Rutting Season by Mandeliene Smith

Author:Mandeliene Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

FRIDAY NIGHT

Her husband called her at work every couple of hours. She would never have gotten away with it before, but now that he was in the hospital it no longer seemed to matter what she did. No one pressured her about deadlines, no one expected her at meetings. She was suddenly exempt.

The calls were all the same: medical updates, lousy food updates, nurse gossip (“gurse nossip,” he called it). Ordinary calls, conducted in an ordinary tone of voice—no different, if you left aside the subject matter, from all the other daily calls they’d made during their seven years together. Now, though, when he said “I love you,” she didn’t want to say it back. She said it, of course. She watched the words balloon from her mouth, rubbery and hollow, and her heart shrank.

There were times—alone at night in their bed, for example—when she had the feelings she was supposed to have: grief, love, longing. But the instant she opened the door to his hospital room, all of that vanished. He looked terrible with his bald head and sunken chest, his gray, unhealthy skin. Even his beautiful eyelashes were gone, even his smell, which she had loved. She had an irritable urge to rush into the room and scold: Exercise! Brush your teeth! Get a wig for chrissake! Instead, she sat down beside him and talked with him reasonably, even sweetly, until it was time to go home. It was awful. Every word, every gesture of affection seemed like a betrayal. She was acting what she used to feel.

One day, while she was idling away the time at work, she learned that a friend of theirs, a man ten years older than they, had qualified for the marathon. The news had nothing to do with her, really—he wasn’t a close friend—and yet she found herself recalling it again and again over the course of the day. The thought of this man, with his firm, lean torso and clear eyes, gave her a feeling of comfort, even elation, as though she had unexpectedly had a stroke of good luck.

When she got to the hospital that afternoon, she mentioned the news to her husband.

He snorted. “So? What’s so great about that?”

“What do you mean, what’s so great? It’s something like twenty-six miles!”

He raised the muscles where his eyebrows used to be. “Twenty-six miles? Twenty-six miles is nothing. Anyone could do that.”

Anger swept up in her, sudden and fierce. “Oh, really, anyone?” she snapped. “Like you? You could just go out and run a marathon?” She froze: It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong tone.

“And why not, may I ask?” His eyes had their old, mischievous glint.

A joke. She made herself relax back in her chair. “Because,” she said in a lighter tone, “you are too . . .” She searched for something innocuous. “Prone. You are just too darn prone.”

“Prone?” he said. “You think I’m prone? Well, we’ll see about that.” He threw off the sheet and got unsteadily to his feet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.