The Golden Years

Jean stood at the sink and looked out the tiny kitchen window. The back yard, their back yard. She had replayed this moment in her head a thousand times.  Now she was standing at the sink, looking into the backyard. It was where the kids had played and where the grandkids swung on the swing-set she bought for them two years ago. Now it was empty, lined with dead Killarney roses.  Her beloved roses.  She planted them when they first moved into their humble three bedroom ranch, and had tended to them faithfully every year until he got sick.  The yard didn't seem right to her anymore, nothing did.  That life, even her own children, didn’t seem like it ever belonged to her. 
         Jean grabbed the pill box and opened the Tuesday compartment.  She picked out two of Tom's Nitroglycerin tablets.  Fifty one years of her life that weren't even real.  And now she was seventy three and staring death in the face.  Too late to change, too late to go forward. 
          All she had were memories. A whole life's worth.  But now her mind kept going back to one day: their anniversary last May before Tom got sick.  Everyone was so happy.  She was happy.  The kids had thrown them a surprise party.  Fifty years.  She could hardly believe it herself.  The two oldest, Evan and Sarah, had done most of the planning. They even booked the same church hall where the wedding had been.  It was beautiful.  Catered Italian food from Tom's favorite restaurant, Jean's Killarney roses on every table.  They even set up posters of her and Tom when they were newlyweds, before they had kids.  Those were the pictures she hated the most.  They were a lie.  All of it a lie.  She couldn’t even stand pictures of her seven grandkids anymore.  It just reminded her of holding her own babies, looking forward to life and new beginnings.  When she was younger she thought a lot about the small and simple life that she and Tom would make together.  If only she had known. 
         She placed the pills on the counter.  He started taking it a few years back for chest pains. He had the heart problems for awhile.  He had high cholesterol. Then he had the first stroke.  Now there had been many.  He was in a wheelchair.  The man she had loved faithfully for fifty one years was broken.  Pale, fragile, crippled.  Just how she felt inside.  She didn't look too good herself either, and she knew it.  Her strawberry blonde hair had gone completely white long ago and she had to walk with a cane because she sprained her ankle last winter.  Things just didn’t heal like they used to.
          She hated her hands the most.  Nowhere else did her age show more than those hands.  The hands that had cleaned his house and cooked his food and changed the kids' diapers and now changed his diapers.  She hated to see the cracks and rivets, her veins showing clearly through.  Lately she would look down at her wedding ring and cringe.  Her fingers were too swollen to pry it off.  She couldn't help but think of herself as nothing more than old and broken. 
         The last stroke had been the worst.  He wasn't the same person anymore.  At least, that's what the kids had said.  Jean noticed it too when she had sat faithfully by his bedside in the hospital, just like she did for every other stroke.  He slurred his words and looked at her like he had drunk too much bourbon.  She would sing their song to him while he slept. She used to sing on the radio when they first started dating.  He always said her voice helped him to relax.  But then one night when she finished he looked angry.  She tried to sooth him with her special touch.  It always worked; all she had to do was place her hand on top of his and give it a quick squeeze.  Anytime he was upset with her or the kids it always brought him back down.  But it didn't this time.  He took his hand away and looked at her with vacant eyes.  Aged and withered in the hospital bed he decided to tell her the truth.
         He told her that he cheated on her. Told her that it hadn’t been once but many times with many different women over many years.  Some of them she knew, some of them she didn’t. Some of them were neighbors.  "Remember Mr. and Mrs. Ridgley from the end of the cul-de-sac?" He had asked her. Turns out that he had Sheryl Ridgley in the back of his old Chevy in the driveway behind her house.  They would meet each Wednesday before he would come home for dinner because Harold Ridgley worked late on Wednesdays.  Tom had worked late on Wednesdays too.  He had a special project that kept him at work late for almost 6 months back in 1975. 
         Jean had been speechless.  He was so frank, so harsh with her.  He had always been blunt but he had never hurt her.  Now he just tore her world apart so matter-of-factly. She was certain her heart would stop beating. When she cried he simply asked her to stop.  "I hate it when you cry" he had said.  She hoped it was a delusion.  The result of too many strokes and too much memory loss. She loved him but she couldn't help but pray that his brain was so damaged that he was making it all up, that the stroke had left him not right.  But she knew that wasn't true.  He remembered so many details.  She remembered too-- all those nights he came home late.  She had tried to chock back the tears and accept the confession. 
