The kettle on the back burner of the stove had this tiny, high-pitched whistle that started right around five in the morning, long before the sun even thought about clearing the neighbor’s roof. For forty-six years, Arthur drank black coffee, poured straight from the pot into a thick ceramic mug that he had chipped back in 1984 when we were still fixing up the porch. I never cared for coffee myself. I always brewed tea, the loose kind in a brown earthenware pot with a little woven wicker handle that stayed warm to the touch.

Two pots, two mugs, sitting across from each other at the same oak table through three different cars, two roof replacements, and every single morning of raising our two boys.

Then came his last year. It was the year he started moving a little slower, the year his shoulders began to round forward like he was carrying an invisible sack of seed up a steep hill. He stopped drinking his black coffee. Without a word, he started boiling water for tea. I figured it was just his stomach acting up again, or maybe some new pill the doctor gave him at the clinic in town. He never did like taking medicine, and he always claimed it made coffee taste like old pennies. I just set out a second mug, poured him a cup from my own pot, and didn’t make a fuss about it. He died in January, right when the ground was frozen so hard the gravediggers had to use a jackhammer to get the backhoe through the topsoil.

I kept his chipped coffee mug right there on the counter beside the toaster until March. Every time I wiped down the formica, I moved it a half-inch to the left, then back to the right, because moving it away felt like taking down a coat he might still want to wear. But by the second week of March, the dust had settled around the base of it in a little gray ring, and the house felt heavy in a way that made my chest ache just walking through the kitchen. I picked it up, ran it under warm water, and put it on the top shelf of the corner cabinet behind the jelly glasses. Arthur didn’t need a monument on the counter. He needed me to keep the kitchen clean.

Last week I was reaching way back behind the red Folgers coffee tins to find a new canister of instant lemon tea because my throat had been scratchy all morning.

My hand hit something heavy and square sitting right in the dark corner where the mice never went because there wasn’t a crumb to be found. I had to hook my fingers around the edge and drag it out into the light, grunting a little because my arthritis has been acting up whenever the weather shifts. It was an old metal tea tin, the kind that used to hold holiday butter cookies back in the seventies, but it was wrapped around the lid with two layers of yellowed masking tape. It felt heavy, like it was full of lead shot or iron nails.

I sat down at the table because my knees felt a bit wobbly, though I couldn’t rightly say why a tin of tea should make me feel that way. I picked at the corner of the masking tape with my thumbnail until it gave way with a dry, papery rip.

Inside, packed so tight you couldn’t have slid a razor blade between them, were tea bags. Not loose ones in a box, but individual foil-sealed bags, stacked in four neat rows, right to the top. I pulled one out and turned it over in my palm. They weren’t the cheap ones I bought in bulk at the Piggly Wiggly. They were the good ones, the Irish breakfast blend he used to tease me about buying because they cost fifty cents more than the store brand.

Hanging from the handle of the tin by a thin piece of green floral wire was a small white paper tag, the kind you buy in a box of fifty at the hardware store for labeling mason jars in the root cellar. I knew that handwriting immediately, even though it wasn’t the neat, upright hand he used for keeping the tractor logs. It was shaky, the letters leaning hard to the right like he was writing while riding in the back of a pickup truck on a gravel road. It was dated back in November, just two weeks after the specialist in Dayton told us there wasn’t anything left to try.

I didn’t want to read it, and at the same time, I couldn’t stop my eyes from spelling out the words. One for every morning you sit alone, my love. I couldn’t stay, but I wanted to make sure we still shared a cup at dawn. Drink one for me.

The silence in the kitchen got very loud right then. I just sat there staring at the green wire, my thumb rubbing the rough edge of the paper tag, while the clock on the wall made its dull ticking sound. I thought about November. I thought about all those afternoons when I went down to the cellar to put up winter squash or went out to the shed to check on the lawnmower while Arthur stayed up here in the warm kitchen. He must have sat right at this very table, hour after hour, with his hands shaking so bad he could barely hold the pen, counting them out. Three hundred and sixty-five little foil packets. One by one by one. Making sure there weren’t three hundred and sixty-four, and making sure there weren’t three hundred and sixty-six. A whole year of mornings, measured out in hot water and black tea, hidden away behind the coffee he hadn’t drunk in twelve months.

I didn’t cry right then. Tears don’t come easy to a woman who spent forty-six years burying things deep down where the farm work has to get done anyway. Instead, I just looked at the neat little rows inside that old tin, realizing how hard he must have breathed while he was taping the lid shut so the mice wouldn’t get into them. He knew he wasn’t going to see next Christmas. He knew I was going to wake up in this big, empty house with the frost on the window and the sun coming up over the ridge, wondering how to boil water for just one person.

I stood up, my joints popping in the quiet room, and walked over to the stove. I filled the small aluminum kettle just enough for one cup, the way I used to do before the boys were born and before the house got crowded with boots and muddy coats. While the water heated up on the front burner, making that low, singing rumble before the whistle starts, I reached into the metal tin and pulled out the very first bag. I didn’t put it back. I dropped it right into my old earthenware pot and poured the boiling water over it, watching the steam rise up toward the grease filter above the stove.

I poured my tea into my mug, and then, because it felt right and because I didn’t want the shelf to look too empty, I reached up into the corner cabinet and pulled down his chipped coffee mug. I set it right across from mine on the oak table, just like we had done every morning since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. The tea was hot and strong, tasting faintly of malt and old paper, and as I took my first sip, I didn’t feel quite so alone in the cold morning light.