A Little Hope

by Ethan Joella

  He rests his hand on her back again and they walk slowly up the aisle. “I have news,” he tells her and she looks at him in that way.

  “I don’t like news,” she says, and shakes her head. She can tell from his look. She always can. “It’s about the girl?”

  He nods. “We need to talk about her.”

  “You know better,” she whispers.

  “Hear me out.”

  “No.” She pulls away from him, and he holds back. She trembles as she slowly marches toward the door, barely limping now, her ankle and foot cooperating. “No,” she says again.

  Alone, he touches each row of wooden pew after wooden pew. He looks at the soft carpet below his feet, and the holy statues in the back. He knows all the fake candles they’ve lit behind them are flickering, and it makes him happy they will burn through the night. He feels relieved already, but he doesn’t know why. He hums some recessional hymn in his head as he leaves. He has to tell her. Outside in the car, he will tell her about Iris and pray she will listen.

  8. Until You Do

  The Cul-De-Sac is a new restaurant outside of Wharton on Route 23, about a mile past Crowley Cleaners. Out front are pots of boxwood around the benches, and the dumpsters are off in the corner surrounded by a lattice screen. They designed the interior of the place, for some reason, to look like a dive bar. Bowls of peanuts on the tables (with a peanut allergy warning on the double glass doors), cluttered pictures on the walls, red leather booths, and a cement floor that looks aged but is so clean it almost shines. Freddie holds her daughter’s hand as they wait for a table with Mr. and Mrs. Lionel by the hostess station. Servers in black T-shirts and jeans hustle by, and the podium with the menus and pagers is draped in a pine swag. Freddie wouldn’t have picked this restaurant, but what can she do?

  Her husband pleaded to get out of the house. A round of chemo later, almost two months since the follow-up diagnosis, Greg has gotten so tired of the walls of their home, of her hovering. He sits on the long bench to their left, next to an old woman who keeps leaning over to talk to him. Greg sitting while they all are standing, who would rather die than sit because he never sits. How many times, she thinks, did this man give up his seat for an elderly woman on a bus, on a train, and now there he sits right beside one.

  Freddie is surprised she convinced Greg to sit. “I’m fine,” he said. She glared at him, hoping the Lionels wouldn’t notice. She gave him that please just do it expression, and she sees how resigned he looks now as he slumps and converses with the strangers near him. Greg in a blue ski cap because his hair is gone. The woman keeps blotting at her nose with a crumpled tissue, and Freddie wants to rush over there and pump hand sanitizer into Greg’s palm. Now she wishes she had let him stand. A cold could be his end.

  He looks over at Freddie with his wide eyes, so much more clear since some of his eyelashes have fallen out that she can see hints of blue to their hazel. “Look,” he said one day. “Confetti.” He held some of the small dark hairs in his hand and blew them into the air. “I hope you made a wish,” he said quietly, his voice only half joking.

  She tries to make small talk with Alex and Kay, but she can’t take her eyes off Greg. Addie twists against her. “I’m going over to see Daddy,” she says. Freddie watches her safe passage to her father, and when he says, “Puppy dog!” and scoops her up, something wilts inside her. “Please Come Home for Christmas” plays on the speakers amid the background noise of pagers going off and a group of smiling servers singing “Happy Birthday” to a woman in the distance whose face is illuminated by a brownie with a candle in it.

  This place breaks at least four of her personal health rules, rules Freddie never had before. She hates rules. She wants to eat ice cream for breakfast and drive her car for weeks after the change oil alert dings at her. She wants them to take Addie out of school for a month and go to Hawaii, to Greece, to a cozy cabin in Maine where the smoke trails out of the chimney.

  She has no business doing it, but she has been secretly filling out the application for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (December 15 deadline) for next fall. Why? There couldn’t be a worse time for her to start something so many states away. But she realizes she loves the way it is so far-fetched and absurd that it makes her keep wanting to creep toward it. What woman with a sick husband even thinks of something like this? But she will send in her application, she will cross that bridge when it comes. She is sick of rules.

