He looks over at Freddie with his wide eyes, so much more clear since some of his eyelashes have fallen out that she can see hints of blue to their hazel. “Look,” he said one day. “Confetti.” He held some of the small dark hairs in his hand and blew them into the air. “I hope you made a wish,” he said quietly, his voice only half joking.
She tries to make small talk with Alex and Kay, but she can’t take her eyes off Greg. Addie twists against her. “I’m going over to see Daddy,” she says. Freddie watches her safe passage to her father, and when he says, “Puppy dog!” and scoops her up, something wilts inside her. “Please Come Home for Christmas” plays on the speakers amid the background noise of pagers going off and a group of smiling servers singing “Happy Birthday” to a woman in the distance whose face is illuminated by a brownie with a candle in it.
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.