“I’m fine. You just came from outside.”
“So did you.”
“I was in that oven you built me. I’m probably cooked.”
He reaches for the cutting board. “Let me finish. I can make an omelet.”
“Since when?”
“I’ll have Lydia do it. She’s good at that woman’s work.”
Debra stops cutting onions and slashes in his direction with the knife.
“Unkindest cut of all,” he says.
It’s like a little gift, the way he surprises her sometimes with the things he remembers. “I used to teach that play,” she says. Without thinking, she quotes her own favorite line: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.”
Pat sits at the counter. “That hurts more than the knife.”
Lydia comes up the stairs then, towel-drying her hair after her shower. She tells Debra all over again that Ted and Isola were at the play, and that they asked after her.
Debra knows by heart the inflection of their concern, How IS she?
Still alive. Oh, the things she would say if she could—but it’s a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. She’s constantly being offered homeopathic remedies by the funky people up here: magnets and herbs and horse liniments. Some people give her books—self-help books, tomes on grieving, pamphlets on dying. I’m beyond help, self-or otherwise, she wants to say, and Aren’t the grieving books more for the survivors? and Thanks for the book on dying, but that’s the one part I have covered. They’ll ask Pat, How IS she? and they’ll ask her, How ARE you? But they don’t want to hear that she’s tired all the time, that her bladder is leaky, that she’s on the watch for her systems shutting down. They want to hear that she’s at peace, that she’s led a great life, that she’s happy her son has returned—and so that’s what she gives them. And the truth is, most of the time, she IS at peace, HAS led a great life, IS happy her son has returned. She knows which drawer the phone number for hospice is in; and the company with the hospital bed; and the provider of the morphine drip dispenser. Some days she wakes slowly from her nap and thinks it would be okay to just go on sleeping—that it would not be scary at all. Pat and Lydia are as solid as she could hope, and the board has agreed to let Lydia take over the theater. The cabin is paid for, with enough left in the bank for taxes and other expenses, so Pat can spend the rest of his life puttering around outside in the early mornings, which he loves—gardening, painting and staining, pruning trees, working on the driveway and the retaining walls, anything to keep his hands moving. Sometimes, now, when she sees how content Pat and Lydia are, she feels like a spent salmon: her work here is done. But other times, honestly, the whole idea of being at peace just pisses her off. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?
Sometimes, during her various rounds of chemo, she had wanted the pain and discomfort to be over so badly that she could imagine being comforted by her own death. That was one of the reasons she’d decided—after all of the chemicals and radiations and surgeries, after the double mastectomy, after the doctors tried every measure of conventional and nuclear weaponry against her diminishing frame, and after they still found traces of cancer in her pelvic bones—to just let the thing run its course. Let it have her. The doctors said there might still be something to be done, depending on whether it was a primary or secondary cancer, but she told them it didn’t matter anymore. Pat had come home, and she preferred six months of peace to another three years of needles and nausea. And she’s gotten lucky: she’s made it almost two years, and has felt good throughout most of it, although it still stuns her to catch a glimpse in the mirror: Who is this relic, this tall, thin, flat-chested old woman with her white porcupine hair?
Debra pulls her sweater around herself, warms her tea. She leans against the sink and smiles as she watches her son eat his second helping of eggs, Lydia reaching over to take a cheesy mushroom from the top. Pat looks up at his mother, to see if she’s caught the blatant thievery. “You’re not going to stab her?”
And that’s when a car announces itself on the gravel outside. Pat hears it, too, and checks his watch. He shrugs. “No idea.”
Pat goes to the window, puts his hand to the glass, and peers down toward the driveway, the faint glow of headlights down there. “That’s Keith’s Bronco.” He steps away from the window. “The after-party. He’s probably wasted. I’ll go take care of it.”