Poetry & Books

A few days later, a man came in near closing with two children and a photograph folded in his wallet. His wife’s birthday, he said. The first one without her. The children stood on either side of him, solemn and scrubbed, each holding one of his hands as if he might drift away if they let go.

He wanted a box of chocolates. Something nice. Something she would have liked.

I began asking the necessary questions. Dark or milk. Nuts or creams. Fruit centers or caramels. Allergies. Preferences. Price.

He looked at me as if I had begun speaking through glass.

She came out from behind the register and asked his wife’s name.

“Ellen,” he said.

She said the name back once, gently, as if testing its shape in the room. Then she asked what Ellen used to order when she came in.

He did not know.

The children did.

Raspberry creams, the little girl said. Orange peels, said the boy. Their mother hated coconut. Loved anything wrapped in gold foil.

She made the box herself. Badly, from a technical standpoint. Too much fruit. Too little contrast. No real progression from first taste to last. But she tucked the gold-wrapped pieces into the corners and added three raspberry creams in the center, one for each of them, so they could eat them together.

The man cried.

Miriam did too, of course.

I stood by the marble table with a tray of properly finished truffles cooling in front of me and thought, with some irritation, that grief has no palate.

The man paid. The children waved before they left.

She turned back toward me, her face still soft from what had passed through it.

“You made it too sweet,” I said.

Her expression changed so quickly I might have imagined the softness.

“It’s what they wanted,” she said.

“That does not make it balanced.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

Then she went to wash her hands.

I remember the water running longer than necessary.