The Widows’ Cafe: A Short Story Read Free

they sat down at a table in the corner. The man looked deceptively meek. Short, grey, insignificant. All the same, there was something in his eyes that she recognized all too well. He had Ruben’s eyes. Part hatred, part unreasonable anger, part aggression, and part malice. She knew the recipe by heart.
    The woman looked in her direction and their eyes locked. Marianne’s heart ached. She could feel the woman’s pain as clearly as if it were her own. In fact, it was almost worse to sense another person’s troubles. Marianne’s pain was over. She had confronted it. Confronted the fear. At last.
    The woman came over to her.
    It had taken almost half an hour to get home. Kjell could feel the anger smouldering and sputtering inside him. An hour wasted on going out for a fucking cup of coffee. Beata had been going on about it for weeks, until he’d eventually given in and agreed to go with her. Although afterwards he couldn’t understand why. The café was nothing special. It was in a good location, of course, but there was nothing to set it apart from all the other coffee shops in the city. They could have gone somewhere local and been home in five minutes. Still, the coffee was excellent; that much he had to admit. Strong, hot, and with a slight taste of something … different. Some sort of spice. Maybe cardamom.
    ‘Well, are you satisfied now?’
    Kjell slammed the car door, gleefully noting how Beata flinched.
    ‘Finally you can stop nagging me about taking you to that place, right? I can’t for the life of me understand why we had to go there. And now Sunday’s almost over. Do you realize how much I could have got done in the time we spent on this? Do you?’
    He pushed Beata through the door ahead of him. The anger inside him was growing with every word, and he could hardly wait to let it loose. The sense of relief afterwards was always so enormous, so liberating. All the tension evaporated, and for a while he could breathe easier. Sometimes he’d be filled with a vague sense of regret, but over the years he’d taught himself to repress that feeling.
    ‘How could you dream up something so stupid! Don’t you think I have better things to do than sit around and guzzle coffee on the weekend?’
    He grabbed her hair and pulled her head backwards. But much to his surprise he didn’t see the usual look of submission and resignation. Instead he saw something that resembled … no, how could that be possible? Was that triumph in her eyes?
    Kjell raised his hand to strike, determined to pound that sudden, disrespectful look out of Beata’s eyes. But an acute twinge of pain forced him to drop his hand. He pressed it to his chest. The pain seemed to rip and claw at the area around his heart. Unaware of what he was doing, his other hand let go of Beata’s hair, and she collapsed in a heap at his feet. There she stayed. Watching, observing. And as the pain intensified and he felt the floor rise up to meet him, he once again saw that look of triumph on her face.
    Ruben hadn’t been like that in the beginning. He had been a quiet man, considerate, almost shy. That was what had attracted her. Having grown up with four rowdy brothers, she had truly appreciated Ruben’s gentleness when he was courting her.
    It didn’t take more than two days after their wedding for his anger to come pouring out. The anger that seemed to boil and seethe inside him, always on the alert for mistakes, an excuse to spew out its hateful lava. She no longer remembered what had caused the first explosion, which was far from the last of his outbursts. Maybe it was something important. Maybe it was something minor. That had ceased to matter.
    For twenty years she put up with it. Twenty years that had marked her body, her soul, her heart for all eternity. When at last she put a stop to it, she was surprised to discover how easy it was. How weak Ruben actually was. Her experience as a nurse had provided the answer. Sometimes she cursed her stupidity.