Dora Beckett was dead for ten minutes before her husband knew. She was gone half an hour before her mother, roused from a fitful old-woman's sleep, let the phone slip from her fingers and slumped against the kitchen wall silent in quivering grief. In three hours her priest knew, four, her boss and after one inexcusable day, the two children she rarely spoke with received the news from the father they barely knew. Yet somewhere between Daniel Beckett's awful discovery and young Emily Beckett's first trip home in years, regulars at a certain Evanston café, notified of their friend's loss, began a quiet day of dirges that stretched from six o'clock in the morning until well past dinner time.   

Dora Beckett had been dead for just over a day by time I'd stepped into the café. At first it was impossible to tell that something was wrong, being an infrequent patron of said café and unfamiliar with the new crop of coffee bean bonhomies keeping the North Shore appropriately jittery. When I was in high school, I used to frequent the café all the time, meeting friends, trying teas, and pretending I had any clue what the Northwestern students were talking about. It was a grungy place back then, less a café than a news kiosk with scones. Sclerotic baristas sang the song of antipathym which by dint of political screeds and anti-establishment rants, rang particularly true my seventeen-year-old self,. Everyone there seemed so sure of themselves, even when they must have known they were speaking nonsense. Faith-based atheism at it's best.

But things have changed since my last visit there in April of '04, and even more so since my final spin as a regular in the fall in 1998. Evanston, like all of Cook County, has taken the path of least resistance and banned smoking from virtually all public places. Air once dense with the stench antagonism and carbon monoxide now smells of brewing coffee and sweet, Indian teas: truly the bete noir of any decent coffeehouse.

Last Thursday, however, there was something else in the air and it didn't take long before I picked up on it. Turning from my book to the sound of free-versing in the distance, I noticed a group of sweater-clad hipster-types sitting in a circle in one the café's larger back rooms. It was an eclectic crew, though primarily undergrad and female, and every now and again one would pass me on their way outside for a puff. This went on for the better part of an hour, my interest in Michener, waning percipitiously. Not seeking to be presumptuous I resisted the urge to ask what was going on until a man behind the counter asked if he could see the "metro" section of my newspaper.  

"There it is," he said to no one. Holding the paper, he pointed to an obituary. "We knew that woman. She used to come in here all the time."

"A regular?"

"Yeah. I always liked her even though most of the people here thought she was a little annoying."

I told him I was sorry about the loss. I think I may have mentioned something about regulars being the "lifesblood" of commercial establishment, but I was just grasping for something to say.

The man nodded and turned his attention toward the crowd. Roughly a dozen people thick, they felt their way through lamentations which, though undoubtedly sincere, smacked of a certain sense of self-aggrandizement. Literary devices abound. True sadness, true regret, true anything does have the luxury of metaphor and iambic pentameter.  

I thought about the dead woman. She was fifty-eight years of age. She was a wife, a mother, a woman. Instead of flowers, her family asked for donations to the American Cancer Society. She didn't die of cancer. I pictured her, despite not knowing what she looked like, sitting at the table across from me. I envisioned her as tall but sturdy with coarse gray hair curling down to her chin, kissing just below her neck. I imagined her in a stocking cap and forest-green fisherman's coat. I pretended that we were arguing over globalization. She would refer to me by my last name and I'd call her "grandma." We were each other's reason for late-afternoon espressos.

I asked a woman who said she was a friend of the family about Mrs. Beckett. She gave me the brief timetable I described at the start of this post. When I told her I had to leave (I was meeting a friend at the vegetarian restaurant down the street), she asked if I knew Dora.

I said, "Yes."