Slow Dance

At three minutes to five, Amos Green reached over and turned off the alarm before it had the chance to ring.

Taking great care not to wake the sleeping old woman who shared his bed, Mr. Green slide his feet from beneath the blankets and plopped them directly into the slippers he’d placed with painstaking consistency, heels square, the previous night and most nights prior.

Arching his back, he rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. He stood with a gentle grunt, wrapped a robe around his body, and began the slow journey toward the pile of pills waiting for him in the kitchen.

Per the routine, he planned to take his pre-food meds with tap water, pour the remains of the glass into the potted hostas, and get breakfast going. He’d wake his wife in roughly thirty minues, just about the time the coffee finished. Mr. Green was counting out his pills on the counter when he heard a crash from the far side of the house.

He moved as quickly as he could, fearing the worst, and held his breath as he rounded the corner into the bedroom. Eunace was sitting on the floor with a puzzled look on her face, the contents of a nicknack shelf scattered around her on the cream colored carpet.

Amos exhaled a sigh of relief, then furrowed his brow at the recognition of another rung in the ladder, another accidental step in the direction he knew they were headed, but dreaded nonetheless.

Things had been bad for a while, but after her stroke last year, it was only getting worse. He knew to choose his words carefully.

“Dearest, did you have a spill?

Amos watched lucidity creep across her face and vanish as quickly as it had formed. Her coherence was flexible, undulating like desert dunes, constantly shifting and formed anew each day. Predictability had all but disappeared, but still, there were plenty of good days. Eunace made icy eye contact.

“It’s camp this weekend. I asked you a hundred times not to put the lanterns up so high. I stretch myself for that boy, and this is what I get? I’ll tend to the mess, huband, you just get Johnny’s sleeping bag down from garage storage.”

Amos didn’t have the heart to tell her a truth he could barely face himself. The house with the garage was long gone, and their son gone with it. Instead, he donned a false smile and changed the subject, intentionally derailing the frailty of her focus.

After he gathered the trinkets, discarding a broken few with hope she’d never notice, Amos joined his wife in the kitchen and poured her a cup of coffee. A splash of heavy cream and a single cube of sugar, just the way she liked it.

She ate her eggs under the microscope of his observation, commenting on the weather and complimenting his cooking. They shared the easy banter of their early years, and talked of nothing in particular for a handful of minutes. Amos noticed the swelling around her elbow. Cold compress on papyrus skin.

She recoiled from his attendance, becoming at once the incensed Mrs. Green and a mirage of her former self.

“If you don’t take your fucking hands off of me… I am newlywed to a man with little tolerance for riffraff. Amos will not take this lightly.”

For the first time since the beginning of her decline, Mr. Green pulled back. His frustrations bubbled, and in an uncharacteristic moment of transparency, he shouted.

“If you don’t know who I am, I don’t know who I am!”

He watched her eyes move from concentration to confusion and back. She placed her hand on his, pressing his palm into the kitchen table her father built.

“I love you, and that’s a fact that’s never been false.”