The apartment was small and bare. There was a couch with a blanket and pillow on it, like he’d been sleeping there instead of the bed. A little TV was playing an old baseball game with the sound off. On the kitchen counter, there were a dozen orange pill bottles lined up in a neat row. There was a stack of pamphlets next to them. I could read the top one from where I was standing.
“Living with Huntington’s Disease: A Guide for Patients and Families.”
Next to the pamphlets was a framed photograph. It was our wedding picture. The one that used to hang in our hallway at home. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing.
I turned around to face him.
He was standing by the door with his back against it, like he wanted to make sure he had a way out.
“How long were you going to do this?” I asked.
“Claire…”
“How long, Greg? A year? Five years? Were you just going to sit in this apartment and fall apart all by yourself until somebody found you on the floor?”
“I was going to move,” he said quietly. “Somewhere far away. Arizona, maybe. Somewhere you wouldn’t have to see it.”
“See what?”
“Me.” His voice cracked. “See me become him.”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and held it up between us. The fingers were jerking and twisting.
“Look at this, Claire. Look at it. I can’t make it stop. Some days I can’t hold a fork. Last week I fell down the stairs out there. I’ve been forgetting words. I sat in a meeting at work and forgot my boss’s name. Ted Morrison. I’ve known Ted Morrison for nineteen years.”
He was crying now. Openly. Tears running down his face and into his beard.
“And it’s going to get worse. It only ever gets worse. In five years, I might not be able to walk. In ten, I might not be able to talk. I’m going to scream at you for no reason. I’m going to forget your name. I’m going to need you to feed me and wipe me and…”
He couldn’t finish.
“I watched you with your mother,” he said finally. “I watched what it did to you. You were a ghost that whole year. You barely slept. You barely ate. You lost so much weight that I was scared you’d get sick too. And that was one year, Claire. One year. This could be fifteen. Twenty.”
“That’s my decision to make.”
“No, it’s not!” he shouted. Then he winced, like the shouting had scared him. Like he didn’t know where it had come from. “It’s not. Because you’d say yes. You’d say yes without even thinking about it. You’d give up the whole rest of your life for me, and I’d have to watch you do it, and I can’t. I won’t. Elliot’s mom gave up everything, and it killed her. I’m not going to let that happen to you.”
“So you lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“You lied to Sophie.”
“Yes.”
“You let me think you stopped loving me.”
He slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor with his knees up to his chest.
“I never stopped loving you,” he whispered. “Not for one second. Not ever.”
I walked over and sat down on the floor next to him.
“I know that, you stupid man,” I said. “I’ve always known that. That’s why I couldn’t sleep for a month. Because nothing you said ever made any sense.”
We sat there on the floor for a long time without saying anything. The baseball game flickered on the silent TV. Downstairs, I could hear the dry cleaner’s big machines humming through the floor.
“You remember our wedding?” I finally asked.
He laughed through his tears. “It rained. The roof leaked on your Aunt Doris.”
“Do you remember what you said? When Pastor Jim got to the part about sickness and health?”
He didn’t answer.
“You squeezed my hands so hard they hurt,” I said. “And you looked right at me, and you said it louder than any of the other parts. In sickness and in health. Everybody in the church heard you. My mother leaned over to Lynn afterward and said, ‘That boy means it.’”
“I did mean it,” he said. “I meant it for you. If you got sick, I’d take care of you forever. I’d never leave.”
“So it only goes one way?”
He looked at me.
“You get to keep the promise,” I said, “but I don’t? You get to be the strong one, the one who takes care of everybody, the one who drives forty minutes each way every night with dinner and a clean shirt? But the second it’s your turn to be the one who needs help, I’m not allowed?”
“That’s not…”
“That’s exactly what it is, Greg. You decided I wasn’t strong enough. You decided for me. You took my promise away from me without even asking.”
He covered his face with his hands. His shoulders were shaking.
I reached into my purse and pulled out the manila envelope.
He saw it and went very still.
“You never signed them,” he said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a quitter,” I said. “And neither are you. You’re just scared.”
I took the papers out of the envelope. Every page with his neat, careful signature on it. Every page with that blank line underneath, waiting for my name.
And I tore them in half.