         She could live with it.  After all it had been a long fifty one years and hadn't they been happy?  Hadn't he cared for her and provided for her and their five children?  And now they were grown up and successful with kids of their own.  Sure, the girl in her was crushed. That wide eyed seventeen year old wished she had never asked Tom Miller to the Sadie Hawkins dance.  But hadn't they had a good life?  This she was sure of.  Then he told her that he never really loved her.
         Jean reached into the pocket of her long floral robe and pulled out a bottle of Viagra.  She remembered when she found it.  Before she knew.  It was in the back of Tom's nightstand behind the old white bible his grandfather had given him on their wedding day.  She had thought it was sweet.  They hadn't made love in years, but she knew his heart was too weak.  He thought with his heart and not his head.  That's what she always told him.  She didn’t want him to take it and risk a heart attack.  So she took the bottle and hid it.  He never asked for it and she figured he was embarrassed.  She wanted to tell him, but couldn't bear to deny him.  All she ever wanted was to make him happy and it had been so long.  If only she had known it was never meant for her.
         She opened the bottle and picked out two blue pills. She had lots of memories like that now.  She would lie awake at night and recall dozens of times when he had come home late from work with a different excuse.  All those nights.  Like the time he said he had to go into the office during a snowstorm.  She had begged him not to go, but he insisted.  There was work to be done.  When she called to see if he had made it okay the night guard at the mill told her that no one was at work on account of the storm.  She stayed up half the night worrying while he spent the night between another woman's sheets. How could she have been so foolish?  She couldn't even remember the excuse he gave. It must have been good and she must have been blind.  Now nights were the only times she cried, really cried. She didn't want anyone to see her.  She wanted to be strong for the kids.
          They were shocked of course.  Her youngest, Leanne, refused to believe it at first.  She thought her mom was losing it.  Then it came out that people had known.  Neighbors, cousins, coworkers.  The news had traveled quickly through their big family and tiny neighborhood.  Some had seen Tom at a bar with different companions.  She wondered how so many people could have known and never told her.  She questioned every meaningful relationship in her life.  Who was left to trust? Who was left that cared about her? She wanted to know when everyone decided for her that it was better to live a happy lie than a miserable truth.  The lie was better, they were right.  Still she didn't want anyone to know that she prayed many nights to go back to that happy fairytale.
         It only got worse when Tom came home from the hospital.  He just showed up one day in a med-transport van.  She forgot to pick him up.  She also forgot to tell him that she had the locks changed and was one key short.  He had shouted for her to let him in.  She simply opened the door and told him through the screen of the storm door that she wanted a divorce.  The young van driver looked frightened but seemed more than happy to get away and take Tom somewhere else.  She lied awake at night thinking her entire life was a scam.
         Jean placed all the pills side by side on the counter top.  The kids, of course, had a fit.  David, her youngest son, had protested the most. He scolded his mom for kicking their dad out.  The others joined in.  They told her she was acting like an emotional teenager.  Acting like them, she had thought. They begged her to take him back and when she wouldn’t they stopped talking to her.  They moved him into David's house in the kid's room.  Now his wife, Theresa, had to take care of Tom with two kids camped out in the living room.
           Jean didn’t want the kids to see her cry.  She was so ashamed.  The whole family had looked up to her and Tom's marriage.  She wanted to tell them how bad it had hurt, how it made her stomach turn, but she couldn’t.  She just sat silently listening to their pleas and stared down at her old, tired hands. 
         She knew they were hurting too.  After all, he had betrayed them as well.  Her husband, their father, was a fake.  It was him they were mad at, not her, but he was dying. They were unrelenting.  The pressured her and hit all her weak spots, which they had learned well over the years.  They begged her, told her that he was sure to die soon.  Couldn't she let it go and let their dad die in peace in his own home?  And what about the grandkids?  Would she let them see their grandparents unhappy and apart?
         It wasn't about the grandkids though, it was about them, all five of them. Some of them stood up for her, some took his side.  All they really wanted was their parents back together.  Fifty one years.  Hardly anyone makes it that far anymore. To think it was all a lie. Jean knew they took it hard. Half of their own marriages had failed.  She knew the kids couldn't stand to think of their parents divorcing.
          They were selfish too. They were all busy with their own children and jobs and didn't have the energy to devote to their aging parents health problems let alone the whole foundation of the family crumbling.  Jean knew because she was being selfish too.  She couldn't help but resent the kids a little.  Maybe if she hadn’t been so busy with them she could have given Tom enough attention.  Or at least she could have seen what was going on.  She didn't want to resent her own children, her life.  All those years of caring for them and they turned away when she needed taken care of.  She couldn't get it out of her mind.
