recently, Daniel and Joy could meet only at occasional, irregular intervals. He visited Selma’s nursing home bedside almost every day. And the more urgent problem requiring his vigilance was Monica’s unsettled, extended adolescence: dangerous exploits with drugs, drinking, and sex. Daniel attributed the acting out to losing her mother and reproached himself.
Joy had never met the girl but suspected Monica might be wild by temperament, one of those incorrigibles who go off the rails even with both parents fully present. She thought Daniel could have practiced tougher love with Monica: pulled her out of public school, placed her in a school like her own Sacred Heart Academy. A lay teacher, not a Catholic herself, Joy held no illusions that a single-sex parochial school constituted safe haven. Plenty of her students found trouble, too, but at least it required more effort.
Last year, nineteen-year-old Monica dropped out of college and had a baby. One more disaster it seemed at first, but she proved a conscientious mother. She married the father, an electrician. Daniel liked him, as well as the union health benefits for his daughter and granddaughter.
And turning over the worry, he really liked that. And being able to see Joy twice a month: he left work early on alternate Fridays, dropped in at the nursing home, and headed out of town.
Joy found the more frequent reunions disconcerting. The new rhythm required adjustment. Fatigued, fragmented, she lacked her usual home weekend quota of quiet time alone. Her spacious, sparely furnished apartment looked untidy and neglected. Last night she’d almost called to cancel. But she neither wanted to lie nor tell him the truth. She could not disappoint him.
Now Daniel entered the tavern. Relieved, Joy observed her response to his physical presence: a rush of pleasure. Stop overthinking, she chided herself.
He kissed her and then slid into the seat across the table, brown eyes glowing. “You look beautiful.”
The arrangement still worked, even with the shorter cycle of separation and reunions. Perhaps she would acclimate. Reassured, she fell into table talk and pleasant anticipation of the night to come.
After dinner she followed his red taillights along Route 30, the two-lane Lincoln Highway which still stretched all the way from New York to California. The darkness of country roads unnerved her. How had the first settlers walked west beneath endless tree cover? A pickup truck careened over the hill and shot past her too fast, its driver drunk or high. The thin pages of the local paper bore witness to plenty of desperation: hit and runs, driving under the influence, domestic abuse, bankruptcies.
Cresting the next hill, Daniel turned at the floodlit sign. Lincoln Motor Courts. Their headlights swept over half a dozen cottages, like playhouses or the Amish sheds for sale throughout the region. Vacancy! blinked pink neon cursive letters in the office window. A boxy Coke machine stood by the door.
Joy waited in her car, letting Daniel pick up the keys. She felt self-conscious arriving in two cars, uncomfortable at the prospect of scrutiny by whoever manned the desk in this out-of-the-way place. Two consenting adults owed no one any explanation, and no one cared, but she preferred to stay at bigger places like the restored resort hotel just outside of Bedford. However, Daniel insisted on paying for their lodging and Joy worried about cost, now they were seeing each other so often. At her suggestion, to economize, they were trying different places—without great success, so far. She had judged the bed and breakfast in town too cluttered with doilies, the small motel close to the lake bare and ugly, and the guest room upstairs from the bar at the Jean Bonnet noisy. These old-fashioned tourist cabins had been Daniel’s idea; Joy was dubious. She missed room service and spa massages. She missed quiet luxurious rooms at the end of long anonymous corridors.
So far neither had invited the other home, nor broached the possibility. It would mean double travel time for whoever visited. Explanations and introductions would be required, if Joy came to Pittsburgh. Anyway, it would be impossible to stay in Selma’s house, wrong to make love in Daniel’s marriage bed.
But Joy’s reluctance to welcome Daniel to her territory would be harder to excuse, if he asked. How to explain her satisfaction with the simple life she had constructed? How to explain its necessity? Not just because teaching, faculty politics, and the girls’ demands left her drained as a juice box discarded on the cafeteria table. More than that: she breathed most deeply and easily alone, unobserved. She craved quiet evenings to read, listen to NPR.
Joy occasionally accepted colleagues’ invitations to dinner but never reciprocated. The invitations grew rare. Joy did subscribe to the symphony with a colleague but enjoyed matinees at the movies or the theatre by herself, preferring to take in the show without worrying about a companion.
Joy feared that bringing Daniel too close would upset their homeostasis. She dreaded exceeding her capacity for intimacy.
Daniel tapped on her window.
He led the way around the horseshoe of cabins and unlocked their door. Joy stepped into unexpected warmth.
“I called and asked them to turn the heat on early.” He knew Joy hated the cold; he paid attention.
Rosy light from an old fashioned pink pressed glass shade on the overhead light fixture softened the room and its simple furnishings. Joy stretched with contentment. Later, making love in the close darkness, she couldn’t quite let herself go.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Just tired.”
“You know,” he whispered, “I miss you more, seeing you more. I’m like a lonely dog in a crate, when I’m at home.”
What to do if appetite generates appetite in one but not the other? What to do if one of us is a dog and one a cat? Stop overthinking, Joy told herself, curling against his warm back.
They drove in his car to the Lakeside Diner for breakfast. Joy finished first and went to the counter to have her thermos filled with coffee for later at the lake.
She returned to their booth. The stiff set of his shoulders alerted her, the cell phone on the table like a hand grenade.
“The home just called,” he said. “She has pneumonia.”
Every infection with Selma posed a potential crisis. And necessitated choosing whether to let nature take its course or to intervene. Daniel always chose treatment. Joy understood his futile determination sprang from love and guilt. And she respected his steadfastness, though it troubled her as well. Joy had never told him, but in Selma’s circumstances, she herself would rather be allowed to die.
Selma was forty-four and could survive for a very long time. Wouldn’t it be kinder to let pneumonia fill her lungs? Drowning couldn’t be any worse than the nebulous drift of a persistent vegetative state.
“You told them to start the IV?” Joy asked the rhetorical question. He always instructed the home to pump Selma full of drugs to keep her here, or half here, or wherever she lingered. Now he would leave, drive back to watch over his wife.
“Not yet. I said I’d call soon. I’m not sure.”
Startled, Joy tensed.
“Let’s go to the lake,” he said.
They parked in the deserted lot. Daniel retrieved his metal detector from the trunk; she slung her binoculars around her neck.
During warm weather they drove through the countryside, pursuing their respective hobbies. Daniel knocked on farmhouse doors,
