The Second Cup
My name is Margaret Briggs. I’m seventy-one years old.
And at exactly 6:18 on a Thursday evening in October, at a dinner table in Scottsdale, Arizona, my only son looked across a roast chicken I had cooked and asked me when I was finally going to leave.
But that’s the middle of the story.
Let me start where it started.
On a porch.
With a cup of tea.
Harold and I were married for forty-four years.
We met at a church picnic in Flagstaff in 1979. He was twenty-six. I was twenty-five. He was a high school shop teacher with sawdust in his hair and a laugh you could hear across a parking lot. I was a bookkeeper at a lumber company. He came to buy two-by-fours for his students and stayed an hour arguing with me about the price.
He asked me to dinner. I said no.
He came back the next week for more two-by-fours he didn’t need.
I said yes.
We moved to Tucson in 1984. Harold got a job teaching woodshop at Catalina High School. I got a job doing the books for a plumbing company.
We bought a little house on East Linden Street. Two bedrooms. A carport. A front porch with a ceiling fan that wobbled.
We paid fifty-eight thousand dollars for it.
We lived there for thirty-eight years.
I painted the kitchen yellow the first week.
Harold said it looked like the inside of a lemon. I said that was the point. He painted the cabinets white to match. He built a breakfast nook by the window out of oak he salvaged from an old church in Bisbee. He carved our initials into the underside of the table where nobody could see.
H.B. + M.B. 1984.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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