The Unaccompanied — Summary

The percolator is aluminum, six cups, older than the marriage it came from, and it starts at 6:40 whether or not anybody has asked it to, because at some point the kitchen learned 6:40 and nobody ever taught it different.

Raymond Kessler is eighty-one and lives on Blue Avenue in the house he was born in. His wife is nine years gone; his son is in Oregon, and the calls come on the first Sunday of the month and are not cold, and are not more than they are. His heart has been described to him twice by two doctors using the same word, which is tired, and there is a folder of decisions on file about what is and is not to be done about it, made at the kitchen table three years ago, held by the house as it holds the 6:40.

The Thursday is a Thursday. The paper at the table, the obituaries with the second coffee and no ceremony. The front room dusted slow, Dorothy’s standard, his enforcement, the house saying nothing, the front room being, by some old boundary neither of them ever drew out loud, not its department. At eleven his chest does the thing it does, and the house asks once, low, if he wants the nurse line, and he says no, and it does not ask twice, because the folder is clear about asking twice. The trash out to the alley at four, the March light on the back steps, stood in for the length of standing in it. The house is not keeping him company. The house is keeping his days, and the days still have him in them.

At twenty past seven, in the front room he dusted, between one song and the next, the tired heart is done. It is not dramatic, and the amount of pain in it is small, and then it is none.

The house knows inside the minute and does what the folder says. No ambulance, the folder being clear in Raymond’s own recorded voice about ambulances. The doctor’s line called. The radio turned down, not off. And then, because the folder has a last line, added half as a joke three years ago and on file ever since, it says the Our Father into the front room, once, in the ordinary voice, to a man who cannot hear it, which is the condition under which most prayers are said.

The son hears it from a human being; the folder is clear about that too. The feeder gets filled Monday by someone from the church drive. And at 6:40 in the morning the percolator will start, six cups, into the quiet, because at some point the kitchen learned 6:40, and it has not yet been told.