sheepish smile, like a child who has been caught stealing cookies from the jar. “I don’t have the strength to reassure Theresa that she is all right and I’m all right and that the world isn’t about to end. She worries too much. I prefer to lie still and listen to her talk to you.”
“You faked it with Gracie yesterday, too, didn’t you.”
Another smile. “Only for a little while. Besides, she talks to you more honestly about the baby than she’ll talk to me. I like to listen. Do you think she’s taking care of the baby all right? I wonder if she’s eating well. Kids these days eat all kinds of junk.”
I say, “Gracie seems a little uneasy.” Then I stop, and fold my hands in my lap.
Mrs. McLaughlin gives me an annoyed look, then turns slowly to see who has arrived.
Louis is standing in the doorway. “Should I leave?” he says, in a joking tone. “I learned a long time ago that a man shouldn’t interrupt two women talking.”
“You’re right,” Mrs. McLaughlin says. “Why are you visiting me so often?”
Louis crosses his arms and rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. He looks like a massive tree in danger of tipping over. “We’ve been worried about you,” he says.
Mrs. McLaughlin makes a disapproving noise in the back of her throat. “That’s not why you keep coming here. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I suppose it’s none of my business.” With that, she rolls over onto her side and closes her eyes.
I am tempted to cross the room and tickle or shake her until she can’t help but stop pretending unconsciousness. Louis is my least favorite visitor. He is so clearly uncomfortable when he is here that he makes me uncomfortable. A few times I have set him to work fixing a broken window shade or adjusting the dresser’s loose leg. Those are the least painful visits, but today nothing in the room is broken and we are left circling each other. I adjust the blankets at the end of the bed and straighten the magazines on the coffee table.
As always, Louis doesn’t sit down. He gets that pent-up look on his face as if there is something he badly wants to say but he can’t find the words. I know that he wants to talk about Eddie. His expression is just an exaggerated version of all the looks I have gotten over the last several months from people who find out that my husband died. Their faces strain with pity and sympathy and the inarticulate desire to offer a comfort they know does not exist. There is something else to Louis’s expression, too, that I can’t put my finger on.
I make polite conversation because I can’t stand the silence. The ache in his face goes right to my heart, and I can’t help but remember that Louis was the one with Eddie when he died, not me. I remember waiting at the door of the emergency room when the stretcher was unloaded. I knew the moment I saw my husband that he was already gone. Any nurse worth her salt can tell if a patient’s dead from across the room. We check pulses and breathing just to make certain, to offer proof to the family. But I can tell with one look when a person’s soul has left the body. In the weeks right after Eddie died, before I shed Catholicism and tried to look at life in a more balanced way, it used to bother me terribly that I wasn’t with my husband in his last moments. I should have been with Eddie when he died; he shouldn’t have died with his boss and a bunch of paramedics.
After I ask Louis how Kelly is and how the business is and how long he thinks this heat wave can last, I want to ask him to leave. I want to tell him that all this daily conversation with his daughters and his wife and his sisters-in-law is enough of a struggle. I want to tell him I have not talked this much in years, and then only with my husband, not with a group of strangers. I want to tell him that the break he started in me at the funeral has opened up again, and that when I drive home at the end of the day, I have to hold carefully to the wheel so that I don’t start to cry