  Greg, on the other hand, always loved rules, and he needs her to have them now.

  The first rule is no germs. Absolutely no germs, and what are they doing at this place with the old woman and her snotty tissue and God-knows-who has sat where Greg is sitting, and even Addie’s hands on his face—did she swing on the monkey bars today without washing them? No germs. She changes their sheets every other day. She keeps Wizard off the bed, out of the bedroom, and the cat in the basement mostly. She hasn’t kissed Greg since when? She can’t remember. Will she regret not kissing him if something should happen? This thought makes her feel pressure in the back of her eyes. Will she say she should have kissed him? No, no, no. These are necessary measures. If he gets better—when he’s better—this will have been worth it. This is how people get better, she thinks. By wanting it enough to make a thousand sacrifices.

  Second rule: she cooks every meal for him. Why did she agree to come here? She washes her hands at least two times as she prepares chicken in a clean pan or lets beef and onion soup simmer on the stove. For the last three weeks, she has cooked everything. That is what the brochure that the nurse gave her said—it eliminates the unknown preparation germs, or chemicals a restaurant might use, so Freddie listens. His compromised immune system needs her to listen.

  Now that she has opened her eyes to all of this, she has found out how dirty restaurant ice is, how easily a restaurant can get roaches, how many people might handle their food without washing their hands or wearing gloves. She should have packed a drink for him—a sugar-free soda (sugar is the enemy) with the can wiped off. Maybe she could have brought him a sandwich. “Am I a toddler?” he would have said.

  She hardly uses salt these days, too. For Thanksgiving, just the three of them, Addie told her something was wrong with the mashed potatoes. “They taste too quiet,” she said, her description summing up the bland potatoes perfectly. Freddie never tastes what she’s cooking with her spoon. She wonders if her spit could kill him.

  She cooks every meal for him, but Greg couldn’t say no to Alex, his boss. He never could. She watches Greg sit there, and the woman next to him in her sweater with the snowman coughs into her tissue. No, no, she thinks. She is so close to going over, but Addie is rubbing her hands on his smooth cheeks and he’s doing that thing where he says, “Spaghetti… Sauce…” Then he puffs out his cheeks, and she hits the air out of them while he says, “Meatballs!” He is too far away and the restaurant is too damn noisy, with an office Christmas party in one corner and people crowded around the horseshoe-shaped bar, looking up at the flat-screen televisions. Dive bar. Sure. What dive bar makes “Ho Ho Ho” margaritas?

  She shakes her head. Why try to be a dive bar? Why call it Cul-De-Sac? A dead end. She winces. She hates how that word creeps into her normal thoughts.

  When she met Greg, he was finishing up at Boston University, and she spent most weekends there. They slept in his beat-up twin bed against the wall in the small apartment. He took her to a real dive bar nearby, and they ordered wings and waffle fries and clinked Heineken bottles together. “If we get married,” she said then, “we have to go to a place like this once a year at least.”

  “To remember where we came from,” he said.

  God. How strong his arm was as he picked up the beer then and lifted it to his mouth, tilting his elbow high so he could drink every last drop. “Two more, buddy,” he said to the bartender, and looked at her and kissed the air, making her love him so much that she never wanted to leave that place.

  Alex Lionel gives Freddie the just a seco
nd sign and ushers Kay over to a seat in the waiting area. Freddie loves how Alex holds Kay’s arm, and how easily she settles into his support. She always loved old couples—her parents, the ones she sees at the mall, at doctors’ appointments. She loves their endurance, the familiarity in their gestures: the hand on the arm, the finishing of each other’s sentences, the knowledge in their eyes, knowledge that comes from knowing another person over years and across circumstances. She sighs. She takes a sanitizing wipe out of her purse and quickly wipes off the pager she holds and then her hand before anyone can see. Kay smiles as she sits down, her posture regal, and then leans over and waves to Greg, who is three people away on the long bench. Kay is in a pink mohair sweater, and she wears her brown hair in a pearl clip. She holds her white coat between her knees and takes a small bag from her purse and motions to Addie. “Santa left this in my mailbox for you,” Freddie can faintly hear her say.

