The coffee machine has been broken for thirty-one years.
The first repair, the one Barrett’s father had promised his mother he would do, never quite happened. The second repair was the machine that arrived in a flat brown box in early 2034, no return address, the model number two generations newer than what the machine ought to have been replaceable with on the parts bin at the Cullman hardware store. Barrett’s mother had cried in a way that was not exactly crying when she opened it. Barrett’s father had read the box, looked at his wife, looked at the corner of the ceiling for a count of about four, and said guess somebody owed us one. The box went up to the loft. The new machine has been making coffee since.
It is broken again now, in the small way that all coffee machines get broken: the second pot does not heat to the temperature Barrett’s mother has, for fifty-eight years, preferred. Barrett’s wife has been threatening to replace it all summer. Barrett has been not-volunteering. The machine is familial in the way the sticky note on page one hundred and forty-two of A Pattern Language is familial: it is not the same machine as the one his grandmother used, but it is the same machine in the load-bearing sense, and load-bearing in a household is a category his mother defends without naming.
He pours two cups.
His wife is at the kitchen table with the morning’s paper-book chapter and a pencil. She is forty-one. She has been his wife for thirteen years and has not, in those thirteen years, asked him a single question about the four envelopes he has held in their marriage. The non-asking is the marriage. He has known this since the count of three the first time her hand stayed on his.
His father is on the couch in the next room with the book that has sat on the side table since 1978. The sticky note is the cardstock from a Maylene feed store nobody has driven to in forty-five years. The page is the chapter on terraced slopes. His father reads it every Sunday afternoon. He has read it every Sunday afternoon for forty-three years. His own father read it every Sunday afternoon for the eighteen years before that. There is a bookmark, somewhere beyond the sticky note, but Barrett has never looked at it; the sticky note is not a placeholder, it is the page.
His son is on the porch with the dog. The dog is a young one — the fourth in the line, since Glen — and is being taught to sit by a twelve-year-old who has the patience for it because his grandmother taught him. His daughter, who is seven and is unteachable about anything she did not personally suggest, is attempting to teach the dog something else. The dog is choosing between them with what looks, from inside the cabin, like real deliberation.
The envelope arrives at nine-eleven in the morning.
Barrett does not see it arrive; the post-slot is at the front of the house and the front of the house is a place Barrett’s mother has gradually colonized with a low table and a rotating bowl of something seasonal, and the envelope slides under it and waits twenty minutes for someone to walk by. His son walks by.
His son brings it to him. The way a five-year-old once did, holding it correctly, by one corner.
It is not addressed to Barrett.
It is addressed to his son.
Barrett reads the front of the envelope twice. There is no return address. There is a real stamp. The postmark is Olympus Mons. The handwriting is the handwriting his mother glanced at four envelopes ago, and has not commented on since.
His wife, who is on her second chapter of the morning’s reading, looks up. She does not look at the envelope. She looks at him. Her hand crosses the table and rests on his for the count of three. She has done this four times in their marriage. The first time was the inscription. This is the fourth.
She goes back to her chapter.
Barrett gives the envelope to his son.
The boy opens it on the porch, in the sun, with the dog watching because the dog watches everything that involves the boy. Inside is a single object: a 1976 Eisenhower silver dollar, in a small plastic flip with no note attached. Barrett’s son turns it over, weighs it in his palm, and walks with it into the next room to ask his grandfather what year it is.
Josh does not look up from page one hundred and forty-two. He says nineteen seventy-six. Year of my birth.
His grandson considers this with a seven-year-old’s gravity, which is the gravity that twelve-year-olds borrow when they want to be taken seriously. He says was it a good year.
His grandfather, who has read the chapter on terraced slopes forty-three Sundays running and is not going to look up from it even now, says the best one I had until your father was born.
The boy puts the silver dollar in his pocket. He walks back to the porch. He gets back to teaching the dog.
Kristen brings the iced tea out at four. She is eighty-two. She has been at the cabin since she married Josh, except for the year of the youngest child’s college, and she has been wearing the same class of straw hat in the cabin’s back garden for forty-six of those years. She sees the silver dollar in her grandson’s pocket as he runs past her toward the smaller pond. She does not ask. She sets the tea down on the porch table and takes her own glass to the chair at the corner of the porch where, by Barrett’s count, she has sat every Sunday afternoon for as long as he can remember being aware of where she was sitting.
A heron lands on the bank of the smaller pond.
It stands the way herons stand. Patient and prehistoric and slightly judgemental.
Barrett’s son sees it. He freezes the way a kid freezes when a kid sees something he has been told to be quiet around. The dog freezes too, on his cue. The daughter, who is on the steps untying the slip-knot the dog learned and the brother did not, also freezes, because freezing is contagious in a household where it gets practiced.
The heron stays for the count of about a minute. It walks two steps. It returns to the water.
Barrett’s son comes back to the porch.
He says, in a voice he keeps quiet because the cabin is quiet on Sunday afternoons, did you see the heron, Dad?
Barrett says yes.
He does not say what he is thinking, which is that there has been a heron on that bank, more or less in the same spot, every Sunday afternoon Barrett can remember from his own childhood, and that the constancy is not a coincidence and is not a fact he is going to explain to his son today, or, at this rate, ever.
Some Sundays the heron stands on the bank.
Some Sundays it walks two steps and returns to the water.
Barrett pours his second cup.