Not nothing in the angry way.

Nothing in the far sadder way of two people who have run out of the small talk and never rebuilt the real talk underneath it.

Hal would read the paper.

I would do the crossword.

We would exchange the necessary words — coffee, the weather, a bill that came — and then sit in a silence that I came to dread, a silence with forty years in it, the silence of two people who had once finished each other’s sentences and now could not find the beginning of one.

I would watch him across the table, this graying, stooping, familiar stranger, and I would try to remember the last real conversation we’d had, the last time we’d talked about anything that mattered, anything that wasn’t a task, and I could not find it.