A private funeral service by invitation. The newspaper notice said it all.

“Not invited?” Hal chomped. “Private. By invitation. I. Be. Damned.”

Scurrying about the kitchen, disconnected Bobbie couldn’t get her laptop to talk to the wi-fi. Her phone – no service. Her presentation all she could think about.

“Can ya believe?” Hal continued. “After all we been through, five generations our families know’d one another, inter-married allwhichaways. God damn it, close the door in our faces, cut the cord, ignore history, start all over! We ain’t no better connected these days, fuckin’ internet?

“Hal, what’s gotten into you? Enough of them pills,” Bobbie said. She saw she needed to change because in her hurry she’d spilled creme on her navy business suit.

“Ya ask me that, black Bobbs?” It slipped. “We talkin’ ’bout my childhood best bud, tied at the waist since filthy toddlers. Ya might recall, despite big bad Mama briefcase, Mama, and ya fancy slides for the President of disUnited States, the dude officiated our weddin’ down on Sea Island last year, legal and spiritual connectin’ us – does this ring a phone at ya office? Helloooo? Jesus, ya with me?”

Despite the jumpy caffeine and salty tongue, his first sentence there jolted Bobbie awake.

“Watch that language, white owl, white Hal! Presentation’s for President of International Connection Division, recently rebranded White Hose Connection. Maybe that’s what you call paying attention, but I’m not going to the White House, not today at least–”

Hal tried to interrupt. He knew when she slid owl in for Hal and added the racial epithet before lunch to counter his own not minutes before, tense was tight in this new-knotted some kinda modern-day matrimony, opposites still attract eh, dumb me to start with quick-study her too early again damnit today, Hal thought. He had started it, a fact.

“No, you had your say – and I call this out-of-proportion tantrum nothing but sarcasm at its lukewarm best, a grown man behaving like a brat at its milk-cold worst. No wonder she got cancer, so she could avoid all this from you!”

Ouch, where did that come from? Bobbie thought to herself. Exhausted, change the subject fast, woman.

“I don’t know any of your friends,” she switched gears. “Just that preacher-man. You said all the rest had trouble with my background, and I’m sorry something snapped in you when you read that funeral notice, but what do you want me to do about it? The man’s dead. I didn’t know him. Here’s my therapist’s number. She’s better at this, and talk to her about the accident. Overdue, young man, long overdue.”

The long hours of Bobbie’s final working years kept her awake at night, the latest promotion not helping. Last month, the couple had started sleeping in separate beds, earlier this month in separate bedrooms, but still married, ever-hopeful newlyweds in their mid-sixties.

“Unlike you, I don’t want to get laid off before I can retire,” Bobbie smart-mouthed. “If we’re planning to live our final years in Panama, I have to keep this job six more months, what our guy told us, right?”

“What I know is ya don’t know the man ya married–”

“I know I’m gonna be late if I continue this conversation–”

“I might not be here when ya get back–”

“You not going anywhere, not with that bum leg you won’t.”

Instantaneous the regret, Bobbie looked away, embarrassed, forgetting about the spilled milk, her stained outfit, the cancer remark.

Doors slammed. Wheels squealed. Yet again in their yard. She was gone. Once more.

Hal knew why his youngest son Mark had texted him not to post a profile on that dating website last year: → #sadbadconnection, internet’s web fulla cobwebs, these spiders real, widows alright, all poisonous!!

Hal glared at the saved text with the emoticon: a spider with a red dot. At the time, he thought Mark melodramatic over his divorce, loss of kids’ custody after coming out as gay, and mourning still his mother’s death from cancer. Hal reconsidered the text’s meaning.

“Fine,” Bobbie had stammered, slamming the kitchen door. “Somebody gotta work.”

Hal looked down at his left leg. It hurt. He popped another pill. Since the accident, he couldn’t work, going on months. He wondered if he’d ever see Panama, with or without her.

The couple had dreamed of a fruitful retirement long before meeting. Adventurers, they loved risks, experimenting with technologies, trying new hobbies; they spoke Spanish. Once in Panama, they would use their new country as a travel base. They wanted to cruise the famous canal connecting warm Atlantic’s crystal Gulf and cooler darkness of Pacific, both stormy all the same. They dreamed of the isthmus-country that connected north and south, east and west. All this would make their unison, a honeymoon that Hal’s accident had robbed from them. How’d his song go, when we danced that night? O, Panama, bridge of two lands, two oceans, two people, one love! He questioned it all, even his song-writing hobby. It sucked.

