A Year Less a Day Read Online Free

starting in earnest.

    â€œIt’s my latest poem, ‘Trouble,’” continues the big man into the microphone, then he drops his voice an octave and takes on a poet’s serious mien.
    Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking.
It comes for thee.
Don’t answer the door
Let misfortune meet you in the street
At least you have a chance to run.
    Ruth bursts into implacable sobs and dashes for the stairs to the apartment.
    â€œVery touching, Michel,” says Jordan, taking off after his wife, and the poet beams with pride.
    â€œThanks, Jordan.”
    As the voices drone in the café below, Jordan and Ruth run out of words and sink into the silence of over-bearing grief, their minds focussed so deeply on the hurt that they have no spirit for outward expression. Ruth cleans her glasses for the thousandth time and wishes she could smoke. There is a dried-out part-pack of Marlboros in her underwear drawer, a reminder of the day, a year earlier, that she smoked five in succession in a desperate effort to lose weight. It had worked—marginally and briefly—she’d vomited until the bile burned her throat. She hasn’t smoked since, but now she desperately wants something to occupy her pudgy fingers. She knows they should be caressing and soothing Jordan, but something holds her back. She watches him, slumped pathetically into his favourite chair with his eyes boring into the carpet, and already sees a shadow.
    â€œWe could sell everything and live it up in Maui or Mexico for a few months,” suggests Ruth, with more humour than sincerity as she attempts to bring life to the atmosphere, but Jordan harshly stomps on the idea.Their assets wouldn’t cover half of what they owe his mother, assuming they could find a buyer, and, with his condition diagnosed, he’d never get medical insurance—ever again.
    I could eat
, she thinks,
I could always eat
. But the insensitiveness of eating in front of Jordan while the malignancy develops in his intestines keeps her fastened to her chair. “If there’s anything you want ...” she tries, and Jordan replies poignantly, “To live, that’s all. I just want to live.”
    Ruth explodes in a gush of emotion and Jordan does his best to console her. They both want to hear the words, “Everything will be all right,” but the words are wisely unspoken.
    The café clears at eleven, and Ruth is happy to leave behind the gloom of the apartment while she goes downstairs to prevent the evening girls from escaping prematurely. The last thing she needs is a fight with Cindy in the morning.
    The register appears to be a hundred dollars light when she cashes out, but with her brain already swamped, Ruth puts it down to miscalculation and turns her attention to the cake cooler.
    How could you?
demands her inner voice, and she slams the door, drops the knife and bursts into tears.
    Jordan is asleep in his chair by the time Ruth returns with a black candle filched from Raven’s consulting room. The flickering flame is warmly yellow, but it has a dark heart, and in it Ruth sees a dismal future. Not only will she have to run the coffee house without Jordan’s help while the cancer and treatment take their toll, but she’ll have to continue years after his death just to repay his mother and their other debts.

    The night drags and periods of oppressive silence are interrupted by Jordan’s snores, and the hum of the refrigerated display cabinets downstairs in the café—a nagging reminder to Ruth that a degree of solace is close at hand. Caramel crunch cake topped with Rolo ice-cream can be hers for the price of climbing down the stairs, but she worries that Jordan may wake and find himself abandoned, even momentarily, so she stays. Fearful that his final precious moments are already draining away, she studies his face and sees it aging under her gaze.
    He’s not forty for another five weeks, yet he has the