On the car ride home from work through driving rain. And the wipers are slapping. Left one needs replacing, the one I'm looking through now.
It has to be some kind of joke that the only route that will take you to the VA Hospital requires driving directly through the cemetery. What kind of ill person can bear to watch the headstones get younger as he drives east and east for what seems like miles until the field thins out and is suddenly empty, plots already bought and reserved and ready for occupancy. The scattered ones in this sparse section seem lonely, waiting for time to fill in the empty spaces. You buy early enough, and the neighborhood will already be full when you arrive. Just waiting for you to make it complete.
And maybe this is just a kind of gift that stabs you- sometimes the old men and their wives just don't get out so often as they'd like. They're going this way anyway... they can check up on their old friends on the way back from their appointments.
And when I get home, I should have expected that the stack of books I left out for her will be scattered, pages laying open, and bindings of first editions newly cracked. And also that the book under her crooked elbow, as she snores in my underwear, and on top of my new sheets, will not be from that pile, but the one orphan she found pushed back and dusty on top of the case. Some ten year old ink in my handwriting that somehow escaped the dustbin and many moves of house.
And when I take the book from her, she won't stir, because it's been that kind of day for both of us. And despite our grandest plans, I will join her in the sweet kind of sleep, the new kind that I learned about when she started sharing pillows with me.