Sixty Rows

In daylight it looks like this.

It looks like a man driving a woman up a hill at twenty to six in the morning in an eleven-year-old van with the heater on the windscreen, because she has vats to check and he has a stone and an oil can and thirty pairs of somebody else’s secateurs to finish. It looks like two people in a kitchen at six o’clock not saying very much. It is not, it turns out, a different life. It is the same life with the lie taken out of it, and the coffee is exactly as hot as it always was, and I have stopped pretending I can hold the cup.

I make it some mornings now. He drank the first one I made him, in silence, all of it, and then put the cup down and said it was tepid, and I told him that…