoeing right atop it. He blames himself more than he blames the weather or the deer in his headlights or the black ice. He blames himself because he has to live daily with the memory of holding their boy in his arms, knowing it was the end. The tears that didn't freeze to his own face on that blistering winter evening fell to mix in with Samuel's blood. Barely conscious, body convulsing, and he'd heard his father blubbering on about how he hadn't wanted to hit the deer.

The boy's last words were that he hadn't even seen the animal in question.

That stuck with Russell, remained like a concrete knot in the width of his chest and demanded his attention at all the least opportune times. Some days, it feels like a heart attack lying in wait.

Some days, it's a heart attack he hopes for.

He hadn't taken the animal out, supposed it pranced off to disappear into the tree-line, but Sammy hadn't seen it, and Russ hasn't stopped thinking about just how tired he'd been on that drive home, how many hours he'd been at work and how he'd been drinking the night before.

"Cake's always dry," he comments, "Ain't half as good as yours."

They've been desperately trying to survive this drought. The two of them, bound to one another by a promise made when they were only children themselves, have been dying to make it out alive.

"Doesn't matter," she tells him, her attention refusing to lift from the table.

She's right. It'd been Sammy's favourite, either way.

Catherine's focused on the way her napkin absorbs the liquid from her discarded teabag. She's always been harder and colder than her soft-hearted counterpart. She's wondered whether it would've been better had she gone to pick up Samuel from hockey practice that night.

Russ can't peel his own eyes from her face. He's made a second career out of trying to read her, out of swallowing the questions that all too often try clawing their way up the back of his throat. They leave scratches and lacerations on their way back down, scars for every time he doesn't pry to know what's going on in her mind.

Above the plate, their forks move toward the final bite of chocolate cake at the same time. A shared lack of attention tangles the prongs together, creates a tiny and temporary mess of utensils until they both pull back.

"Sorry," Russell says, half the word catching in the back of his throat before he clears it.

"It wasn't your fault," she says, and it's the first time she has. The first time in a decade she's looked him in the eye and admitted there'd been no crime done at the hands of her husband.

Russell's gaze turns to glass, an imminent threat of tears welling along his bottom lash line.

Finally, the sky opens up outside the diner windows, and a summer storm starts trickling down to the soil of their small town.