         Jean got some pudding out of the refrigerator. Tom had trouble swallowing pills after the first stroke so she put them in butterscotch pudding.  She had done the same thing for the kids when they were younger.  Eventually she started to have her arthritis medicine that way too, and she and Tom would have pudding together every morning. They were back to the old routine once she let him move back in.  It was Theresa who finally convinced her.  She had come by one day desperate for help with dinner.  His health was getting worse and it was too much with the kids and keeping up with cooking and cleaning.  Jean had made lasagna and let Theresa relax. She knew that it wasn't fair.  This was her lot, not Theresa's.  Theresa was still young and beautiful, too soon to be worn out.  Especially by someone else's life.  She had to finish what she started.  While the lasagna was cooling Jean told Theresa that she wanted Tom to move back in.  Theresa politely protested, but Jean had never seen someone look so relieved.
         She knew he would die soon.  She welcomed it but she feared it.  Part of her wanted him out of her life, the pretend life he created with her.  The other part was afraid to lose him.  She knew she would be embarrassed if she cried at his funeral.  She didn't want him to take all of her dignity.  Yet she took care of him.  She gave him his medicine, bathed him, adjusted his pillows, cooked his dinner.  All with silent pride.  She was doing the right thing for her family, even though it was difficult.  It was what they needed.  She was sacrificing herself for them.  Still she couldn't picture crying in front of her children.  She didn't want them to see that she still loved him.  She didn't want to see it either.   
         Jean spooned two plastic single cups of pudding into a bowl. Fifty one years of love doesn't just go away.  Even though she tried.  She tried to destroy all the memories.  Especially the happy ones.  Those were the ones that turned her cold, made her shiver.  She used the fireplace for the first time in ages.  She sat in his worn out easy chair and sipped hot coco and watched as their wedding pictures burned.  Then she added pictures of the children and grandchildren and sighed as they shriveled into ash. 
         She didn’t ruin all of them; she saved some of her favorites with the grandkids.  She wrote them each a letter telling them how much she loved them and dropped them off at the post office.  Along with the pictures and the letters she sent each grandchild a check for $500.  It was money from the retirement piggy bank she and Tom had filled for years.  They were going to take vacations together when they finally had the time.  Most of it was drained after Tom's last stroke, but there was just enough left.
         She gave away their best china too.  It had a beautiful black and red oriental design.  He had gotten it for cheap when he was serving in Korea. Why wait until she was dead to pass it down?  Besides, she told everyone, Leanne was getting remarried and had always had her eye on it.  She slowly dismantled what was left of their life together.  Casually she gave away the crystal stemware from their wedding, the pearl earrings he gave her for their twenty-fifth anniversary.  The old life was almost erased.
         Jean dropped the prescriptions into the bowl of pudding and began to stir. The Doctor warned her to never mix Nitroglycerin with Viagra.  She had seen this moment in her head a thousand times.  She kept stirring.  She thought about everything that had happened, how quickly time past, how suddenly things changed.  She couldn't help but blame herself.  She was the one who never caught on when the warning signs had been there all along.  She was the one who kicked Tom out and divided the family.  She had turned her own children against her.  She was staring death in the face and had nothing left.  Fifty one years of pretend.  Was any of it even real? Every day she would remember a new lie he had told her, every day she would wish was her last.  She had thought kicking him out would work, she thought she could get a divorce and start again, but she knew deep down that it couldn't happen.  This was the fate God had chosen for her.  But where had God been after all?  Where was he during the cheating? During the strokes? During the endless nights she spent with tears streaming down her weathered cheeks, begging for an answer? No matter how much she prayed she knew she couldn't go back and she couldn't move forward.  She was trapped in the lie that took a lifetime to create; a lifetime of loves and friendships and relationships that were now meaningless. She wanted out.
          She stared at the pudding on the counter, ready to be eaten.  She had seen it there a thousand times when she had lied awake at night crying.  It was time to let go, time to end the masquerade.  Pudding on the kitchen counter. Nitroglycerin and Viagra. The interaction would be fatal. She would stare at the ceiling in the dark and try to think of anything but Tom.  Anything but his quiet affection, the kisses on the forehead, the pink carnations he'd bring home every paycheck Friday. She begged God to let her forget.  She pictured herself somewhere better; she imagined that it all went away.  She saw herself, her wrinkled hands covered by garden gloves.  She was planting roses. Maybe she would plant something different too, daisies or tulips. She saw it in her mind a thousand times. Jean picked up the bowl of butterscotch pudding and began to hobble towards the bedroom.  It was time for breakfast.