A Year Less a Day Read online

  “Yeah right,” says Ruth to both of them, and puts double caramel in the latte as her head spins.

  “I will quit, Ruth,” Cindy carries on, but she snatches the coffees off the counter and heads to a table with a scowl that dares anyone to touch her or complain.

  Ruth looks up from the espresso machine with an idea. “What are you doing today, Raven?”

  Raven hesitates then grabs an apron off a hook on the side of the fridge. “Oh, all right—just this once. And only because Serethusa says it’s your day.”

  Ruth smiles. “You must have known I was going to ask. Wouldn’t want Serethusa to be wrong, would we?”

  “Serethusa is never wrong.”

  “I really hope you’re right, Raven,” says Ruth, her mind chiefly on her husband.

  Cindy is back with another order and a snarl for Raven. “Roped you in now, has she? I hope you know what you’re doing.” She drops her voice, though not far enough, “Make sure she pays you cash.”

  “I’ll pay,” insists Ruth, though she’s wondering if the cash register will take the increasing load.

  Ruth is right about the hospital. Jordan phones at four to say he’s still awaiting test results. “Good luck,” she says, but she is still flagging with the aftermath of lunch and her tone has an acerbic edge. The evening staff are in; two teenaged schoolgirls: Angela—who’ll threaten death to anyone who calls her Angie—and Margaret, who has an opposing view and is universally called Marg. They are bubbly and enthusiastic—while Ruth is around -—but will quickly droop until their boyfriends arrive at closing. At ten-to-eleven they’ll fly around complaining about how busy they’ve been, and how they have to get up for school. Then they’ll rush off, half done, to hit the bars and dance clubs ’til three a.m.

  The phone rings as five o’clock approaches. Ruth grabs it, hoping it’s Jordan; wanting to say, “Sorry—but I’m worried about you, that’s all.”

  It’s Raven with a final reminder. “Oh for Christ’s sake—all right,” mutters Ruth, then struggles out of her apron, grabs a dollar from the register, and heads for the convenience store across the road.

  Jordan is parking the car as Ruth comes out of the store a few minutes later. He sits staring out of the wind-shield as if he’s lost, and Ruth crosses back over the now-quiet road and approaches, wary of scaring him.

  “Are you all right?” she asks, bending into the driver’s window.

  Jordan’s hands are frozen to the wheel and his knuckles look close to bursting. “Cancer,” he mouths, dropping a grenade with the pin pulled.

  chapter two

  The old Chevrolet sinks under Ruth’s weight as she slumps into the passenger seat. They sit like accident victims waiting for the emergency services to show up, but no one calls 911. Theirs is an accident yet to occur, though the path is clearly set. The question, “How long?” remains unasked and unanswered, but holds them locked so powerfully on the road ahead that passing pedestrians stare worriedly.

  Ruth breaks the silence eventually, conscious that the burgeoning feelings of loss and grief are trying to overwhelm her. “What did they say?”

  “Six months, max,” Jordan replies succinctly, and Ruth crashes.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she blubbers through the sobs. Sorry I doubted you; sorry I nagged you; sorry it’s happening to you.

  What about me? Someone inside her is asking as she tells Jordan, “There must be a mistake—they make mistakes, right? They’re always making mistakes.” She brightens momentarily. “Surely they can treat it—operate or something. They must be able to do something.”

  What about me? is screaming to get out as she waits for Jordan to get his thoughts together. It’s all right for you, she tells herself as she watches him; waiting for his response. You’ll be dead. You won’t have to deal with everything. The bills—all the fucking bills. Not just the bills we can’t pay now—more bills—medical bills, the funeral.

  This is crazy—your husband is dying and all you worry about is money.

  Jordan opens up a little, as if he’s coming out of a coma. “Chemotherapy might help. They’re gonna try.”

  Ruth isn’t listening; her mind is spinning out of control. Insurance—How many times have I told you we should take out life insurance?

  How the hell can we pay for insurance when we can’t even pay the coffee supplier?

  This is crazy—Stop worrying about yourself, bitch. Think of Jordan. What’s going through his mind? Look at him; hug him; kiss him. Tell him everything will be all right.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she says, doing her best.

