In the Company of Angels by Thomas E. Kennedy

Author:Thomas E. Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608191529
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

29. Grandmother’s crystal

In the kitchen, she thawed chicken legs, boiled new potatoes, peeling them hot at the sink, prepared them with crème fraîche and chives and onion sauce. She saw herself there making his dinner while in truth she wished he would go back to his own apartment and leave her in peace. Her temple throbbed, and she was angry with herself for tippling the wine she had opened for their dinner. She thought of him inside, lying on the sofa, a pillow bunched behind his neck as he read one of her books. Not that she wanted him in the kitchen. She preferred to be alone here. With her guilt. The guilt angered her, too. Why should she feel guilty just for dancing? But guilt was a familiar emotion. She felt guilty about so many things. Guilty when she had sex and guilty when she denied herself, guilty when she drank to free her desire and guilty afterward, in the memory, for having freed it, for having drunk too much, for drunken kisses, guilty when she partied too much and guilty when she avoided company.

But the guilt she felt now was specific; her dancing with that man had a meaning now she did not wish to think about. She had felt Voss’s urgency as they walked away together from the café, felt it in his hand on her, heard it in his breath, and was not surprised when, at the top of the stairs to her apartment, just inside the door, he pushed her against the wall and pressed himself against her. She slipped away, chided him lightly when what she really wanted was to shove him off with all her might.

“Go in and relax while I make some food. I’m hungry,” she had said instead of, Go home, Voss. I’ve had enough of you for one day.

It made her sick to think what he might be thinking. How dirty it made her feel, tainting the memory of that dance. She had never been good at the tango, but in that man’s arms, led by his hands, his legs, his body, she had felt no doubt in her movement. She had forgotten herself, forgotten Voss there, watching, but she knew now what was on his mind.

Yet it was not only that. It was her mother, the personnel at the home, telling her they didn’t have staff enough to change her mother’s diapers.

She thought it must feel degrading for her mother and, even worse, her father to have their own daughter change their diapers, to have to end life the way they began it. If a nurse changed them, it would seem more clinical, but lately whenever she came to visit, the nurses gave her the diapers and made it clear they expected her to do the changing. At least her father had the catheter now, but her mother would be wearing diapers for a long time to come.

She realized she was also angry that her mother had never mustered the courage to leave her father.

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