Their number fluctuated from week to week, but they were almost never fewer than three, three was the bottom limit. He could remember only a couple of times with just two. It was awkward when they were just two, hard to get a conversation going, and, once going, steer it in the right direction, keep it from collapsing into long awkward silences that only got worse with every second, until the awkwardness started to feel more like panic, until finally one of them, nearly desperate, would toss something out, any odd thing, it didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter which two it was, none of them had the sort of personality that held up well under those conditions, facing each other across a little table in a coffee shop, the usual topics didn’t work under conditions like that. The conversation, the repartee, the jokes felt contrived, rehearsed, his own voice, he could hear, sounded stilted and insincere. When he saw it would be just two of them, his impulse was to call the klatsch off. But he couldn’t actually do that. To even suggest such a thing, and explain why he thought it was a good idea, presupposed an intimacy that was not in the ethos of the klatsch, even though he was sure the other person felt the same way, was thinking the same thing. So they had to go through with it, had to sit there and chat in that painful stilted way for an hour or more, even though they were not enjoying it, when enjoying the company of others was the whole point of the klatsch. After the last time that had happened, when only Harv of all people had showed up, he had come up with the idea of a quorum rule. The next time they all got together he would ask them to make it a rule that, when only two people came, it was not to be considered a proper klatsch, in which case they could just go back home, turn on their heels and leave without any fuss or discussion, because that was the rule. But he didn’t know how to tell the group that he wanted this, it was not the sort of thing they talked about in the klatsch, they were not close in that way, so he never brought it up. They kept it light, a lot of joking, sometimes a bit of good-natured teasing. There were no formal rules, but they all understood that nobody wanted heavy trips. Occasionally, it is true, they would turn on an absent member and gossip about him in a way that was sometimes vicious, but face-to-face they kept things amiable. He was never absent, the one person who had never missed a klatsch, because living alone, having no family nearby, he had nothing better to do on a Sunday morning. They met in either of a pair of coffee shops, in Jack’s Java Joint two blocks east of his place or the Lighthouse three blocks west, so it was nothing for him to just walk over. The group was maybe ten people, counting the ones who came only now and then, with just five regulars, or six if you included Lena, who was semiregular. It took a lot to keep the regulars away. On the day of the giant blizzard, four-foot drifts on the sidewalks and the city practically shut down, they were all five at Jack’s, the only customers in there. Jack had opened the shop just for them, he was that sure they would show up. He made them coffee and pancakes with bacon or sausage, and when they had all been served he fixed a cup for himself and sat with them. They were men and women, they were of different ages, from different walks of life, a lineman for the electric company, a dog trainer, a middle-school music teacher, it was hard to say what they had in common. Maybe they didn’t have anything in common and that was the point, was the thing that made the klatsch interesting, hearing the various perspectives people had. They never saw each other outside of the klatsch. He was the intellectual of the group, the news junkie, the one with the statistics. Being on disability he didn’t have anything to do all day but read the papers and watch CNN. He liked knowing what happened the moment it happened. During big unfolding events like a hurricane or a hostage situation, he would get up in the night and turn on the computer to find out the latest. It always seemed to him that the others, who showed less interest in such things, were cutting themselves off from the world. He was often angered by things he read and saw, the lies of politicians, the cupidity and fraud of Wall Street, the ignorance and folly of people generally. He knew more than the others, had more facts ready at hand, and sometimes he worried that he might be going on for too long. Sometimes, reflecting on it afterward, he felt he had been too insistent or too forceful with his opinions. He sometimes lost control of his voice and could sound irritated and peevish without meaning to. No one became blatantly angry with him when he held forth for a long time or lost control of his voice, but he was aware of a kind of tension in the air, and thinking it over later he would wonder if they wouldn’t be happier if he weren’t part of the group, or maybe not part of it every Sunday. When he walked into Jack’s a little after ten this morning he was surprised that none of the others were there yet. He got coffee, took his usual seat at the head of the long table by the window, and waited. He read the front page of the paper that he had already read at home. He guessed they were at the Lighthouse, he must have been distracted when they were deciding where to meet next, and so he walked over there, but they weren’t at the Lighthouse either, and he came back to Jack’s. He couldn’t figure it out, it was eleven o’clock already. He decided to call. He never called, he didn’t even have numbers for most of them, but he called the ones he had. Nobody answered. That wasn’t surprising. A crisp, clear autumn morning, people had better things to do than sit in a stuffy coffee shop. That was normal, they weren’t married to each other. Nobody came every Sunday. It was just a coincidence that they had all stayed away today, it was bound to happen eventually. He could have been one of them, he might well have found something else to do on a day like today, he might have gone for a long walk, he really ought to walk more, or for a drive in the country. He might have stopped for lunch in some little country town. That would really have been strange, if he had actually done that, the hour of the klatsch arriving and nobody there at all. He ordered an egg sandwich. He ordered the same thing every Sunday. They teased him about that, about being a stick-in-the-mud, he never ate an egg sandwich otherwise. The waiter set it down in front of him, a rye bread sandwich topped with a sliced pickle in a nest of potato chips, and he just looked at it. He didn’t feel like an egg sandwich. He wished he hadn’t come, he wished he had done like the others and just not showed up, it was stupid, he was always the odd man out. He studied his face in the window glass. He looked terribly tired, even depressed, he wasn’t getting enough sleep. He didn’t know how much longer he could go on like this. He was forty-eight years old, he had already had most of the life he was ever going to have. Seated at the head of the long empty table, he was conscious of looking ridiculous. If the others had showed up, if even one of them had thought to show up, the morning might have been different. Fuck them, he thought. Fuck every goddamn one of them. He got up to leave. He told Jack he wasn’t hungry. Outside on the sidewalk, in the Sunday morning quiet, a cardinal balancing on a wire directly above him whistled clear and clean, the chill sunlight of early autumn flooded the street and ricocheted from the windshields of cars, the sky was blue and cloudless.