  Brilliant! Is that it? Is that the best you can do? But something holds her back; This isn’t happening, insists the voice with a note of anger. He can’t die—he’s not even forty. What about the holidays we never had? And kids; as soon as we have enough money—you promised. “Don’t worry,” you said. “As soon as we can afford it we’ll have more.” And if I can’t? “We’ll adopt, foster—whatever it takes,” you said.

  “Jordan, there has to be something they can do,” she says, finally bringing herself to lay a hand over his in an attempt to thaw him out.

  “Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, they said. They gave me some booklets.”

  “So—they can cure it?”

  Jordan shakes his head almost imperceptibly, but doesn’t take his eyes off the road in front of him.

  “I want to talk to them,” insists Ruth. “They’ll listen to me. They’ve got to do something. This isn’t fair.”

  “They’ll do their best.”

  “Raven,” muses Ruth angrily. “Blasted witch. What does she know?”

  Jordan looks at her, confused. “What?”

  “Raven said you’d be OK.”

  Jordan snorts his derision, then says, “Dave—you know, the beer breath, triple-espresso, telephone engineer?”

  “Cindy says he grabs her ass,” says Ruth, momentarily distracted.

  “She oughta be grateful,” sneers Jordan. “Anyway, Dave thought his wife was seeing another guy. Then Raven says, ‘Dave—stop worrying, she isn’t.’”

  “What happened?”

  “He gets home and finds her in bed with a plumber.”

  “Raven’s always bloody wrong.”

  “No. She was right. It wasn’t a guy. The plumber was a dyke.”

  Their laughter is real, but fleeting, as the depress-ingly lonely road of widowhood quickly re-appears in Ruth’s future. Where now? What to do with the information—hide it in a Cadbury’s chocolate bar or a litre of Häagen-Dazs Rocky Road?

  “I’m scared,” she says.

  “We’d better go in,” suggests Jordan, trying to keep the conversation light. “It’s poetry night—the girls’ll be busy.”

  Ruth slumps back. “Oh, no. I don’t think I can handle poetry night—they’re such a depressing bunch. Why can’t we just drive away and keep going forever? Maybe we can outrun it.”

  “We’ve got to carry on,” says Jordan.

  Ruth tries hard to keep her face up, but it crumples again. “I don’t think I can.”

  Why bother? says someone inside. Why not just go in there, fire the staff, fling out the customers, shut the doors, and open the fridge. You’ve eaten your way out of bad situations before.

  And look where it got me.

  “Come on, Dear,” says Jordan, easing her out. “We’ve got to be strong. We mustn’t upset the customers.”

  “Customers!” explodes Ruth, “I don’t give a ...” She pauses quizzically. “It’s not contagious, is it?”

  “No, of course not. Not directly. But if word gets out, it might as well be.”

  “I don’t ...”

  “Listen. I spoke to a counsellor ... people will avoid us—well, me, once they know. They don’t want misery, Ruth. It’s a coffee house. People come here to escape misery. We can’t tell anyone, Ruth. Do you understand? We can’t tell anyone at all.”

  “But they’re our friends.”

  “R
uth, don’t kid yourself. They’re lonely, sad; holed up in one-room apartments, or holed up in a mansion with someone they can’t stand. They’re our friends because we’re the only people they can rely on. They don’t come for coffee—they can make coffee at home for peanuts. The coffee’s just an excuse. They’re escaping.”

  “I want to escape. Why can’t I escape, Jordan? This is ridiculous. I don’t give a shit about their sad little lives. This isn’t happening to them, this is happening to us. Jordan, please tell me this isn’t happening.”

  “We’ve got to face it ...”

  “Why are you so calm? I want to scream. I want to kick something. It’s a nightmare, right? Tell me I’ll wake up.” Wake up somewhere else, as someone else—not trapped here in this horrible body with a husband who’s going to leave me penniless. “Jordan—tell me it’s a nightmare.”

