Chapter 25
“What do you mean you don’t think I should drive?” Jim asked as Agathe gripped the keys tightly in her hand. He held his palm out for them, but she couldn’t bring herself to drop the keys into them.
“I just... I just thought it was a good idea for me to do it,” she said, trying to sound cheerful and hoping that he didn’t go off on one of his anger-induced, verbally abusive rants. The kind of rants he never had back before he started to succumb to Alzheimer’s.
“Now, Agathe,” Jim said in a cajoling tone. “You know I always drive. And you ride with me in the car. That’s just something a man does for the lady he loves.”
She smiled. It was her old Jim, speaking in a tone of sweet cajoling that made her feel loved and appreciated. Something she hadn’t been feeling much of lately.
But she still didn’t want to give him the keys.
“How about you let me do something for you for once?” she asked, smiling and showing him her dimple, and feeling a lot younger than she had for a long time.
“I do. I let you cook for me every day. And I appreciate it. That’s something you do for me. And while you weren’t a very good cook when we first got married, I’ve got you trained just about right, now.”
She grinned. It was true. She hadn’t been a very good cook, even though she’d come from France, and every American she’d ever met expected her to be able to make French cuisine like it was something she was born knowing how to do.
“You’re so sweet,” she said, running out of ideas of how to distract him. He still had his hand out, although he had put his other arm around her and pulled her close to him. She snuggled down deep, holding on to his waist with one hand and her keys with the other. Feeling right at home where she had been for decades, snuggled up beside her Jim.
“Now give me those keys, girly. I’ll take you wherever you need to go. And you know, all you have to do is say so.”
“I know,” she said, trying not to let the tears that were pricking her eyes fill them and definitely not allowing her voice to crack. She didn’t want any telltale signs that her heart broke every time he said something like that. The Jim she knew and loved wasn’t who she saw much anymore, and the man that he’d become, who didn’t know her and she didn’t recognize, had taken his place.
Maybe it was because of that that she held the keys out and dropped them in his hand. She didn’t want to fight with this Jim, the one she hardly ever got to see anymore. Not that they’d ever fought. So seldom she really couldn’t remember any specific time. Maybe just a few arguments here and there. But he’d always treated her with so much love and respect, like she had done him the greatest honor in the world when she agreed to marry him and moved across the ocean to live in his country.
It had been a big change, and maybe it had been a big sacrifice if she looked back on it, but she had wanted to do it because she had loved Jim with all her heart and soul, and she believed he had felt the same about her.
She had been right.
She hadn’t known this was going to happen. This fading away where one hour he knew her and then the next two hours he didn’t.
“That’s my girl,” he said, dropping a kiss on her forehead as he squeezed her even tighter, and she relished the feeling, knowing that the day would come when he wouldn’t recognize her at all, ever again. And she would never be tucked up against his side, him dropping loving kisses on her head, his arm around her, and calling her girly.
“Now, where are you taking that casserole again?” he asked as he opened the door and she got in.
“To our neighbors, the Clybornes. They lost their barn in a fire, and I wanted to do something nice for them. They spent so much time helping me—” She broke off abruptly. They helped her by watching her husband so that she could go to the Alzheimer’s support group meetings.
She didn’t want to even talk about it. In his more lucid moments, she and Jim had talked about the fact that he had Alzheimer’s and that he was fading away, once or twice. But she didn’t want to ruin the few good times they had left by talking about something that depressed him every time. He hated the fact that he didn’t know who she was and didn’t remember not knowing or anything about those things that happened when he became the man she didn’t know.
“I need medicine, so I can drop you off at the post office first, and then I’ll pick you up after I grab my medicine, and we’ll go on out to the farm together. Will that work for you?”
“Yes.” She spoke against her better judgment, even though the post office was right beside the drugstore in town. There really wasn’t much that he could do that would mess anything up. Surely the ten minutes it would take for him to drive to the drugstore and pick up his prescription, which should be ready, and then go back across the parking lot and pick her up at the post office would not be enough time for anything terrible to happen.
“I’ll be right back,” he said as they stopped at the post office, and she got out, carefully making sure that the casserole was still sitting on the floor behind her seat.
“All right. I’ll be waiting for you right here,” she said as she turned to go into the post office.
He would be fine. She could see the drugstore from here. He knew he was going to the drugstore, he knew she was at the post office. There wasn’t anything more for her to do.
“Goodness gracious, if it isn’t Agathe. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you in here. Usually I have someone in here picking up mail for you, or buying stamps for you, or dropping your mail off, but here you are in the flesh.”
“Yeah. It’s me. My husband dropped me off,” Agathe said, maybe bragging a little, because how many more times would she be able to say that? Would this be the last?
“Did you hear what happened out at the Clybornes’?” the postmistress said, leaning over and lowering her voice like she was imparting state secrets, rather than saying something that the entire town had to have known, since Agathe herself knew it. She, in her caretaking state, was the last to know anything nowadays. So if she knew, they could be sure that everybody else in town knew as well.
“Are you talking about the fire?”
“Yes! It was started by some teenager standing behind the barn smoking a cigarette and just tossing it over his shoulder like he didn’t have a care in the world. What are the youth coming to nowadays?” the postmistress said, in a tone that said that the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
Agathe already knew that. She’d been experiencing it for the last eighteen months as her husband slowly faded away from her.
She spent longer than she expected talking to the postmistress, and it had been a good ten minutes until she walked out. Even two years ago, her husband wouldn’t have been upset if she took that long. He was used to people talking and chatting, and he never got impatient with her. It was like once he retired, his entire world revolved around doing whatever he could to serve her and make her life happy. Like she had done for him all of his working life.
Except, lately, it was impossible for him to be what he wanted to be, and that made her sad too. It was so hard to see her strong, capable, handsome husband, who always had a joke and a kind word, falling to fits of rage, not knowing where he was, flirting with women he would never have flirted with before, and walking outside without his clothes on, among other weird things he’d done.
She hurried to the door, opened it, and her heart leapt up into her throat. Her husband was not there.
Surely he was at the drugstore. Maybe there had been a delay. Maybe he forgot his wallet. She hadn’t thought to ask, and he shouldn’t have needed it, other than to maybe present his insurance card. She took care of all the business she could over the phone or online, and really all he had to do was drive through the pickup window.
But there was no car in the parking lot that matched the description of their car.
What in the world was she going to do?