TOGETHER AGAIN Susan McMillan
The rotten apple on the kitchen counter could be a clue, but since I’m not a sleuth, it’s just a mildewy fruit rather than a spoiled after thought, or a forgotten thought. Is it mine? It could be Ted’s, or the repairman’s. So I leave it on the counter only to recall, later, that Ted is dead and that the repairman, well, I don’t know that there ever was a repairman. The kitchen faucet still drips. Did I call anyone about it? The point is… Perhaps you get the point. I’ll possibly miss the point again, later, when I wake up from my third nap of the day or finish reading the chapter in the book on the coffee table, the book that I began reading today or that I’ve been reading for days, I just don’t know. Anyway, I’ll wake up, or I’ll put down the book, and I’ll wander into the kitchen and there will be the apple, lying in an even more rotten repose. I know that Ted is dead. But that doesn’t extinguish him. In the night, if I listen closely, I can hear a soft snore and snuffle next to me, then the mattress tilts as he shifts in his sleep. Some days I don’t get the morning paper because I feel the draft when the front door opens and hear the rattle of coat hangers in the front hall closet upon his return. When I meet up with friends, I see their gazes shift to my side, looking for Ted but seeing only an empty half of a now-nonexistent whole. With just three weeks gone since his stumble and gasp outside the coffee shop, the clamor of sirens and voices, the knees of my tights torn from kneeling on gritty pavement, I may still be able to tug the fraying remnants of time back, to wind them into a tight enough ball so that if I leave them alone they will mend of their own accord and in the morning Ted will rise, put on his slippers and shuffle into the bathroom. We’ll start anew, the same old same old, like water dripping from the faucet. The point is time. The point may also be memory, although I can’t recall for sure. Sometimes I remember the credit card receipt I found in his pants pocket when I pulled them from the dryer. The receipt, soft and frayed around the edges but still legible, was for a beachside hotel the week he said he was in Des Moines for business. I’m not proud that I searched his computer for clues, 31