  The coffee house has taken on a new mantle by the time Ruth and Jordan are finally forced out of the car by the September evening’s chill. The harsh fluorescents and muzak of the day have been extinguished, but it will take more than vanilla-scented candles and a mock-log fire to warm them. The stage is set with a single swivel chair in the soft glow of a pink spotlight. An eccentric collection of poets clusters around a table trying out their latest works on each other before braving the stage, while a cuddly bear of a man sneaks a chance to upstage his peers by slipping in a quickie while testing the microphone.

  “Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking,” begins Michel, a soft-voiced giant with the calloused grimy hands of a charcoal-maker. “It comes for thee.”

  Michel stops at the sight of the owners entering from the street. “Hi Jordan, Ruth,” he calls, and all heads turn.

  Jordan attempts a greeting smile, but Ruth’s falls flat as the early poets acknowledge them. “Oh, God. The silly hat brigade,” mutters Ruth with a contemptuous edge and she gets a nudge from Jordan.

  “Shh ... They’ll hear.”

  “Well, it’s like a bloody religious uniform,” whispers Ruth, and Michel reinforces her point by donning his wide-brimmed, aging fedora to signify that he is now starting in earnest.

  “It’s my latest poem, ‘Trouble,’” continues the big man into the microphone, then he drops his voice an octave and takes on a poet’s serious mien.

  Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking.

  It comes for thee.

  Don’t answer the door

  Let misfortune meet you in the street

  At least you have a chance to run.

  Ruth bursts into implacable sobs and dashes for the stairs to the apartment.

  “Very touching, Michel,” says Jordan, taking off after his wife, and the poet beams with pride.

  “Thanks, Jordan.”

  As the voices drone in the café below, Jordan and Ruth run out of words and sink into the silence of over-bearing grief, their minds focussed so deeply on the hurt that they have no spirit for outward expression. Ruth cleans her glasses for the thousandth time and wishes she could smoke. There is a dried-out part-pack of Marlboros in her underwear drawer, a reminder of the day, a year earlier, that she smoked five in succession in a desperate effort to lose weight. It had worked—marginally and briefly—she’d vomited until the bile burned her throat. She hasn’t smoked since, but now she desperately wants something to occupy her pudgy fingers. She knows they should be caressing and soothing Jordan, but something holds her back. She watches him, slumped pathetically into his favourite chair with his eyes boring into the carpet, and already sees a shadow.

  “We could sell everything and live it up in Maui or Mexico for a few months,” suggests Ruth, with more humour than sincerity as she attempts to bring life to the atmosphere, but Jordan harshly stomps on the idea. Their assets wouldn’t cover half of what they owe his mother, assuming they could find a buyer, and, with his condition diagnosed, he’d never get medical insurance—ever again.

  I could eat, she thinks, I could always eat. But the insensitiveness of eating in front of Jordan while the malignancy develops in his intestines keeps her fastened to her chair. “If there’s anything you want ...” she tries, and Jordan replies poignantly, “To live, that’s all. I just want to live.”

  Ruth explodes in a gush of emotion and Jordan does his best to console her. They both want to hear the words, “Everything will be all right,” but the words are wisely unspoken.

  The café clears at eleven, and Ruth is happy to leave behind the gloom of the apartment while she goes downstairs to prevent the evening girls from escaping prematurely. The last thing she needs is a fight with Cindy in the morning.

  The register appears to be a hundred dollars light when she cashes out, but with her brain already swamped, Ruth puts it down to miscalculation and turns her attention to the cake cooler.

  How could you? demands her inner voice, and she slams the door, drops the knife and bursts into tears.

  Jordan is asleep in his chair by the time Ruth returns with a black candle filched from Raven’s consulting room. The flickering flame is warmly yellow, but it has a dark heart, and in it Ruth sees a dismal future. Not only will she have to run the coffee house without Jordan’s help while the cancer and treatment take their toll, but she’ll have to continue years after his death just to repay his mother and their other debts.

  The night drags and periods of oppressive silence are interrupted by Jordan’s snores, and the hum of the refrigerated display cabinets downstairs in the café—a nagging reminder to Ruth that a degree of solace is close at hand. Caramel crunch cake topped with Rolo ice-cream can be hers for the price of climbing down the stairs, but she worries that Jordan may wake and find himself abandoned, even momentarily, so she stays. Fearful that his final precious moments are already draining away, she studies his face and sees it aging under her gaze.

