The Bottom of the Cider Barrel
“What happened?” Roger asks, crouched over the hospital bed, wearing a control freak’s look of frustration.
“Well, I don’t know,” you say. “I was tired. My back hurt. I dropped my pill case behind the toilet and gassed myself trying to pick them all up, I guess.”
He rubs the baseball-sized tumor peeking out from under his shirt cuff. He starts to say something else but stops. It has all been said before. You’re both frustrated with saying the things there are to say. He reaches out his good arm and rests it on your hip brace. He has tears in his eyes.
“Ellie, my love, I think we have to move out.”
You nod. You reach out your good arm to rub his good arm. “Hey, hey. We made it. Honey. We’re here. You’re still here. Honey. What a life we’ve had! I remember it all! Don’t you? Don’t you remember?”
He smiles and coughs and wipes his nose. “Oh, I remember. But I don’t…it’s not—something spilled out along the way. You just aren’t the same in my head.” He starts to cry again. “It’s been seventy years, Ellie. I’m hooked. You got me. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Oh, Roger,” you say, “We’re not going to die tomorrow. Or, well, you won’t.” And just like that, as the wrong words like slippery fish pass from your lips and land in his eyes, you know hemust be the one to die first.
* * *
They take you home on a Sunday. The maple tree in the front yard is a blazing orange and yellow; leaves crunch underfoot on the sidewalk. The swing bench on the front porch creaks when the wind kicks up. You can hear it from the couch where Roger deposited you. He’s down in the basement, so out of sorts that he mercifully forgot to put on the Packer game.
On the way home from the hospital, you’d agreed to call your eldest daughter and give her launch authorization on the retirement facility in Marquette she’d been pushing for at least a year. Sons and in-laws would fill the place in a few days and empty it by the following weekend. And that would be that.
* * *
You met him in a rather unromantic way; you each were looking for a quick fix at the time. He made a joke about a doobie and you laughed, and that was pretty much it. When he brought in Tarot cards, he purportedly stole from the trinket shop on the corner, and asked you to read his palm, you nearly asked for his hand right then and there. Things were different back then; you were streaky and emotionally all over the place. For weeks you slept together and did a bad job acting too cool to really like each other. At the end of the summer, he was making pancakes when you had to run to the bathroom and weep. You told him you loved him. He said he loved you too, but not with the same gusto. It wouldn’t be until later that he was really sure.
* * *
He’d decided to love you by the time you finished school. He came to your graduation and suffered through car rides with your family and friends. You went up to his dad’s place on Keweenaw Bay for a weekend. The following week you left for a summer job in upstate New York. After a month, you were ready to quit. You called him in tears after getting screamed at in a meeting.
“My love, my love,” he said. “Hey, hey, hey. You’re so okay. Screw that guy, I mean, really, forget about him, but baby, baby, hear me on this one, I happen to know from experience. Getting yelled at is part of the job. I’m so sorry, baby.”
“I know, I know. Ughhh. I hate that it affects me so much.”
“Doesn’t make it okay, but I just want you to know that this guy probably thinks that that interaction was ordinary. You’re all good. All good, baby.”
Later during the phone call, a roommate came in who was at the meeting. Roger asked the kid why he hadn’t stuck up for you. The kid got righteous, at which point Roger got litigious, and after five minutes of going at it you were hysterical again, so the kid left. Roger realized he screwed up.
“Hey, baby, baby, I’m so sorry, I’m just trying to stick up for you! Hey, hey, it’s okay. Ellie, Ellie, breathe for me,” and so on and so forth for several hours. He was patient; he knew about your past, about what certain guys and family members had said and done.
You cried and cried. Not just that time—there were many instances, those days, of uncontrollable tears. Roger was solid as a rock through it all. Occasionally, he got frustrated, but most of the time, he was brilliant. “I’m like your sponge, baby. I’m here to soak up all the bad stuff. Let me soak it all up, baby. I’m here. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. I love you so much.” And he meant it.
* * *
He wakes you up in the late afternoon, gently. He didn’t actually wake you up; you heard him approach, hobbling up the basement steps and across the floorboards. You always let him wake you up, even if you’re already awake. You’re the snoozy one of the two of you. There has always been an element of flirtatious song and dance in his efforts to wake you from your naps. It was a sad day when, because of your busted hip, he could no longer wake you up by tickling you. And you had been sad about it, too! The devious gaslighting bastard. That’s what you tell him, and he grins his gap-toothed grin and gently pokes your ribs through the blanket.
“I made you a grilled cheese,” he says.
“Well, okay then,” you sigh, and then you both laugh, and begin the odyssey of rising and limping to the kitchen; you lean on him, he leans on the furniture whose layout he knows so well. It was a minutes-long journey, plenty long to look at pictures resting on side tables an
