Twas a Cold Winter Eve

Bacon sizzled in the background, and steam swirled from the untouched coffee cups between the elderly couple. Most observers would hardly notice the stoic couple sitting in the Bleecker Street diner where they had first met forty years earlier. Surrounded by Christmas décor, carols thrummed through speakers mounted in the ceiling. Bing Crosby yodeled White Christmas as large snowflakes fluttered to the ground outside.

He stared out the plate glass window as strangers hustled and bustled to who knows where. Uncomfortable, the couple's eyes made contact, but she quickly looked away to pan their dining neighbors. Her line of sight locked onto a child sitting two tables over in a high chair. Her wanton eyes caused his to follow, and they observed the child laughing and mashing scrambled eggs on his face. Tears welled in her eyes. Reaching across the table, he laid his wrinkled hand on hers. Her touch sent a spark of electricity surging to his needy heart until she jerked her hand from his in rejection. The curt escape doused his core like ice water and his shoulders slumped.

A young couple, in matching holiday sweaters, passed the window hand in hand, laughing, bumping lips together, with an animated love openly intimate. He thought that was us not long ago.

Merry Christmas Darling, by The Carpenters, piped through the speakers.

He waggled his finger at the couple and her eyes flashed toward the love scene. Her mouth opened to speak, but froze in disbelief, chastising him. Slamming her palm on the table, coffee catapulted onto the white tablecloth. Staring, unblinking, with enlarged blackened pupils, and flared nostrils, she pointed to the manila file on the table. The legal papers like a wall between them represented a decision to be made.

He opened the folder and the words, Irreconcilable differences, leered at him. This was a lie. After forty years of happy marriage, this was the end? A dish shattered in the kitchen interrupting the hum and buzz of the diner.

Pulling an ink pen from her purse, she turned the cap and laid it on the document. Folding her hands she lowered her chin and bathed in her condemnation. Their server approached with a coffee pot but skittered past with the intuition of a psychic.

Hot tears streamed down his face and blurred his vision. He lifted the pen. The ink zigged and crooked as his hand shook across the signature line.

Elvis singing Blue Christmas feathered throughout the diner.

She closed the folder, stood, and put on her winter overcoat. He moved to rise with her but she pushed him down with her palm like a Jedi knight. Exiting the diner she paused, turned to him, and gently shook her head in final judgment.

Forty years earlier, a complete stranger, had entered his life through the diner door for a blind date. Four children and five grandchildren later they had lived a happy life through its ups and downs. Today, she would exit his world, their marriage, through the same portal because of a kidney he had refused to donate to her grand-nephew. How was it his fault there were no other matches and the five-year-old had died?

Frigid air drafted into the diner as she departed, and an unconquerable chill swept over him from within. Frank Sinatra sang Silent Night through the restaurant's speakers as the snow falling outside turned into rain.

The broken old man sipped cold coffee and could only hear his ex-wife singing in his mind, You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch.

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