Hal had never been able to call their initial meeting a date. Mark advised him to meet “the woman,” as he called her, for the first time in a public place. Dad, ya sure she female, American, 18+??? Mark cautioned in a text later. Minutes after shaking hands, Hal and Bobbie laughed about Mark’s text, joking the concern from his own dating experiments that hadn’t hooked up right. They laughed at what they had listed online as their lifetime goal: RETIRE 2 PANAMA. The exact same words, both profiles.

“Three words,” Bobbie said, to which Hal responded, “two words, one number, all caps, with the cute number ‘2’ to attract a sexy lady.”

“I had the Panama flag emoticon,” Bobbie countered.

They laughed over cappuccinos, followed by whiskeys. For hours.

“Bushmills, not Jameson,” Bobbie had pestered the server.

Hal smiled to himself, Protestant and a drinker? If not a Protestant, at least she got a palate, a woman with religion or taste? Maybe I’ll make Mama proud and do me right.

Bobbie corrected herself, “Waiter, either’s OK.”

At the time, Hal noted it all: Opinionated but gentlewoman. She saw his smirk, forcing him to confess, “Oh, it’s nothin’.”

They laughed, even after the Broad Street coffeehouse had closed.

“Looks like we’re the oldest of the online daters here tonight,” Bobbie said.

“The last table to get thrown out,” Hal continued her thought as they walked out, “but isn’t it nice not to be the only old couple on a date?”

“Better than nice,” Bobbie replied, gripping his hand and leaning in to touch his beard. “Better than whiskey.” She kissed him, leaning against her car.

First date, first kiss, first time lady made first move at sixty-five, Hal thought, how ya know anyone, even sixty-five dates later?

Out of his head and back in the kitchen, Hal’s phone buzzed. The text read: Security Breach. A squirrel outside, he concluded, had tripped the home system. He pressed #2 on his smartphone, signaling all was well. Sitting alone in their already-jointly owned house, Hal again thought of Mark, who’d not come to the wedding because they had not signed a pre-nup.

Hal wondered if any these technologies made life easier, much less the Task of All-Time. Hadn’t he read online of an inventor seeking funding for a so-called “lie-detector to judge romantic weight of heart connections”? He remembered the phrase’s odd wording.

“That device,” Hal told a buddy over drinks when he golfed, “connects to the lovers’ groins. To their groins? Would you?”

“A good way to squash a couple’s love lives, I say,” his friend had replied. “I need all the help I can get, but ouch, not sure about that kinda help.”

Back in classes at all-male Wolfard in the ’70s, he never imagined the high-tech life he’d come to live as a transportation innovator, how the future would one day come and toot-toot-railroad its way, with no forewarning bells’ or crossing-guard arms’ protection, onto his tracks and redirect his life, disconnecting every cord from life’s flow. Underneath his old-mannish grunts lay a heart as red as any Valentine. When she’d learned of his life’s work, Bobbie labeled him 3R: my Rail-Road-Romantic. Hal missed the male camaraderie and the mix of on-the-rail and office work with the guys those three decades. Were they already having problems they couldn’t heal? He didn’t know if Bobbie understood him. He missed her honeymoon spirits. Who said seniors don’t – can’t – before work? He smiled. He missed his youth, his youthful liver, his college buddy, deceased according to the notice. The funeral, what to do about it? Bobbie’s corporate-branded White Hose Internet-Of-Things coffeemaker buzzed Hal’s smartphone: Panama Bean Delight reordered. Hal deleted the text. “Enough of my – our – money,” he muttered.

One of two hawkish blue jays outside the kitchen window slammed into the glass. He watched it fly away. Get on with life, injured or not, focus. Good lesson there, buddy. The coffeemaker switched itself off. Hal sighed, these gadgets. He couldn’t think about Panama. Not a half-hour ago, Bobbie hovered within arm’s reach, the distance of a kiss, sweetness and wisdom, beauty of aging woman so near, and yet last week, they stopped exchanging morning kisses and now, his boyhood buddy dead. He needed to get a grip.

“Routine movement needed to heal that leg, only way at our age,” the orthopedist, a Wolfard brother, had commanded at Hal’s last visit.

“Go, Bulldogs,” Hal had responded, lacking any Homecoming cheer.

Heal leg, part-time job, get outta my head, feelin’ sorry, get outta house. Should I crash the funeral?

Hal sipped the coffee’s dregs. The mug’s embossed 3R set it apart from the its companion BTS on the counter’s far side. “Ugh,” Hal spluttered, then pushed the brew button on his smartphone’s app. The coffeemaker switched itself back on, ground Panamanian beans, then began to brew once more. Stewing about the funeral, Hal figured he’d have to find out which church, if they had an elevator. He didn’t know when the funeral was, time or day. Private, my ass, he thought.

