She wasn't sure when waking up had become a chore, only that it had. There was a heaviness to her, not to her weight, she was actually thinner than she had been before. But there was a heaviness and it lived in her head and crept down to her throat and began to ache as she lie awake, ensconced in blankets.
She grabbed a rice cake from the bedside table, carefully breaking it off into pieces so that her husband wouldn't complain that she would get crumbs in the bed. She wouldn't. she was careful. She was always careful.
She swung her feet down to the carpet. A berber. Whose idea had it been to put berber in here? It was a bedroom not an office. It had probably been her idea, she knew. Because it was stain resistant.
When she heard the water turn on, she went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, which made some of the heaviness vanish. She padded down the stairs, wrapping the ratty Juicy Couture sweatshirt, the one she used to wear when she dropped Jeffrey off at preschool, tightly around her.
She didn't like the Today Show, they were doing a story on electric mixers. She hadn't liked it for a while, even before they got rid of Katie Couric, but she wanted the noise to fill up the house, to fill up the kitchen. It was the kind of kitchen she wished she had grown up in. with great big hardwood floors that she had thought would be perfect for kids to slide around on in their socks. But there were glass cupboards that made it dangerous. And Jeffrey shouldn't be running around like that anyway.
Tim came down the stairs in a red tie and well polished shoes, as he had every day of their marriage. She straightened his already straight tie and kissed him, as she had every day of their marriage. Then he drank a glass of orange juice, ate a bran muffin and put a banana in his briefcase. She got the little zippered make up case out of he fridge, the navy one, with his insulin and lancets. They would read the Trib and then sometime around 7:30, they would hear Jeffrey wake upstairs. it was then that Tim would bolt out the door.
Jeffrey was so like his father. He would come down every morning with the same look on his face, slightly confused to greet the morning, and yet industrious. He would plop down his Jansport backpack with all it's many patches in exactly the same place that Tim would put down his leather briefcase. And now he would always drink orange juice and eat the same bran muffin from the same bakery. Then she would get out the little zippered pouch, the green one, and send him off to school.
They were so alike and yet their mornings never overlapped. Tim made sure of it. it had been like that for weeks. It had been like that since Jeffrey was diagnosed.
