Free Let Go by Michael Patrick Hicks Page A

water with a wedge of lemon squeezed into it. A bowl of lemon slices for the fish always sat on every tabletop, and he always added lemon to his water, too. As the years slipped by, he began bringing a newspaper with him, hoping to stay up on current events, and she brought a book, and their table grew a bit quieter, their conversations and her observations a little less frequent. After nearly forty years together, how much did they have left to say?  
    If you were here right now, I’d be talking your ear off , he thought, imagining Lucille across from him. Even when they sat in companionable silence, reading, they always had a hand stretched across the table, breaking their hold only when necessary to turn a page, but their fingers always found one another again and settled into that familiar, reassuring squeeze.
    Newspapers were too hard to read anymore, the print too small. And the world events always seemed to be so much the same with murder, wars, corruption, drone strikes, an unending pantheon of misery and finger-pointing and brutality. He didn’t need that.
    Instead, he read on an electronic tablet, losing himself in fiction. Stuff Lucille, a horror hound, would have enjoyed. Some of it he enjoyed in spite of himself. It was mindless entertainment, junk food for the brain, and Jesus, he could almost hear his mother’s voice speaking those words. His son, William, had gotten the tablet for him two years ago, and he had learned how to increase the font size so he could read without his glasses.  
    He read more now than ever before. What else was he going to do? The kid was out of the house, and his wife was in the ground. TV bored him, and with his books, he could always make a mental movie if the words were good enough.
    Since getting the Kindle, he’d bought most of Lucille’s books in digital form—the type in the print editions she had owned, like that in newspapers, was too tiny for his tired old eyes. He now had a healthy library of titles by Brian Keene, Joe Lansdale, and Jonathan Maberry, from Ania Ahlborn to Stephen King—of course—and so many more he could hardly recall all the names populating his digital shelf space.  
    As his eyes drifted over the scattering of old folks at the other tables, Lucille’s voice piped up again.
    She’s got a sort of Jacqueline Kennedy vibe about her.
    It’s the pillbox hat , Everett replied. Looking toward the woman’s partner, a weathered black man in a blue windbreaker, he asked, What about him?
    He looks like Ossie Davis , she said. They were illicit lovers once upon a time , she added with surety and because she always had a story about the people she saw.
    Really?
    Yup, she said. She was a reverend’s daughter and they started dating young, and when she got pregnant and then lost the baby it caused all sorts of controversy in that small rinky-dink town they were from.  
    He fought in one of the wars, Korea probably, and gave more to his country than he ever got back, that’s for sure. But she waited for him to come back home, and when he did they came north, settled here in this little town and made a home.  
    He found a job as a car salesman, but not one of those slimy used car salesmen you always hear about. No, he was one of the good ones, as honest as he could be and still cut a commission, fair and decent. She was a purebred housewife, maybe did some medical billing from home to help make ends meet. She was never able to have kids, and she went through a few miscarriages before they figured out it wasn’t ever meant to be.  
    They love each other, though, a lot, and they’re happy together. You can see it in their eyes, how they look at one another even after all these years. Ain’t that something? Had she been there, she would have taken a long drink of water, a certain sparkle in her eyes as they drifted over the other people, seeking more stories.
    He had always wondered where she came up with those stories, and regretted that he could never