Deferred Maintenance

Earl looked up from the crossword. Jane sat across the table with her knitting, the needles clicking like crickets. Her reading glasses had slid so far down her nose that he expected them to crash to the floor any second. The curls of gray hair that snuggled around her head looked warm on this cold dark day. It was only five, but the sun was gone and had left no trace. The rain rumbled on the awnings.

“What’s for dinner?” he said.

She paused and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “You’re cooking.”

“I am?”

“That’s what we agreed.”

He didn’t remember agreeing to cook. “I didn’t prepare anything.”

She looked back at her knitting. “You never do.” The clicks seemed louder.

“That’s not true.” These days, whenever they talked, he felt like he was dodging darts. “I prepared those steaks we had when the Bentons came over.”

“That was three months ago. You bought steaks at Safeway. I did the green beans and the rice and the dessert.”

“I carefully chose those steaks,” he said with as much irony as he could manage.

“That’s not preparation,” she snapped. “I prepare. You don’t even repair.”

That wasn’t fair. He had kept this house together for forty years. “When something’s broken I fix it.”

“Everything’s broken. The faucet in our bath leaks. The doors squeak. The garage door doesn’t open half the time.”

She was right. In the past few months, his enthusiasm for maintaining the house had disappeared. He told himself that the problems weren’t urgent, but he knew he was just making excuses. He wasn’t going to fix the faucet because if he managed to get under the sink, he might never get out. When he tried to oil the doors, he found that his can of three-in-one oil was empty, but the Ace by the Safeway was closed, and he hated Home Depot. It was a long way from the parking lot to the front door, and then he always had to walk down every aisle to find what he was looking for.

“I’ll call the garage door guy tomorrow.” He never had any trouble opening the door. He just had to click a couple of times.

“Perfect,” she said. “You’ve learned to respond to nagging.”

She didn’t used to be so damned sarcastic.

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

<=+=+=+=+=+=+=>

Jane clenched her teeth. Earl had given up. He was still wearing PJs at five o’clock. His hair stood up in dark gray tufts. It wouldn’t hurt him to run a comb through it once a day. Did he leave these maintenance projects because he didn’t care anymore? Or did he think that keeping them around gave him a little bit of relevance?

This wasn’t the Earl she had married. Even the Earl of five years ago was gone, and she’d never get him back. Maybe the garage door would get fixed – if Earl remembered to call – but in a month, the faucet would still leak and the doors would still squeak, and something else would be broken.

She reached out her hand and put it over his. “I only nag for your own good.”

He jerked his hand away. “You nag because you enjoy torturing me.”

Did he really believe that? Couldn’t he see how hard it was to live with him? How hard it was to watch a man who only left the house to go to the doctor’s office? Who spent his days watching reruns of last night’s basketball games? She had to do everything. She needed to make up for all the parts of Earl that would never come back. “I nag because you can’t see. You can’t see what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong. I have a couple of projects. No big deal.”

He turned to look out the window, not willing to face her. Doing a few projects wouldn’t fix anything. The cancer wasn’t going away, and he wasn’t fighting it.

“Everything’s wrong,” she said.

“That’s an exaggeration.”

Anger rose in her chest. He was abandoning her. He was going to leave her all alone, and he had no idea how hard that was going to be. Even if she accepted that he was going to die, she didn’t want constant reminders. She wanted him to act like he was going to live forever. Instead, he acted like a ghost, and the memory of him with no hope in his heart would haunt her forever.

Her throat tightened, and tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want him to see her cry. She got up from the table, went to the sink and turned on the faucet. If she splashed water on her face, he would never know.

“Pizza,” he said.

She turned off the water. “What?”

“We’re having Pizza for dinner.”

Pizza was the easy solution, the solution that let someone else solve his problem. She couldn’t let him get away with it. She couldn’t let him avoid cooking, the one productive thing he would do that day.

“No. You’re making me an omelet.”

Earl looked at her from the corners of his eyes. Good. She had annoyed him just enough. He wasn’t dead yet, and he needed to stop acting like he was ready for the crematorium. He needed to remember what it was like to live.

He rose slowly from the table and moved toward the kitchen, every step looking painful, every step looking like it might be his last. He opened the fridge, pulled out the eggs and peered deep into the darkness. The refrigerator bulb was burned out.

“Swiss or cheddar?” he asked.

She dragged the step stool across the kitchen and pulled a light bulb from the cabinet over the sink. When she handed it to him, he looked at her quizzically. She pointed to the fridge. “Fix that.”

He turned, put the bulb beside the butter and began to fumble with the light bulb cover. She smiled. One item would never make it onto the deferred maintenance list.

“Cheddar,” she said.