The Professional Lover
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“Humbug!” Aster screamed, less than an hour before I grabbed her with my throbbing left hand, less than an hour before I felt the sting of the bee that had yet to make its way into her house.
Downstairs, I unlocked and lowered the guardrail and put my arms around her. “It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re fine, now.”
“Who’s there? Who is it? Go away. Lily isn’t here.” She had removed her pajamas, undone, somehow, the safety pin holding the cloth around her private parts. There was shit all over the sheets, in her fists, beneath her nails. She clasped my hand. I stuck my nose inside my robe. “How should I know? Do I look like Lily’s keeper?”
I was used to her outbursts and paid little attention as I focused on keeping her dirty hands against her body and supporting her as we made our way through the hallway and into the bathroom. I eased her into the tub as water overtook the drain. “Come on, Aster. Give me your hands.” I used a rag on her fingers, scraped the bar of soap under her nails, scrubbed them clean.
“Don’t!” she hissed. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“Stand up, now,” I told her. “Let’s rinse.”
“Have you called Helen?”
Shit dammed the drain. I ran hot water until it gurgled and sucked away, past her bony feet. “Let’s dry off now, Aster.”
“She must be at Helen’s.” She shivered. Her jaw began to vibrate as I rubbed a towel over her arms and legs, under her armpits, between her toes. “You’ll see, she’ll tell you herself in the morning. Now take your hands off me!”
I removed a cloth from the linen closet and used extra pins. After dressing her in clean pajamas, I changed the sheets and put her back to bed, raising the guardrail. I admit, now, that I neglected to lock it in place. She stared at the bees writhing against the window. I blew out the candle. She reached for me in the dark. “Oh, my,” she said, not letting go. “Oh, my Lily, my Lily, my love.”
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It is so late it might be early, but my eyes aren’t great in the dark, and all I truly know is that everyone is gone except Helen who lies beside me in my bed. I remember the dead bee in the pocket of my robe and wonder if I should leave it there, buried on the floor of my closet, or if I should retrieve it, show it to Helen along with the small red bump it left on my palm. I feel like a child, as if she is the only one who can take my pain away, the only one who can properly love me now, now that I realize what Aster was to me all these years. She was, quite plainly, a replacement husband to me: How can I convince myself otherwise, the way we shared such close quarters for four decades? There is a certain kind of love shared between people who eat their meals together, share a toilet, spend the majority of their waking moments together. It is not, I assume, dissimilar to that shared by couples who have been married just as long. And as she declined, I suppose she became something of a surrogate child. What it all boils down to is that we were a family, and one with secrets like any other.