  He’s not forty for another five weeks, yet he has the drawn look of a prisoner—a lifer; his greasy wan skin the result of daily incarceration in the café’s kitchen.

  How can he sleep so soundly? Ruth wonders as the night air cools and she gently drapes him with a blanket. But hadn’t it been her complaints about his lethargy that had driven him to the doctor in the first place? If I hadn’t kept on at him to work harder, this wouldn’t have happened, she tries telling herself, then shakes it off as she turns the spotlight on her husband, almost willing him to hear. “How could you do this to me?” she muses illogically. “Haven’t I been through enough?”

  Pull yourself together, she tells herself, realizing that the burgeoning anger is overwhelming her with a desire to smash him in the face. It’s not his fault. He’s not dying on purpose. And it’s not your fault either.

  “I bet the fucking old bat’ll blame me,” she whines to the air, knowing that somehow Jordan’s mother will manage to twist the facts until her darling son’s suffering can be laid at her daughter-in-law’s feet.

  It’s not your fault, she tries again, but can’t avoid the ridiculous feeling that she has somehow driven him into the arms of another, as if the tumor is a malignant third party with whom he is willingly flirting—a cancer that will ultimately win him away from her.

  “Jordan, I love you. I’m not going to let you go,” she whispers tenderly as she brings herself down and kisses him lightly on the forehead, but she knows that while a pair of frilly panties and a peek-a-boo bra may have worked in the past, it’ll take more than that to break him away from this new mistress.

  The flame of the exhausted candle is barely alive at dawn, and Ruth’s tear-clouded eyes see Jordan through a fog as if he is already cloaked in a shroud when the sound of Cindy’s crappy Ford pulling into the gravel parking lot reminds her that time has not stopped, despite her most fervent wishes. She is still dressed from the day before and rushes downstairs to the front door, waiting with a spare key in her hand, as Cindy arrives.

  “Sorry. I should have given you this before,” Ruth says, flooring Cindy. “Jordan’s got a bit of a cold. I’ll do the breakfasts,” she adds and quickly
turns back into the café.

  “Are you all right?” queries Cindy, turning over the key in her hand. Ruth scurries away with her face to the kitchen. “I’ve asked Phil to come in early and I’ll take on someone new if Jordan’s not better in a few days,” she calls over her shoulder, but has difficulty keeping her voice straight.

  Ruth shivers as she turns on the bright kitchen lights. It’s the stainless steel appliances and ceramic tiles, she tells herself, but knows it is Jordan’s absence, and quickly fires up the gas stove. “I can’t do this,” she says, losing her nerve. Not that she can’t cook—it isn’t complicated. Eggs—“Any way you want”—bacon, sausage, hash browns, and bagels, mainly.

  You can do it. You just need to eat first, says her inner voice. You’ve got to keep up your strength.

  How can I eat when my husband’s upstairs dying? she scolds herself.

  Not today. He’s not dying today, nags the voice, and she grabs a frying pan and opens the fridge. Three eggs or four, she is considering, when Cindy’s shouts and the noise of a commotion in the café send her running. In an instant her mind conjures a terrifying scene, with Jordan writhing in death throes at Cindy’s feet, and her heart is pounding as she plows through the door.

  It’s not Jordan, he’s still asleep upstairs.

  It’s Trina, struggling to control a yapping yellow Labrador she has hauled in off the street, and Cindy appeals to Ruth for backup. “I told her not to bring her crappy dog in ...”

  Trina cuts her off as she drags the animal around the room by its collar, looking for a tether. “It’s all right, Ruth. It’s not mine—it’s a stray.”

  “Trina, this is a café!” remonstrates Ruth, but Trina’s determination to rescue the animal makes her deaf, and she quickly fashions a leash out of an electrical extension cord attached to a floor lamp.

  “No, Trina,” screeches Ruth advancing the length of the room with the frying pan. The dog, sensing hostility, takes off with Trina and the lamp in tow. “Stop ... Stop,” yells Trina as she is dragged toward the street, then she braces her feet against the door frame while the electrical cord streams through her grasp.