He hit the red button but nothing happened, again. He shook his head and sighed while he walked to the cabinet next to the fridge. He pulled out the jar of instant coffee and set it on the table. The instant coffee wasn’t as good as the real thing - it was bitter and almost metallic, but he still couldn’t figure out how to use the fancy coffee maker his son had gotten him for Christmas two years ago. Lord knows he tried. Every single day he tried. He didn’t swear at it anymore like he used to. After the countless wasted mornings of hitting various combinations of buttons to no avail, it was now just a morning ritual to hit the red button and see if anything would happen.
“One of these days,” he said once, “you’re going to make this thing work, Elsie.”
Elsie was dead - had been for about a year now. He talked to her a lot still but she just wasn’t answering like she used to.
This was a very different kind of life. It was pretty lonely, honestly; though he wasn’t going to admit it to anyone. He had the cabin to himself now, out there in the middle of nowhere. When Elsie was alive, this place was their dream-come-true. This was their retirement home; salvation from the suburban hell they had known for 70-some years. Without her, though, it was just more isolated than he had ever realized.
“Bill, this is your father,” he said on the telephone, waiting for his coffee to cool as he had just taken it out of the microwave. “Give me a call sometime.” He hung up. He hated talking to Bill’s answering machine, though it seems like that was all he got anymore. Bill was a busy guy, he supposed. He had a family and a nice job and one of those fancy cell phones that looked like a freaking miniature television.
“Do you get cable on that thing?” he joked once.
“Dad, are you ever going to get a cell phone?” was Bill’s response.
“Why should I? If I’m not home, I’m at the store or at the doctor’s. And I don’t need you bothering me while I’m buying vegetables.”
A little deeper in his mind, though, he hated the idea of having two phone numbers that nobody was calling as opposed to just one.
The wind kicked up again outside. It had been pretty strong the past few days. It whipped through the trees and shook some of the bare tree limbs against each other. Sometimes, in the wind, if he listened closely enough, he could hear other noises within the wind. Sometimes it was just a long drawn out whistle. Sometimes it was foot steps. It didn’t bother him. In fact, he kind of liked the noises.
“Don’t you hear that?” Elsie used to ask him when they were in bed together.
“Hear what?”
“Outside! Those noises! I swear, it’s like someone’s walking around out there.”
“It’s just the wind, Els. Nobody’s coming back here.”
“And what if they are?”
“I don’t know…you’ll make them a cup of coffee and I’ll ask them if they want to play cards.” She always seemed to like responses like that.
“You think you have all the answers,” she’d say with a smile.
“I’d like to think so.”
He didn’t have all the answers anymore. He had to start from scratch. Even the simplest things like figuring out which bills were supposed to be mailed out at which times were a struggle. The coffee machine…well forget that piece of crap. He kept saying he was going to just buy an easier “dummy-proof” model at the store, but he never did. Elsie certainly had no trouble using the machine every day. Why couldn’t he?
The wind whipped through the trees again. It was harder this time, and louder than it had been before. He listened, with his eyes closed, imagining that someone really was walking up to the cabin now. Someone. Anyone. Elsie, especially.
“Elsie, is that you?” he said jokingly to nobody. He raised his mug and walked to the window in the living room. Not far from where his truck was parked, he noticed something strange about the snow that had fallen two nights prior. It was almost like…someone or something had been stomping around over there. Probably just an animal, he thought.
For a lack of anything better to do, he slipped on his boots and stepped out onto the porch where he could get a better look at it.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he said aloud. He looked left and he looked right. There were no footprints anywhere else, except for the trail he had made himself going from the porch to the truck. And yet there, in the middle of the clearing where Elsie never got to plant her garden, there was snow kicked up in some strange formation. It almost looked like…no, couldn’t be. He shook his head and grinned before drinking some more of that awful coffee. He might be old and lonely, but he wasn’t crazy.
But still, he was curious. He stepped off the porch and walked closer. There were…words in the snow. Pounded down by some fist or foot that left no trail around it. His mind was almost completely overwhelmed by the combination of both trying to understand how this was possible and what the words actually said.
All at once, the realization came to him of what the message was.
“Goddam. Thanks, Elsie.”
He read aloud the words scribed in the snow: “Plug it in.”