The newspaper’s notice had been vague. On purpose. Younger generation bein’ all snobby. By invitation, he repeated the refrain, stuck in his head, in his craw, now sandwiched in his throat and stomach and being. He coughed and coughed and again, before raising his hands, almost falling. Sound like somethin’ outta a London royal palace, don’t it? Goddamned invite. What even do them city folk know about death? Not that country folk all pure and righteous, connected to Almighty, but they still attend to funerals some regularity, didn’t move off, thinkin’ they escape final hand of Good Lord. Private funeral service by invitation? Irritatin’ beyond the grave, not how we used to do. When ya knockin’ on St. Pete’s pearly gates, flashin’ ya pearly whites like five years old, guilty-a-sin, swipin’ Granny cookies, but standin’ before beckonin’ Santa, well of course ya say, “Been a good boy, uhuh, I been.” God damn that family.

Coffee’s smell always, strange, calmed Hal’s nerves, the oddness about his years of working weird shifts, where he’d learned the rails among the train men, back then all men, at least on his watch. He smelled that blessed second pot. He reread the notice. Send flowers, or show up? Should I call the guy’s wife, oops, widow– His thoughts interrupted, Hal imagined Bobbs once more: rehearsing her script a final time, her canned Q&A, her body language entertaining her audience with the best of PR and fit to survive past the age of seventy-five in corporate, rehearsing for the President of the International Division, recent rebrand of White Hose– Was she wearin’ those white-hose stockin’s I gave her last Christmas? He loved her calves as much as her brains. Smart woman. Maybe too fine for me.

Not long after the couple started therapy, Bobbie suggested he get out more. She saw the notice for a local technical college’s “Tech Course for Smarties,” as she talked it up to him, and despite his curmudgeonly reluctance (which she’d come to adore), Bobbie didn’t relent until Hal registered. At the first session, he discovered he’d enrolled in “Internet for Seniors.”

“Seriously? Really?” Hal asked, back at home.

“Yes, seriously, yes, really, you are a Senior,” Bobbie retorted.

He learned a lot about online research, chummed up with the librarian-instructor, who’d convinced Hal that library science these days more detective work than book reshelving.

Bingo, Hal texted the smartest researcher he knew and hobbled toward the fresh pot.

“Hey, Book Boy here,” the brittle voice bounced from Hal’s speakerphone.

“Bad connection with this $900 pieceashit phone, damned textin’ works a-OK, eh?”

“Kinda busy here, ha ha, with my book shelving, Mr. Hal–”

“I know, ya investigatin’ another online-datin’ serial killer over in Mobile again?”

“You know I can’t talk about my active cases, Mr. Hal–”

“Son, I need a favor….”

As Book Boy had learned, Hal always needed the oddest of favors: Where, when was his buddy being eulogized, and (to be on the safe side) what was his new wife Bobbie’s old life?

As Bibliophile had promised, ninety minutes later and second pot of coffee emptied, a new email popped up with a CIA-quality, but ultra-brief dossier on LoraLuAnne RobertaJean Thomason-Smith AKA Bobbie-Tommie-Smithie. She’d refused to take Hal Smith’s sole last name as her own, hence the hyphen, and seeing it this morning during his own internet research irritated Hal beyond the crotch of his pants. Their morning’s conversation kneed him where he more vulnerable these days, post-accident.

Nada new on Bobbs? Zilch about funeral? Nothin’ at all?? Hal texted someone else. Did I overlook? Thx.

Hal considered adding a smiley, but his phone rang again.

“Nothin’ much new here, I’m afraid.” Hal knew it was his buddy Juan Carlos, since the caller didn’t say hello. JC never said hello or goodbye. He didn’t reply to a text with a text either. He considered all that a waste of time for non-billable non-clients, such as Hal.

“Ya said ‘no new news on Wifey Número Dos’?” Hal shouted. “Brand-new, so-called smartphone ain’t worth Capital-K Krap.”

“Might be your ears, old man.”

“Oh, fudgeya, JC, ya stealin’ the phone company’s lines.”

While waiting on Book Boy’s confirmation, Hal had texted JC for help.

“Nope, law school didn’t teach us any online research,” JC continued. “Didn’t know what this internet was back in those days. Thought always have armies of paralegals, libraries of librarians. Changed in ’09. Can’t afford one part-time assistant today. Fuckin’ cost of it all, health insurance, small business. People ruinin’ America–”

“Needa run, adiós. gracias, bud–” Hal pressed end-call on his phone before finishing his sentence. Jesucristo, dude gets paid by the quarter-hour alright, paid for every fuckin’ word outta his mouth. Let’s see if he sends me a quarter-hour bill like the last time. ¡Basta!