  Alex looks both ways before he crosses the crowded walkway where the servers come through with trays and pitchers of beer and returns to Freddie at the hostess stand. He crosses his arms. “Christmas is right around the corner,” he says. His cologne smells like a country club. Like brandy and good soap.

  A hostess squeezes by Freddie and calls a table of twelve. “Yeah. I feel like I have nothing ready.” She holds the pager in her hand and wonders when it will buzz. Her heart thumps as she starts to panic. Greg shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t eat this food. At home, he only drinks distilled water.

  “How’s he doing?” Alex asks, gesturing toward Greg. As though she could think of any other he right now.

  “Okay.” She wonders how many people have touched this pager. She never used to be a germaphobe. She used to wipe her hands on her jeans after pulling weeds. She never worried about anything then. Dirt. Poison ivy. A kiss from the dog. She drank out of the milk container once in a while. “At least he’s listening to what they tell him… he doesn’t want to stay in the hospital again.”

  “I miss him at the office.” Alex smiles at a woman who comes in with two baby carriers. “Hands full,” he says, and holds the door for her. “Twins—can you imagine?” he whispers to Freddie after the woman passes. Alex has nice lines around his eyes. He is seasoned. A later-years Michael Douglas or James Caan. Will Greg ever be his age?

  She looks across the people, holding their coats over their arms, some carrying holiday gift bags. Addie is lying on Greg now, her head against the arm where all the bruises are. He doesn’t flinch. He holds her there and closes his eyes.

  The third rule is that she will not cry. Her role model in not crying is Mrs. Crowley, who always keeps herself composed. She can try to be Darcy, can’t she? When she sat in Darcy’s office at the dry cleaner’s that day in October after the big appointment when their whole world seemed to collapse, Darcy stayed calm and took in every word Freddie told her. She sat at her desk with her hands folded, and Freddie sat in one of the chairs opposite her, slumped over, sharing the news in a low voice.

  Darcy’s steely eyes watched Freddie carefully. She nodded as Freddie spoke, voice cracking, saying it was bad, saying she might have to miss some days, saying she might have to leave the seamstress job altogether, saying she couldn’t even look at Addie. Darcy stood up then from her desk chair, and it rolled backward and bumped the wall, and she shocked Freddie by rushing over to the seat beside her. She patted her shoulder. “I have no idea what’s next,” Freddie said, and she started to cry.

  “I will do anything, anything to help you, my dear. And I mean that.” The blazer she wore was scratchy against Freddie’s neck, but the hint of her perfume felt like a blanket. Darcy put her hand under Freddie’s chin. “Look at me,” she said, and her voice was unwavering. “You will get through this, and you will help him. And I will be with you.” Freddie didn’t want Darcy to move away from her. She never imagined sharing something like this with her boss, but now she felt like they could never know each other in another way. Something about Darcy’s steadfastness inspired her to push forward and confront the disease head-on.

  “Thank you,” Freddie whispered.

  “Anything you need, you say the word,” Darcy said. “I’ll even send those paisley dresses down the river if you want.” She raised her eyebrows.

  For a moment, they laughed.

  Freddie hasn’t been great about not crying.

  She cried in the bathroom once, her hands on the white pedestal sink. She cried in the car when the doctor first told them on October 17 that it was much more serious than they’d initially thought. Greg laughed and said, “Should we swing by the gas station so I can start smoking?” She sobbed and slapped his chest and then felt awful.

  Now she sees her daughter lying against the father she loves so much, and Freddie hears in her head a thousand things she could write to chronicle all this. She presses her teeth together. She cannot cry anymore. Even though Greg looks so young and vulnerable with that hat on. What a shame, she thinks for a second. What a goddamned waste. A perfectly good person wasted. She shakes her head. She will not think like this. She will not cry. Even though “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Rosemary Clooney) plays, and that song always gets her. Something about the longing in the words, the hope and vulnerability: if the fates allow. She hears everything differently now.

