Henry clicked on the Solitaire icon on his laptop screen. As he opened the game and the cards were dealt,Henry let the familiar comfort and predictability of the game flow through him, seeming to seep into the wrinkles in his brain with a numbing gel that brought relief. Solitaire has been Henry’s only friend for a long time, ever since Jen died. Jen has been the organizer of their lives, scheduling couple dinners, game nights with neighbors, even the occasional weekend getaways. After she died, a few friends reached out to Henry to invite him over for dinner or out for golf, but he always politely declined. Eventually the invitations stopped coming and he was grateful for it. It was too hard to continue with the old life and he had no interest in starting a new one. So here he sat, one year later, alone in the study of their four bedroom house playing Solitaire on a Saturday afternoon. 

The doorbell rang and Henry opened up his Ring camera app to see a woman who appeared to be in her sixties breathing heavily on his front porch as she stacked up his groceries next to the Hunter green screen door and then turned to start walking back to her car for the next load. 

For a split second, Henry felt a mild annoyment about leaving the comfort of his laptop, but if there was one thing Henry was, it was polite to a fault. So we pushed back his desk chair and walked to the door, unlocked the bolt, and stepped outside in the cool fall air. He walked down the three steps to the sidewalk in front of his house and took a few steps towards the woman’s blue Honda Civic.

“Hello”, he called to her from a distance so as not to startle her, “Please let me help you with that.” 

The woman was digging around in her trunk and didn’t even look up.  “No need, I’ve got it, but you really need to back off the Diet Coke. It’s worse for you than the sugary stuff, you know.”

Henry stood silent and stoic, increasingly annoyed but bound by his upbringing to maintain his composure and politeness.