Five Months Before Now

Loss of a Lifetime

MAX AND THE Wife have decided against eating in front of the television and instead enjoy a meal sitting across from each other, drinking too much red wine. They are hopeful about his worsening memory problems, and talk honestly about his illness and how they’ll manage it. He thinks often about how little she has changed. The same brown hair, though now straightened, not curled, and shorter because she’d decided she’s too old for long hair. Her cheekbones are still strong. Her eyes say more about her kindness than her age. Her lips, as always, seem barely able to constrain some kind of secret inner mischief. Like the Mona Lisa after three tokes, he used to tell her.

He joins her on the loveseat and they sit quietly for a while. The conversation is idle. She calls him “goatman” a couple of times, and he calls her “cactus.” They turn on the TV, but not long after, the Wife says she’s feeling tired and wants to go to bed early. Max wants more time to digest the meal and promises to be up soon.

Two hours later, he kisses her cool forehead and goes to his own bed where the Son slept before he moved out. They miss sleeping together, but they have both become snorers.

Max sleeps poorly. At four a.m., he awakens with the familiar sense of doom that troubled him for many years as a younger man. He used to call four a.m. the “hour of the spooks.”

He’s awake again at seven and goes to check on the Wife. In the dawn light, he can see she hasn’t moved since he last saw her. He kisses her forehead.

It is much, much too cool.