Then I tore them in half again. And again. And again. Until there was nothing left but a pile of little white scraps on the floor between us, like snow.
Greg stared at the pile.
Then he made a sound I had never heard him make in twenty-two years. A low, broken sound, all the way from the bottom of him, like something giving way inside.
I put my arms around him. He put his face against my shoulder, and he cried like a little boy. He cried like he’d been holding it in since that day in the clinic parking lot. Since the day at the diner. Maybe since he was two years old and his father walked out the door and never came back.
I held on to him, and I didn’t let go.
“I’m so scared, Claire,” he whispered. “I’m so scared.”
“I know. I’m scared too.”
“I don’t want you to see me like that.”
“I’ve seen you throw up on a roller coaster at Six Flags,” I said. “I’ve seen you get stuck in our chimney trying to fix the flue on Christmas Eve. I’ve seen you cry at a dog food commercial. I can handle it.”
He laughed. A wet, shaky laugh against my shoulder.
“The dog food commercial was very sad,” he said.
“It was a dog food commercial, Greg.”
“The old dog was waiting by the door for the little boy to come home from college.”
“I know. I was there.”
We laughed. Then we cried. Then we laughed some more. We sat there on the floor of that sad little apartment until almost three in the morning, in a pile of torn-up divorce papers.
Somewhere around one-thirty, I texted Lynn and told her to go home.
She texted back one word. “FINALLY.”
Greg moved back home that weekend.
Biscuit lost his mind. He ran in circles around the kitchen, barking and crying and knocking over chairs, and then he jumped up on Greg so hard he almost knocked him down. Greg sat on the kitchen floor and let that dog lick his whole face for five straight minutes.
Then he stood up, walked over to the kitchen table, and moved the salt shaker to the other side.
“I never want to see it in that spot again,” he said.
But we still had one more thing to do. The hardest thing.
We drove to the university together the next Saturday. Three hours in the car. Greg held my hand the whole way, even when his fingers twitched. He didn’t try to hide them from me anymore.
Sophie met us at a little coffee shop across the street from her dorm. She walked in, saw us sitting together at the same table, holding hands, and stopped dead in the doorway.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you guys back together?”
“Sit down, sweetheart,” Greg said.
She heard something in his voice. Her smile faded. She sat down slowly.
He told her. All of it. I let him do the talking, because it was his to tell, but I held his hand under the table the whole time. He told her about the DNA kit she’d given him for Christmas as a joke. About the grandfather she’d never known existed. About Uncle Elliot. About the clinic.
He told her about what it meant for her.
Fifty-fifty.
Sophie didn’t say anything while he talked. She just sat there with her hands wrapped around a cup of hot chocolate, getting paler and paler.
When he was finished, she was quiet for a long time.
Then she stood up so fast her chair fell over.
“You lied to me,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “You lied to me for months. You told me you and Mom grew apart. You let me think my family was falling apart for no reason. I’ve been crying myself to sleep, Dad. I’ve been failing my statistics class because I can’t concentrate. And the whole time…”
“I know,” Greg said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Sophie.”
“And you weren’t even going to tell me? About me? About my own body?”
“I was going to tell you someday. When you were older.”
“When? When I was thirty? When I was pregnant?” She was crying now. “Dad, it’s my life. It’s my body. You don’t get to decide when I’m allowed to know about it.”
Greg looked at me. I could see him hearing it. The same thing I’d said to him on the floor of that apartment, coming out of his daughter’s mouth.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “You’re absolutely right. I made a mistake. I made a lot of mistakes. I thought I was protecting the people I love. But I was really just protecting myself from watching you get hurt.”
Sophie stood there with her fists clenched and tears running down her face.
Then she walked around the table, climbed right into her father’s lap like she was six years old again, and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“I’m so mad at you,” she sobbed into his shoulder.
“I know, baby.”
“I’m so scared.”
“I know. So am I.”
“Don’t you ever lie to me again.”
“Never,” he said. “Never again. I promise.”
Half the coffee shop was staring at us. I didn’t care. I got up and wrapped my arms around both of them, and the three of us held on to each other in the middle of a crowded coffee shop until a nervous young barista came over and asked if we needed any napkins.
“Yes,” all three of us said at the same time.