Hal missed his bud. They grew up next-door friends in the rural reaches of lower Carolina, when neighbors were few. They’d badged up to Eagle Scout and graduated the same Upstate men’s college. Both married Georgia peaches, moved west to Atlanta, but as the Southern metropolis paved over itself, the distance between their new families on opposite sides of the city required too much time, more patience than either had.

Hal realized he hadn’t thanked JC for the history books he’d loaned him. He needed to keep this relationship alive. Thx 4 bks, Hal texted JC, adding the Panamanian flag texting symbol Bobbie had introduced to him. The books focused on old and new Panama stories in unique ways. JC’s grandmother was buried there. Hal and Bobbie had read the books in bed, back when they slept in the same room.

Good vibes, Bobbs, Hal thought. “Ace that presentation,” he said aloud and alone in their kitchen. Their new church all about affirmations, ore power when spoken, heard, the preacher had said last Sunday.

Startled from deep thought, Hal heard a plane fly over. High above the trees, Hartsfield-Jackson’s air traffic commanded the skies across north Georgia, even above the nicest of neighborhoods. Hal had lived in Hotlanta’s hubbub so long that when they last visited his parents’ graves in the country Methodist churchyard far beyond the Charleston suburbs, he couldn’t believe the silence that day….

Quiet here this day and age. Then planes overhead ruined it for him. Hal froze. The barren, wintry landscape of leafless hardwoods exaggerated the man’s awkward stance.

“Can you smile, Hal? Raise your arms over your head, hun? Hurry.”

He smiled back at her smile. She relaxed.

“Thank God,” she said. She held his hand and rubbed his back, which he liked from their first date.

“Growin’ up, I could never smell the pines here. My first wife, from off, could smell their sweetness her first visit. She said I too used to ’em, all I’d ever known, grow’d used to ’em from earliest of my days, too familiar their scent, but now,” and he started to cry here, but paused to finish, “but now I damn lived in Atlanta too Goddamned long, fuckin’ disconnected from all I once knew, longleaf, loblolly no more in my DNA, all that reconnected, like for the first time, Bobbs, like seein’ these here graves today, feelin’ ’em as if for the first time. Am I makin’ any sense, fool-talkin’ crazy me?”

She didn’t answer; she detested his vulgar language, but she let him finish: “Bobs, don’t they smell so sweet?”

Ugh, such a fuckin’ train wreck, Hal hummed, welcoming back the grumpy, old, injured man inside him. Maybe Bobbs was right about them painkillers. Damn male menopause, lady hormones surgin’ me. Women getcha comin’ and goin’ in this life.

“I’m man, not part man! No tears, connect this!” Hal shouted. He stood to grab the crotch of his pants in protest, but too fast. He landed on the floor, kitchen stool the only leggy kitchen thing left sporting a broken one. “To hell with this knee, doctors all mother fuckers.”

Wheels squealed. Doors slammed. For the second time today, and not yet noon.

“Hal!” Bobbie burst into the kitchen, brushing herself, finally aware of the spilled milk on her suit. “What are you doing on the–”

“How’d the presentation–”

“Hal, hun, are you OK?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a man. Can take care of myself. Been doin’ fine all these years.” He got back up onto another stool, pushing off Bobbie’s every attempt of motherly assistance.

“Hal, I apologize. Don’t know what got into me, why we let this happen, separate beds, bedrooms, trash talk of mine this morning. I’m so sorry.”

She sank on bent knee, the oddness of her position not lost on him. He glared at first, then softened.

“I don’t know either. I’m sorry. I been relivin’ decades of nightmares since the accident, too much time on my hands, all these people dyin’, Mama, Daddy, I can’t walk, the pills, now this funeral–”
Bobbie stood up and patted his other leg, avoiding his damaged knee. She wiped away her tears, smiling.

“Funeral’s at 2:00, Hal.”

“But ya didn’t know the guy, those people. How’d ya–”

“Don’t ask about the f–,” she caught herself, “presentation. I know YOU, my husband, darn Rail-Road Romantic. I love. Gosh darnit, don’t know when we’ll get to blessed Panama, but after I get you up and all showered, some sense knocked in as of late bless your heart, we gonna crash a funeral, some uppity people. My first,” she almost said the f- word again stuttering unusual for her the emotion, “fffuneral-crashin’, and I say it ’bout damned time to join ya, you, me not just on some silly cruise but in your own lovable,” here she paused to kiss, “your own sweet, salty-earth brogue, you dirty old white man I love, codger well seasoned, foul-humored, and,” she laughed before adding, “what but don’t we both need this go-round.”