Volume Three - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

Maybe this would be the last session with the toilet bowl, she thought as she wobbled to her feet after
vomiting for a good ten minutes. Without treatment, she should at least feel better. That’s what Dr. Leigh has
intimated.
But how could she feel better when she knew – okay she admitted that she did know – that Matt was getting
something more out of that client that her money? She tried to look at their life from his point of view. She had
been extremely hard to live with since her cancer was diagnosed. One treatment option after another had not
panned out and now the last resort had been declared a failure. She was given a few months at the most.
Matt would be home in a couple of hours. Unless he called again and said he would be late.
How could you abandon me when I’ve never needed you more?
She called him some choice names out loud. That felt good. Maybe she would let him have it when he came
through the door. She paced, energized by her bitter hatred, rehearsing the coming scene.
Then she stopped. Wait. If she told him she was dying, what would he do then? Would he just leave her
completely? God knows things had been rocky since her diagnosis. Matt had never dealt well with illness, his
own or others, and hadn’t displayed many moments of graciousness lately. Mostly just impatience and
exasperation.
No, she wouldn’t tell him. But she would have to do something.
*****
Five hundred people got into cars, onto buses and bicycles, or just started walking toward the antique
district.
*****
She called in the next day, Friday, and quit her job. Her boss said she had five days of vacation pay coming,
and he’d see if they could keep her on the payroll for two more weeks.
After she hung up she thought how odd it was that she had told her boss she was terminal, and not her
husband.
The weekend was pleasant. She could tell Matt sensed that something was drastically different, some line
had been crossed, but he had no way of knowing what it was. Maybe he suspected she knew of his affair. She
didn’t tell him she had quit her job, but pondered how she was going to keep him from knowing. And why she
wanted to.
As she watched him flip the burgers on the stove Sunday night she wondered if she had been too hasty.
Maybe he wasn’t having an affair. Her overwrought state could be making her imagine things. Maybe the client
had merely been in the shop and that overpowering smell stayed with Matt after she left.
She seemed to have more energy than she’d had in a long time and jumped up to get the salads as he pushed
the patties onto the plates she had set on the dining room table. The meal was restful and they watched out the
window in a companionable silence as the winter sun sparked its radiance into the sky just before it died for the
day.
*****
Some people arrived a little too soon and found ways to loiter until the appointed time. Others circled the
block looking for parking spaces. The four-tiered garage at the corner filled up and cars started entering the one
two blocks away.
*****
It was a relief to quit her job, but she missed the people after just two days. Two busy days, though. There
was an urgency to her life, now, since she knew if was finite. The first thing she did was clean the house from
top to bottom. Amazing how much better she felt without the deadly treatments. Dr. Leigh’s prescribed pain
relievers gave her a sense of floating above the world, but didn’t seem to prevent her energy from flowing.
By the time Matt got home she made sure she was dressed in her regular working clothes so he would think
she went to work. She tried to act tired from work, but he noticed how bubbly she was and attributed it, rightly,
to her condition. Wrong condition, though.