Not that it stopped her from going.
On the drive there, she caught herself touching the sides of her lips over and over again, making sure her lipstick hadn’t strayed or smeared. It was ridiculous, she thought, being nervous now, at this point, with all that history behind them, with him in the state he was in now. But it didn’t make any difference; rediscovering him, and them, had kept her giddy for weeks, aching to get home for more than the usual reasons.
She parked in the visitors’ section and pulled down the mirror to check her lips one last time. She noticed a bit of sleep in her right eye from the nap she’d had earlier with Peter on his favorite piece of furniture in the house, the jade-green chaise longue, its velvet long since hardened and scratchy. Still, he loved the angle, the way he could hold her on his side just right without his shoulder pain getting in the way, the way he could scoop her close to him and wrap one leg over hers. She was truly one of the luckiest women alive, she thought, though she knew only a fraction of it was luck, really—she’d created circumstances for herself over and over again. Like this, here, now.
Her low heels clicked across the smooth parking lot, the lines of the spaces recently repainted and sharply white, almost gleaming in the twilight. Inside, Darlene, the Sunday evening nurse, greeted her with a smile. “Harold is having a good day,” she said. “He’s in the rec room.”
“Oh good, thank you,” Iris said. At the doorway to the rec room, she saw Harold sitting, a bit slumped, watching a rowdy card game that several gentlemen were engaged in, along with a lady Iris hadn’t seen there before. She smiled at the curses the players were hurling at one another as they demanded the woman make her move to call or fold, but she was holding her cards in her lap and waving a disapproving finger at them, insisting they give her the proper time to consider her odds.
“She’s counting cards, you idiots,” Harold boomed suddenly, and Iris laughed. He heard her—he was blessed with better hearing than Iris’s own, which was beginning to fail, a fact he relentlessly teased her about, since he was two decades her senior. When he turned to look at her, his face, normally a distinguished craggy mask, spread wide with his smile, causing his cheeks to further wrinkle up toward his eyes even while his jaw seemed to smooth out. Iris was herself fairly lined, but she’d been watching the people here since she began visiting, fascinated by the many ways skin could weather the years. “Well, look who it is!” Harold called out.
Deliberately, slowly, Iris walked forward, her thick hips swaying, and released her hair, which had been up in a high bun, from its clip. Her wavy almost-black hair with its unevenly dispersed streaks of gray tumbled down to her shoulders, and Harold wolf-whistled as she shook it out behind her. She knew other women her age who felt at peace with their looks, but she could never quite tell if that meant they also still felt sexy at times. She did, at least in moments like these. The cardplayers clapped and whooped for her, the lady winking and grinning widely, showing off a single missing tooth.
“Hello, Iris,” Harold said as she pulled up a chair and sat down. The cardplayers included a couple of Harold’s new friends, though she couldn’t recall their names. The woman just waved and then asked the others if they were ready to play or if they wanted to keep gawping at young women. Iris laughed at this. She was certainly not young, and her skin showed far more wear than some other women her age. Still, the lady had a point—every time Iris came here, she registered a shock at seeing so many old people in one place, before reminding herself she too could be considered old, that people on the street probably thought of her as such.
“It’s busy here tonight,” Iris said. The room was relatively full, visitors sitting with residents, children running around with the kind of pack mentality that kids thrust together seem to acquire quickly.
“No busier than usual,” Harold said. “But let’s go to my room and open a bottle of wine, shall we?”
“Hubba-hubba!” one of the men sing-songed, raising extremely bushy gray eyebrows.
“Now, now, be nice,” Iris said as she helped Harold up. He leaned on her, the exertion of rising showing in his pained face. “Where’s your walker?”
“I got here without it today,” he told her proudly, but she could tell that he was tired, his knees wobbling a bit. Darlene had said he was having a good day, but Iris wondered how much of that was Harold feeling well and how much of it was shame over his need for assistance. His face began to redden as they walked slowly toward the elevator in the hallway by the rec room, and Iris wanted to suggest a rest, or that she borrow a walker from the room they’d just left, but he looked determined, mouth set in a hard line. She didn’t want to ruin his good mood.
The elevator was equipped with a small bench, and Iris maneuvered Harold to it and sat with him for the short ride up to the third story, where his room was. He wasn’t panting, but he wasn’t comfortable, and even as he gripped her hand, he looked away.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she said.
“Darling, pennies are worthless and you know it. Make a man a better offer than that.”
The elevator door opened and there was Harold’s walker on the landing where he must have left it earlier. Iris knew it was his because his grandson, a fifteen-year-old whom Harold said was in his monosyllabic phase, had decorated the dull silver with skateboarding stickers, wrapping every surface but for where Harold gripped it with the black-outlined, neon-colorful graffiti fonts. It looked ridiculous, but Harold loved it. His grandson must be special, Iris had thought when she first saw it. How many teenagers would try to make their grandparents’ walkers look hip?
They got to his room fairly easily after that, Iris taking small paces beside Harold, but it was hard seeing him like this. She’d first met him over twenty years ago, and while he hadn’t been young then—he’d been only a bit younger than she was now, in fact—he had been vibrant and athletic, that late-fifties type of man who wore his middle-age like a bespoke suit. Now he was old, truly old, and she could tell he hated it. She thought he’d hate being dead more, though.
“All right, here we go,” he said, trying to turn his energy back on as he settled himself on one side of the couch that sat by the window. The curtain was pulled back and the sky was a magnificent indigo, not yet entirely dark. “A room with a view, some good wine, and an old flame—what could be better?” He’d already positioned the bottle, an opener, and two glasses on the coffee table and was now working on opening the wine while Iris settled beside him.
“Excuse me, who’re you calling an old flame?” she said, trying to be playful as he struggled with the cork. When it was out, he poured a generous glass for each of them so that the bottle was almost half-empty when he set it down.
“Iris, what are you still doing here?” Harold asked after taking a sip. His charm was dimmed, his eyes suddenly very tired, the pouches underneath making him look like a hound.