  She could almost start writing. She thinks the words could explode out of her everywhere, like steam through a cracked pipe. For her application, she has been touching up some of her old writing—nothing new. She promises herself she will write again if Greg gets better. What if he doesn’t? Will she write anyway?

  But she will not cry, not in front of Greg, and certainly not in front of Alex Lionel, who has probably never cried once in his life. Alex who no doubt smiled a stoic businessman’s smile at people on the day of his son’s funeral and told them he appreciated the fact that they came. How did he and Kay bear all of that? How did they assemble themselves back together like this?

  The table next to the partition has a man and a woman with their heads bowed, and that brings up the next rule: she will not pray. She will not say, Please don’t take him from us. Or, I will give up my own life for him. She will not sit in church like a hypocrite and beg for a favor and strike a deal the way some people do, even though she heard Greg whisper, “Please,” once. Such a loud, forceful whisper. He still had his hair that day—charcoal gray and thick. He was looking out the window of the den, and Freddie saw all the leaves gone from the trees but a bright and trustworthy sun, a sheet of diamond frost across the grass.

  She will not pray because people pray every day, and often the answer is no. She will not ask a yes/no question because she doesn’t like one of the answers. But her mother and father at the farm pray. Her mother even mailed her their church bulletin that had Greg’s name in it. She imagines all these parishioners praying for a man they’ve never met.

  Her rule for all of this is that she play a part: the strong wife in a movie. Maybe a Meryl Streep role. Something Sally Field could do. She can be this woman who doesn’t flinch. Who says I will not let him die.

  So when the pager starts vibrating, the circles of red lighting up, she holds it in the air as though she has won something. “That’s us,” she says.

  * * *

  Greg drinks ginger ale at the table (no ice) and Kay leans over to Addie and asks if she can help her color the holiday scene on the place mat.

  “The branch of holly? You’ll let me do that?” She clasps her hands together, and her green-blue eyes sparkle. Addie nods. “Why thank you, Miss Addie.”

  “You’re welcome,” Addie says. She pulls her top lip up. “See my tooth?”

  Alex leans in. “Goody good,” he says. “What’s the tooth fairy’s going rate these days? I used to just get a note that said, ‘Maybe next time.’ ”

  Greg and Kay chuckle, and Addie says, “Five dollars.”

  Alex looks at Greg and Freddie, eyes wide. “That tooth fairy should come to my house.” He smiles, a
nd then pulls out a five-dollar bill from his pocket. “Here. For when the other one comes out, in case the tooth fairy oversleeps.”

  Addie smiles.

  “What do you say?” Freddie says.

  “Thank you.” Addie hands the money to Greg, who has always been the money keeper. Freddie wonders for a second about money. They have plenty, and she does okay at Crowley’s with her in-high-demand alterations. But she realizes she would miss this terribly—the way Greg takes care of everything. The bills, the online accounts, the check at the restaurant when they’re out together. He always has his credit card ready, always smiling in his charming way, flagging down the server. She imagines a quiet table in a place like this, her and Addie alone. No. She wishes she had a button in her brain that could reset bad thoughts like this.

  God, she could write now so easily. She’d have a thousand things to say. This new urgency gnaws at her, as though the words are crackling inside and need to come out; as if she’s one of those writers who needs to scribble ideas on a napkin, something she always found ostentatious. She hears phrases (unashamed sky). She could write all day and skip lunch. She could write about her rules.

  Next rule: only positive thoughts. The dark ones breed and gallop through her mind. She has to steer clear. She has thought too many bad ones already: her holding his limp fingers as he takes his last breath in a hospital, in a flannel shirt at his gravestone. Her alone in their bed the way she was when he spent ten and a half days at the hospital for the first round of treatment. Her holding her sobbing daughter. Her having to answer her daughter’s questions. No, no, no. Happy happy thoughts.