“Sure,” he said, “I’m always eager to hear your stories, you know that—I mean, hey, what have we got? Your stories and nothing but time.” Her hair was a bit…disarrayed, a few strands falling over her forehead, which reminded him of the way she had looked—what? Forty years ago, when they were still young and she had the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen, deep and soulful, and she was so beautiful in every possible way that she was just out of his league, untouchable in her grace, but she had loved him anyway back then and still contained a memory of that love, now, buried deep within her somewhere.
“So there was this wrecking company,” she said, a curl bouncing against the middle of her forehead, “on Blaisdell, and you know that church there, the Blessed Church of the Fiery Holy Smoking Bleeding Heart of Jesus?”
“Old building? Red stone exterior?” He reached for the celery before she took the stalks away from him.
“You shouldn’t eat that without cleaning it. Um, the church, yes, that’s the one,” she said. “So there I was, sitting in my car, stalled in traffic, nothing moving including me.” She paused for dramatic emphasis.
“You were sitting in your car, nothing moving including you,” he echoed.
“Yes,” she said. “And do you know what they were doing? What those men were doing? Take a guess.”
“Demolishing the church?” Brettigan said. “Wrecking ball? Dust and debris? Big lifting hook and crane? Spectators? Asbestos dust? Cancer?”
“Yes,” she said. “How’d you know?”
“It was in the paper.”
“Well, I hadn’t been informed. No one had told me. And I was, I was sitting in the car, and, you know, I—I couldn’t breathe. Took the air out of me.”
“The air…what’re you talking about?”
“Oh, come on, Harold. Let’s try to keep up with the conversation here. Let’s pay attention. Give me my due. I was using a metaphor. I couldn’t, I’m saying I couldn’t breathe.”
“I love you, Alma. And I always give you your due. How come you couldn’t breathe?”
“Oh, do you give me my due? Well,” she responded with an increasingly argumentative tone, as she turned away from him, holding some fresh broccoli and waving it around like a whisk broom. “Be that as it may. There I was, in the car, not moving, the street all trafficked up.”
“And?”
“And they had this wrecking ball, and this particular wrecking ball was smashing into, what do you call them, the turrets, those little towers, smashing into that old red church brick. Bang. Crash.” Alma waved her arm with the broccoli back and forth, pantomiming wreckage.
“The old must make way for the new,” Brettigan said quietly. “Dem’s the conditions that prevail.”
“In that case, we’re sunk. Personally,” his wife said. “That place was beautiful, Harry. I loved driving past it.”
“Right, okay, yes. But we weren’t members. You weren’t, I wasn’t. The Burning Heart of Jesus had to burn without you, all those years. We didn’t contribute, and we can’t complain.”
“You bet I can complain. I’m complaining now. That’s what I’m doing. Can’t you understand anything? It gave me a moment.”
“A moment? In the car?”
“Yes.” She turned her face slightly away from his and put her hand on the kitchen counter. “They were so happy doing their demolishing, those men in their yellow hard hats over their hard heads, bent to their work, so serious. So officious. With their awful destruction machines. You boys are so proud of your machines.”
“No,” Brettigan said. “Include me out of that.” He could see her eyes beginning to tear up, so he put his hand on her shoulder. “Okay, I’m sorry,” he said as gently as he could. It was an all-purpose apology. When you aged, all the small destructions began to add up. They were like paper cuts, and they hurt everywhere. After a while, you couldn’t stand it, and then, who knows, you might have a good day, and all the paper cuts healed, for a while.
“All the old things,” she said quietly. She glanced out the window at the backyard bird feeder, and Brettigan followed her gaze to see a blue jay, large and bullying, eating the seeds and the suet. The smaller birds, the sparrows, had gathered on the ground for the husks. “I know I’m being sentimental but I can’t help it. Do you know what’s going up there?”
“Where the church was?”
“Are you even listening to me? What do you think I was talking about?” She wiped her eyes free of tears with her forearms.
He hated to say it even though he knew. “Yes, I read about it. One of those franchise gyms. I think it’s called ‘Gopher Fit.’ For Minnesota, the Gopher State.” He waited. “Or ‘Go For It.’ Or ‘Gopher It.’ I don’t remember. Anyway it’s a fitness place. The church of fitness. Gophers are involved.”
“Sometimes I can’t bear it,” Alma said quietly. “Any of it.”
“I know. But we have to.” He debated inwardly whether to embrace her from behind, and he did, but he could tell—from the knowledge about her that he had accumulated in their long marriage—that the embrace could not comfort her and was an annoyance. She stiffened for a micro-moment. Nevertheless, he held her still. She smelled of lavender, from her soap, and he thought of her fleetingly as a boat and himself as her harbor.
“And how was your morning, Harry?” she asked. “And all those senile geezer friends of yours?”
“Well,” he said. “A man, a doctor, well, he said he was a doctor, spoke to me on the train. He gave me a cure for everything. Everything. You name it, he had the cure. And then there was a young couple at the mall, dropping pamphlets here and there. They were very cute.”
“You can’t do that, dear,” Alma said, pulling away from him. “Pamphlets at the mall? It’s illegal. And also, it’s, what do they call it, an anachronism. People use the internet now to broadcast their mad opinions. Anyhow, that mall won’t let you do that. It’s private property, that place.”
“Okay.” He watched her floating away from him across the kitchen. “I picked up one. It’s over there on the counter.”
“This one?” She peered at it.
“Yup.”
“Oh, goodness,” she said, reading it. “This is all whoopee stuff.” Brettigan let her read it, and slowly she passed the pamphlet over to him. He bent down and raised his head slightly so that he could see the print through his bifocals. The print was large and thick, and the pamphlet showed signs of haste.