I stared at him.
Dropped coffee mugs. A spilled glass of wine at our anniversary dinner. Car keys falling out of his hand over and over again.
His knee bouncing at church. His fingers tapping on the table.
Shouting at a waiter over cold eggs, and then sitting in the car with his head on the steering wheel, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“No,” I said.
It came out of me like a breath. Not even a word. Just a sound.
“Claire,” Elliot said.
“No. No, no, no.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s fine. He’s just stressed. He’s fifty-two. Men get forgetful at fifty-two. He’s fine.”
But even while I was saying it, I knew. I knew it the way you know a storm is coming before you see the first cloud. I could feel it in my bones.
“After I told him about our father,” Elliot said, “he asked me if I’d been tested. I told him yes. I got tested when I was thirty, after Dad died. I told him I came back negative. I didn’t get the gene. I got lucky.”
He paused.
“Greg went and got tested in June.”
The personal days, I thought. Denise had said he took a few personal days this summer.
“Genetic counseling first,” Elliot went on. “Then the blood test. Then you wait. A few weeks. I drove up and sat with him in the parking lot of the clinic when he went back for the results. He wouldn’t let me come inside. He said he needed to hear it by himself.”
I knew the answer before he said it. But I still needed to hear it.
“He came out of that building about forty minutes later,” Elliot said. “He got in my car, and he sat there, and he didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he just said, ‘Well. Now I know.’”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“He’s positive,” Elliot said. “He has the gene. And the doctor said some of the things he’d been noticing, the clumsiness, the mood swings, the fidgeting… she thinks it’s already started. Early stages. Very early. But started.”
I don’t know when I started crying. I just know that by then, the tears were running down my face and dripping off my chin onto that beautiful blue dress Lynn had made me pack.
A couple at the next table glanced over at us and then quickly looked away.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” I said. My voice was shaking so hard I could barely get the words out. “Why didn’t he come home and tell me? We’ve been married twenty-two years. I’m his wife. Why would he hide this from me?”
Elliot looked down at the photograph of his father for a long time.
“Because of me,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what I meant when I said I’m the reason.” He swallowed hard. “That day at the diner, Greg asked me what it was like. Taking care of our father. And I told him. All of it. I didn’t hold anything back. I didn’t know then that he might have it too. I just thought he wanted to know about the father he never met.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“I told him about my mother,” he said. “Her name was Carol. She was a nurse. She was the strongest, funniest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. And she took care of my father for fourteen years.”
His voice cracked.
“She fed him with a spoon. She bathed him. She changed him like a baby. She lifted him out of bed every morning until she wrecked her back so badly she needed surgery. She spent every penny they’d ever saved. She sold our house. She lost every friend she had, because she never had time to see anyone. And at the end, he didn’t even know who she was. He’d scream at her. He’d call her by his first wife’s name. Greg’s mother’s name.”
I closed my eyes.
“My mother died two years after him,” Elliot said. “She was only sixty-one. The doctors said it was her heart. But I’ve always believed she just wore it out. She gave every single bit of it to him, and there was nothing left for her.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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