Who Asked You? Read Free Page A

spend the rest of my life in a desert, burning up around old white people. But then ten years ago, when he was just fifty-five, he started forgetting little things and then things he shouldn’t have had to remember. It scared me and it scared him, so we had him tested and the doctor said he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I thought he was too young, so we got a second opinion, and the diagnosis was the same. Lee David was pretty calm about it. “When it gets so that I can’t do for myself, BJ, put me somewhere comfortable. I don’t want to be your burden.” Then he started laughing. “And if it’s before you turn sixty, get yourself a boyfriend.”
    I remember thinking:
A boyfriend?
I started laughing too. Of course he’s been slipping downhill these past five or six years and my older sister, Arlene, has been trying to convince me to go ahead and put him in a facility. I just ignore her. I don’t like anybody telling me what I should do, especially her. He’s not a burden. Plus, he’s my husband. I can’t just abandon him because I’m tired.
    As things stand, Nurse Kim looks after him when I’m at work. She used to take him on short walks but his arthritis got really bad and then he lost interest in nature. She sponge bathes him (thank God, because my sciatic nerve can’t handle too much bending over). Nurse Kim is as sweet as she can be. Thirty years old and pretty enough to be on the cover of
Essence
magazine, not that Lee David even notices, but as soon as she walks in this house it’s like having a Christmas tree all lit up in here. Plus, she always smells like some kind of tropical fruit.
    On weekends, when I need to run errands, Tammy, who lives across the street, comes over and “Lee-sits” as she calls it. The truth be told, some days I feel sorry for Lee David and other days I get sick just looking at him. This is when I wish he would just hurry up and die so I could hurry up and grieve and then live out what’s left of the rest of my life. It’s a horrible thought, but one I’ve had on more than one occasion, which is why I keep it to myself.
    “Mister, you still in there sleeping?”
    “Yep,” he says.
    After snapping all these doggone string beans, I put most of them into plastic bags and freeze them. I don’t know why I’m going to all this trouble for two people. Wait! I forgot about the boys just that fast! I get a can of chicken broth out of the cabinet and pour a little into a boiler, drop a few strips of bacon in it and a few slices of white onion, and once it boils, I’ll put the beans I left out on the counter right on top of it. Sometimes I cheat and buy things I used to make from scratch and just doctor them up. Like I’m about to do to this potato salad I bought from Ralph’s. I pop the lid on the plastic container and dump it into my yellow mixing bowl, and right after I sprinkle a few drops of vinegar, a pinch of salt, sugar, and paprika and start stirring, the phone rings.
    I can’t see who it is from over here but I pray it’s a telemarketer and not either of my sisters: Venetia, who can talk all day about nothing ever since I warned her that if she started going on about the Lord I’d hang up, or Arlene, who likes to get you to talk about all the messed-up things going on in your life but won’t give you a clue about what’s going on in hers. She would’ve made a good talk show host. I move closer to the phone, since I don’t have my glasses on. It’s Clair Huxtable, a.k.a. Venetia. I stick the wooden spoon deep inside the potato salad so it stands up, and I answer against my better judgment. “Hey, sis,” I say, as upbeat as is humanly possible. “How’ve you been?”
    “I’m good. Just checking in.”
    “And how are the kids?”
    “Oh, they’re fine. How’s Lee David?”
    “The same. And Rodney?”
    “In the clouds as we speak. Headed to Tokyo.”
    I pull the spoon out, do a quick taste test, and then start stirring again.
    “Betty Bean,