Short Story - Jonquils and Tea (for Gretchen Westervelt)

Even the midwife knew something was not ordinary about the girl. She’d been born with a hole in her heart on Easter Sunday in 1899. Her Great Aunt had told her a heavy snowstorm belted town that same day. No one had really expected her to live, but they’d wrapped her up in a warm blanket and rested her in front of the wood cookstove with the door open. 

 

Now, 89 years later, as she found the jonquils timidly sticking their heads up in the flower beds, she remembered fondly the stories her Aunt Gretchen had told her of those times. Her thoughts, however, didn’t fill the spaces in her life.

 

From the next room, Horace, her live-in companion, started up another of his coughing spells.

 

‘Those cigarettes,’ she mused silently, though without malice nor distress. He’d smoked since he’d been 12. Now, at 75, he wasn’t likely to stop just because she’d  think to lecture him on emphysema; or cancer; or some other medical bogeyman.

 

 She recalled when they first started living together - unwed; her “robbed from the cradle,” fourteen year younger, lover. He was 46 then. Now they were an institution. At the time, they were a scandal in town.

 

Funny, she thought. Here she was tidying up her affairs as though she’d completed her life’s journey. Yet somehow she knew she would more likely outlast his stay around on earth. She was a trouper, she had fought all sorts of odds stacked against her during the years.

 

Horace coughed again. As she put on water to boil she called out to him asking if he’d like a cup of tea and honey. It worried her, his cough, only recently. After all, he’d been hacking and wheezing for over 15 years with little more damage from it than doctors’ admonitions. Two of those doctors had, in fact, already died themselves. One – a smoker himself – died from influenza after a heart seizure. The other, a non-smoker and zealous teetotaler, died after an extended and agonizing ordeal with intestinal cancer.

 

What brought her mind around to these thoughts now, and to the reasons why she’d begun cleaning up her personal affairs, was that she knew if Horace were to suddenly pass away, it would unsettle her enough that she would not want t be confronted with bills, and tax assessments, retirement accounts and such. Even everyday housekeeping chores would distress her.

 

It wasn’t that either she or Horace were in dire financial straits. Both of them had settled in after retirement from the teacher’s college in town. Both had made sensible, if modest, investments in their working days and had been crafty enough to anticipate changes in the economic climate so that they were comfortable enough to take a vacation once or twice each year, even now.  Last year, they left the November cold to sightsee in the Mediterranean. The year before, it had been Mexico (where Horace picked up a nasty foot infection that seemed to take forever to go away).  

 

In the next room, Horace coughed again. This time, it was a long, rasping cough that was painful even to listen to. She started to gather the cups together, got out the tea cozy and a tray, but didn’t yet go bother to console him. He’d only get angry at her apparent doting, she knew. The pain and the coughing was something he preferred to bear alone with whatever dignity a human might against the inevitable.

 

Horace was dying. Both of them instinctively knew this and they tried to make the best of their remaining days of companionship together. For her part, this meant that the operation of the household was to remain as normal as possible. Their afternoon teas, for example; the visits from Alice and Mary, two neighbors from across the road; and her efforts to ignore his coughing spells.

 

Lately this was more difficult to endure. Oh, she’d said nothing to Horace about this. It was a little pain she’d kept to herself. The pain of knowing he was soon going to leave her, and in knowing that, this time, there would be nothing she could do about it. He would be gone. Forever. And she’d be alone. On her own.

 

So she devoted her free time to planning her aloneness. She would paint once more. She’d devote more time to the flower beds in the garden. Alice and Mary would console her, but they would not be able to offer the solace of Horace’s companionship. Her main concern, for Horace’s sake, was that when he finally go, that it would not be lengthy. She hoped he would die quick and as painless as possible; although pain, she also knew, was relative, for Horace had long endured the pain.

 

In the next room, she heard him moving about. The radio came on. It would soon be tea time. His coughing had subsided for the moment and the radio was his signal that she could get ready to join him. He was ready to break his afternoon solitude and share some time with her.

 

Almost at the same time, the tea water came to a boil. She warmed the teapot, dropped in the tiny steel tea egg and poured the boiling water over it. Macaroons and chips would be fine to serve with the tea, for with all of Horace’s other problems, he still had an excellent (though smoke stained) set of teeth; and an appetite that bordered on remarkable.

 

She entered the sitting room, laid out the tea cups and cookies, returning to gather the rest of the items for their tea, giving it that extra time o steep just a bit longer.

 

It was their moment alone together, a moment she treasured and wished could last forever; and it would, she knew; it would always last in her mind.

 

They smiled; listened to the radio and watching out the parlor window for the early spring birds. He’d make for the jonquils to bloom, maybe even for the flowers in June. As she resigned herself to the inevitable, the memory of themselves together would be enough. She would make it through his passing, saddened, but surviving. Her memories of him, even now, were keeping him alive.