We're in Trouble Read Online Free Page A

they put the word out. While it rings they stare at each other, and by the time they’re done Albert can see that she knows what he’s going to tell her. Her eyes widen, and her mouth opens a little, and then she covers it with her hand.
    He says, I want to have a few people over. A dinner party. This weekend, I guess. The old boys, and Mark and Danielle.
    Al, she says, please don’t.
    After the party, if I can, I’d like to make love to you. We may not have much longer to try.
    She’s shaking her head, and the wooden spoon rattles slightly against the rim of the pot.
    He says, After that, I’m going to do it. In the meantime, we’ll get the will in order.
    She says, whispering, I can’t let you.
    I have to be able to say my goodbyes, he says. I want you to think about what it means, if I just let this goddamn thing take me. Think about what you’ll have to do. The way you’ll have to see me, and to take care of me—
    I will do anything, she says. You know I will.
    I know it, he tells her. Oh yes I do. But, Elise. There’s no way—he licks his lips, which are dry now, almost always—I know there’s no way to keep you from seeing me dead. But I love you, and I don’t want you to see me
dying.
I want to say the things to you that ought to be said. I don’t want to go like your father did. Do you want me to have to do that?
    She winces, and this hurts Albert to see, but he had to say it. He knows she’s been thinking of her father all along, just as he has.
    And Elise
has
been thinking of her father. She thought of him as Albert complained of his stomachaches, and one day, when he came home from his daily walk around the park, clutching at his gut, she saw for the first time how pale he was, his skin nearly translucent. She urged him, calmly, to go to the doctor, but she knew full well what the doctor would find. She’d only seen that color once before.
    Her father had died of prostate cancer. Near the end, drowning in morphine, he’d somehow, in his head, gone back to Parris Island, and even though she sat with him every day at his bedside, he didn’t recognize her at all. He called her awful names, spat and hissed, and sullenly said Yessir andNosir when she asked him if he wanted more juice. Albert was with her. He saw everything.
    No—almost everything. She’d shooed Albert from her father’s room when she had to tend to his diaper, and to his bedsore. The bedsore, as wide and deep as her fist, which every day she cleaned and packed and swabbed and dressed—while her father lay on his stomach and howled in pain, cursing her and telling her to hurry, hurry—all the while holding her throat against the slipperiness of the dressings and the heavy soaked packing cotton she pulled from the wound, and the sight that made her clamp her jaws together and pray for strength: the spot at the bottom of the sore, like a blind eye half-closed, that was the white knob of her father’s tailbone.
    And Al, her Albert, still handsome, still
there
—standing with a hand on the door frame—is telling her what must be said. His eyes are very blue, and lately his eyebrows have gone white and tufted, and this makes him look even merrier than he did when he was younger. His shirt is neatly tucked in, and the buttons are lined up with his belt buckle. Why
these
things? Why does she think of these things? She knows: because they will soon be gone. These things she loves about her husband will vanish, one by one. Without warning. His mind, sharp and funny and chiding, will dull, become childlike. She will transform from wife to mother to nurse. She has never heard her Albert scream, but that is coming. They can talk about pain control all they like, the doctors, but this is cancer, this is an enemy she knows.
    I’ve thought of Dad, she tells him. Of course I have.
    I have thought about all of this, Albert tells her. And of the things