On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday Stella took Vinnie to that Italian place on Folsom. The Uber had room in its trunk for his wheelchair and the driver helped her load him into the back seat. She wore her black dress and the 18-carat hoop earrings he had given her for their fiftieth anniversary. Hell, since Vinnie's stroke last year, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times they had left the house.
You could. Stella could. Vinnie couldn't. He was mostly aphasic, and paralyzed on his left side. He still had his wits about him, Stella said, and she could mostly understand his garbled speech. Pizza, he had replied when she asked what he wanted to eat for his birthday. Sicilian pizza. With the little brown fishes on it, by which he meant anchovies. He wanted it served on the silver platter someone had given them for their wedding. So the platter was in the back seat between them.
Face-to-face across the table, Stella observed Vinnie as if for the first time. Beneath the thick crust of age she could discern the handsome man he used to be. His sharp blue eyes had pierced her heart, and she could still imagine his hot, urgent breath as he hovered over her, bursting with intensity. Their twenty-year age difference seemed nothing back then. She idly wondered whether, in the afterlife, their bodies would regain the blossom of youth, or be old and withered as in death.
Vinnie eschewed his knife and fork and ate his pizza slices with his good hand. Stella thought he was doing well as she reached across to wipe a splotch of red sauce from the corner of his lips. She would allow Vinnie a second glass of chianti. As often happened when she was having fuzzy loving thoughts about him, the tip of her tongue touched the chipped corner of her upper middle tooth. Vinnie had done that, long ago, in one of his rages. She remembered the terror as his thick, knotty wooden cane came whistling toward her face. The chipped tooth was the least of it. Her nose had been broken, her lip deeply lacerated, her jaw cracked, and she was knocked cold. Her lopsided face never looked pretty to her again, and she never felt pretty either. Vinnie claimed he loved her and was so sorry and would never do anything like that again, but he kept the cane. Said he was too unsteady to walk without it, and that it had been his father's and grandfather's.
Stella sought help. The priest said that she must learn to handle him. "He's a good man, Stella, but he's Sicilian and he was brought up like that. We can't expect him to change." Stella stared at him as if he were the village idiot.
The therapist was an older woman with curly gray hair, kindly gray eyes, and a red mohair sweater. Vinnie has intermittent explosive disorder, IED, she announced, as if that solved the problem. Stella thought IED was for the improvised explosive devices that blew limbs off troops in Iraq. The therapist said that Vinnie's episodes were unlikely to improve without treatment, although they might decrease in frequency as he got older. He's pretty old already Stella had thought.
Her cellphone beeped and she returned to the present. Vinnie's just-emptied wine glass was making its precarious trip from his lips back to the red-checkered tablecloth. Her heart jumped when she glanced at her phone and saw the first response to her new match.com account, some guy named George with a broad smile and a beige puppy in his lap. After months of hesitation, she had constructed her profile and joined a week ago. Stella wondered about George's photo because the one she had used was a decade old. She hadn't thought someone her age would get many responses and she was right. With a twinge of guilt she closed her phone and assessed Vinnie. He was sleepy from two glasses of wine and most of the pizza. Despite his limited dexterity he had managed to capture and disappear the anchovies from the two leftover slices.
Stella sipped her wine and pushed her mostly untouched cacio e pepe around on her plate.
Both the priest and the therapist had told her than Vinnie's rages were likely to continue, and she was sure that they would have, but since his stroke he couldn't hurt her. On the other hand, she was now his caretaker, and she resented that. She cooked and cleaned for him, helped him dress, get into and out of his chair, the toilet, and his bed. He showed no gratitude. Sometimes when he demanded help to get up from his chair she ignored him. Left him there for hours. Let him beg. Let him holler. Once she ignored him till he peed himself.
He had sat there looking sad with a dark wet oval on the crotch of his jeans. She could smell it across the room. She remembered thinking that old men had the world's foulest-smelling urine. She told him she wouldn't help clean him till he calmed down and co-operated. It took a long time to get him undressed, sponged off, and dressed in clean underwear and pants. She was thankful that he could at least wipe his own butt.
She fantasized that someday she would hit him with his cane, as hard as she could, but knew she would never do it. In some strange way she still loved him. Besides, he wouldn't live much longer. And maybe George with the beige puppy would be her Prince Charming.
She touchd the tip of her tongue to her chipped tooth again. It had become a habit, like a lot of her life. She smiled at Vinnie and he smiled back, lopsided. She would let him have his favorite dessert, affogato. The evening, she thought, had gone as well as could be expected.
About the author
David Waters is a retired cardiologist who lives in San Francisco with his wife and Kerry Blue terrier. His work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Cleaver, JMWW, Peatsmoke Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Blue Lake Review, and a dozen others. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He teaches prose and poetry at The Writers Studio.
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What a sad story but you told it so evocatively. Thank you.
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