Known By Heart
Alan was used to Grace’s carelessness. She always left behind a wake of mislaid eyeglasses and car keys, over due library books, socks without mates.
“You should be more careful,” he told her. “Slow down, pay attention.”
She seemed to court chaos and close calls. Years ago she had a fender bender on her way to work. She admitted afterward how frightened she had been to feel warm blood dripping down her face, seeping into her mouth. “Then I tasted it, and it was my coffee!” She laughed and did not give up balancing the mug on her lap as she drove the short distance from home to the library. He had been torn between relief she was not hurt and irritation at her slap dash habits.
She was not careless of people, remembering birthdays and anniversaries and standing first in line with casseroles and comfort after death and divorce. And he paid close enough attention to things for both of them. What he noticed and she forgot, what she attended to and he neglected, had become part of the complementary distribution of labor in their long partnership.
The beginning was subtle, like a message slipped under the door. She left the plug in the laundry tub and ran the washer and the basement flooded. The gas tank was empty every time he got in her car. Then it was the bills.
“I wrote the check, I did, I’m sure,” she said.
“Then what did you do with it?”
“I mailed it, of course. Why wouldn’t I mail it?” She was rattled.
“You’re retired, you have less to do, and you’re doing less,” he said, taking over the checkbook.
Their daughter Frances lived
nearby. Grace often took their
granddaughter to the playground while
“I can’t find her. I can’t find the baby.”
He
jumped in the car and sped the two miles to the park.
It was the first warm day of spring, the sandbox overflowed with
children, the slides swarmed. Even
so, it was easy to pick out his little granddaughter, stolid and quiet, digging
in the cold, damp sand with the delight and absorption he remembered on
“Grace, she’s right there, under your nose.”
“Oh, my goodness, so she is. I forgot what she was wearing. I was so frightened I couldn’t see her.”
Alan sat shivering in the thin spring sunshine; he had not even taken time to put on his raincoat as he scrambled out the office door. He realized there was also something he had not seen, right under his nose
The next steps, the tests, the diagnosis, were formalities. He sat with her in the neurologist’s office.
“Today’s date?” She smiled at the doctor, her charming smile. “Heavens, isn’t that silly… I’m retired you know - the days just run together.” She turned to Alan, “Dear, what is the date?”
“He’s asking you.”
Published in Kaleidoscope: Summer/Fall 2009
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