going to stay right here.” He’d turn his head and she’d jump
dutifully into view, smiling.
“Okay,” he’d say, and I’d be cleared for a coffee run.
The burden of care was taking a toll on Karen. She needed
sleep. She needed to tend to her mother. She needed to prepare the
house if he was returning. But mostly, she needed a break from
the fear. The fear of death from a man who’d spent his afternoons
sitting at the back porch with a Parliament in one hand and
plastic beads in the other, whispering the rosary, was crushing. It
voice as that of a child who’d skinned his knee crying out for the
comfort of his mother, and it engendered the same sense of pity
him whole. His fear evoked a loss of hope within his heart made
manifest through the high timbre of his voice and the wildness of
his eyes. Though we dare not admit it, within the vacuum of his
breast inhaled our hope, pilfering it from us only to reject it, cast it
off wasted, lost to us when most we needed it.
I offered to take the night shift. My wife had little choice
but to accept.
*
His son is a pastor, the director says. He shepherds a
Baptist church not but thirty miles away