A Little Hope(21)
This place breaks at least four of her personal health rules, rules Freddie never had before. She hates rules. She wants to eat ice cream for breakfast and drive her car for weeks after the change oil alert dings at her. She wants them to take Addie out of school for a month and go to Hawaii, to Greece, to a cozy cabin in Maine where the smoke trails out of the chimney.
She has no business doing it, but she has been secretly filling out the application for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (December 15 deadline) for next fall. Why? There couldn’t be a worse time for her to start something so many states away. But she realizes she loves the way it is so far-fetched and absurd that it makes her keep wanting to creep toward it. What woman with a sick husband even thinks of something like this? But she will send in her application, she will cross that bridge when it comes. She is sick of rules.
Greg, on the other hand, always loved rules, and he needs her to have them now.
The first rule is no germs. Absolutely no germs, and what are they doing at this place with the old woman and her snotty tissue and God-knows-who has sat where Greg is sitting, and even Addie’s hands on his face—did she swing on the monkey bars today without washing them? No germs. She changes their sheets every other day. She keeps Wizard off the bed, out of the bedroom, and the cat in the basement mostly. She hasn’t kissed Greg since when? She can’t remember. Will she regret not kissing him if something should happen? This thought makes her feel pressure in the back of her eyes. Will she say she should have kissed him? No, no, no. These are necessary measures. If he gets better—when he’s better—this will have been worth it. This is how people get better, she thinks. By wanting it enough to make a thousand sacrifices.
Second rule: she cooks every meal for him. Why did she agree to come here? She washes her hands at least two times as she prepares chicken in a clean pan or lets beef and onion soup simmer on the stove. For the last three weeks, she has cooked everything. That is what the brochure that the nurse gave her said—it eliminates the unknown preparation germs, or chemicals a restaurant might use, so Freddie listens. His compromised immune system needs her to listen.
Now that she has opened her eyes to all of this, she has found out how dirty restaurant ice is, how easily a restaurant can get roaches, how many people might handle their food without washing their hands or wearing gloves. She should have packed a drink for him—a sugar-free soda (sugar is the enemy) with the can wiped off. Maybe she could have brought him a sandwich. “Am I a toddler?” he would have said.
She hardly uses salt these days, too. For Thanksgiving, just the three of them, Addie told her something was wrong with the mashed potatoes. “They taste too quiet,” she said, her description summing up the bland potatoes perfectly. Freddie never tastes what she’s cooking with her spoon. She wonders if her spit could kill him.
She cooks every meal for him, but Greg couldn’t say no to Alex, his boss. He never could. She watches Greg sit there, and the woman next to him in her sweater with the snowman coughs into her tissue. No, no, she thinks. She is so close to going over, but Addie is rubbing her hands on his smooth cheeks and he’s doing that thing where he says, “Spaghetti… Sauce…” Then he puffs out his cheeks, and she hits the air out of them while he says, “Meatballs!” He is too far away and the restaurant is too damn noisy, with an office Christmas party in one corner and people crowded around the horseshoe-shaped bar, looking up at the flat-screen televisions. Dive bar. Sure. What dive bar makes “Ho Ho Ho” margaritas?
She shakes her head. Why try to be a dive bar? Why call it Cul-De-Sac? A dead end. She winces. She hates how that word creeps into her normal thoughts.
When she met Greg, he was finishing up at Boston University, and she spent most weekends there. They slept in his beat-up twin bed against the wall in the small apartment. He took her to a real dive bar nearby, and they ordered wings and waffle fries and clinked Heineken bottles together. “If we get married,” she said then, “we have to go to a place like this once a year at least.”
“To remember where we came from,” he said.
God. How strong his arm was as he picked up the beer then and lifted it to his mouth, tilting his elbow high so he could drink every last drop. “Two more, buddy,” he said to the bartender, and looked at her and kissed the air, making her love him so much that she never wanted to leave that place.
Alex Lionel gives Freddie the just a second sign and ushers Kay over to a seat in the waiting area. Freddie loves how Alex holds Kay’s arm, and how easily she settles into his support. She always loved old couples—her parents, the ones she sees at the mall, at doctors’ appointments. She loves their endurance, the familiarity in their gestures: the hand on the arm, the finishing of each other’s sentences, the knowledge in their eyes, knowledge that comes from knowing another person over years and across circumstances. She sighs. She takes a sanitizing wipe out of her purse and quickly wipes off the pager she holds and then her hand before anyone can see. Kay smiles as she sits down, her posture regal, and then leans over and waves to Greg, who is three people away on the long bench. Kay is in a pink mohair sweater, and she wears her brown hair in a pearl clip. She holds her white coat between her knees and takes a small bag from her purse and motions to Addie. “Santa left this in my mailbox for you,” Freddie can faintly hear her say.
Alex looks both ways before he crosses the crowded walkway where the servers come through with trays and pitchers of beer and returns to Freddie at the hostess stand. He crosses his arms. “Christmas is right around the corner,” he says. His cologne smells like a country club. Like brandy and good soap.