Believing Cedric Read Free

the bed, at his feet bulging under the covers like two dormant volcanoes, long, deliberate breaths hissing through his nostrils. When he turned to look at her, it was with an indignant expression, as if she had snuck up on him, as if she had been spying on some private moment where she wasn’t welcome. Impulsively, he reached over and pushed the tray of lunch onto the floor. Both the plate and glass shattered, shards sticking out of the food, a finger of milk jutting under the dresser.
    Her reaction surprised them both. She stood up, slowly, with the marked sensation that she was becoming lighter, somehow released. Then she spoke in a low, commanding voice, not unlike the one she used to discipline her pupils. “Well then. That’s what I made for you. If you don’t like it, you know where the kitchen is.” She looked out the window. “Now. I’m going for a walk.”
    She left the food on the floor, exactly as it was, put a shawl on, and stepped outside. When she reached the end of their lane she stood on the corner, hesitating. While she stared down the long block she imagined herself continuing on, imagined wandering through the grid of streets, beside the rows of flimsy poplars and planked fences, in the thick air of freshly cut grass, walking until her feet were tired. But she found she could not. Instead, she returned to the house and started cleaning, bleaching the sinks and cupboards, scrubbing the stove, putting the chairs on the table to mop the kitchen linoleum, the bathroom mirror, the bathtub, noisily cleaning everything she could think of, except the mess on the floor in his room.
    Eventually, late in the evening, she heard him mumble her name. Agnes pushed the door open and leaned casually against the frame, the slat of light she was standing in crawling up the side of his bed. With his hands gathered into a knot on the blankets in front of him, he fumbled through an apology. “I . . . I . . . You . . .” He sighed. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay.”
    From that evening on, almost consistent with the deterioration of his body, he became increasingly gentle and, for the first time in their married life, somewhat affectionate. At times he would abruptly grip on to her hand in his gruff way and then spend a quarter of an hour staring out the window, blinking, unable to let go of it, both of them settling in the silence, in the warm light that bled through the edges of the orange curtains, listening to the hum of the cars passing by, to the unseen sparrows chirping from the neighbour’s hedge.
    At his funeral, sitting on a frigid pew at the church, staring into his coffin, she realized something that disturbed her: that she was going to miss, not the person she married, but the frail being who was lying on the rumpled satin, the man he’d become when he was most decrepit. Looking at him then, she was forced to admit to herself that the best months of her marriage were the months when her husband was suffering the most. What kind of person, she wondered, did that make her?
    When she returned to work, some of her colleagues at the school made a point of inviting her for their weekly Saturday afternoon of bridge, but she’d hated every minute of it. They’d sat outside, around a table on the patio that was much too large, a dish of Nuts and Bolts and a bowl of Jell-O salad jiggling in the middle of it. They adjusted and readjusted themselves on the lawn chairs, the straps of webbing cutting into their thighs, all the while talking about the same conventional things Agnes had always imagined herself talking about but had somehow never gotten around to. The buying of appliances on “the instalment plan,” the automated washers, barbecues, vacuum cleaners, motorized lawnmowers. Then on to neighbourhood rumours and hearsay: “You know what I heard?” one of them leaning in and folding over her bridge hand