Harry & Ruth by Howard Owen Page B

up in an ungainly, uncomfortable knot, side by side with arms patting each other’s shoulders for a few long seconds before Naomi moves away.
    Like two cats in a room full of rocking chairs, Hank thinks, watching from outside.
    The weight of the day lands on Harry suddenly, with a force that makes standing a task. He can barely keep his eyes open.
    â€œHarry,” Freda says, “do you need to sit down?”
    You don’t look so good, he can almost hear her thinking. But they don’t say things like that to Harry these days.
    Artie takes his elbow, more gently than Bob the Driver and just as depressingly. Artie Marks, for God’s sake. Harry used to babysit for Artie Marks.
    Harry’s guest room is the good one, away from the street, facing the carriageway behind Freda and Artie’s brick Victorian house on Monument Avenue. It has a nice, high ceiling. It is chilly, though, and Harry hurries into his old-man’s pajamas and works his way under the covers. He looks up at that ceiling for a few seconds. It seems so far away, and so blue, that it might be sky. Before he can reach over to turn out the bedside light, he is asleep.
    â€œHarry,” Freda says. “Wake up, Harry. Wake up.”
    She looks worried.
    It takes a few seconds for him to regain full consciousness.
    â€œWhat? What was I … Was I talking in my sleep?”
    â€œYelling would be more like it.”
    She looks down at him, frowning.
    â€œYou kept saying you’re sorry, that you tried.”
    Harry is silent. Maybe he should share this dream with someone other than Ruth, but he doesn’t know if he’s up to it. Freda gets him a glass of water.
    Now Harry’s wide awake. It’s 2:30 a.m., he’s in pain, and experience tells him there is little use in trying to go back to sleep. He knows he’ll just toss and turn, then do a facedown in his breakfast cornflakes.
    â€œHarry?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDoes it scare you? It shouldn’t, you know.”
    He realizes his face is wet. It is difficult for him to explain even to his sister that it isn’t the future that makes him sad; it is the past.
    She puts her hand on his head. Her smell reminds Harry of Freda as a little girl, tagging along after her big brother. Amazing, he thinks, how that basic scent, that basic Fredaness, hasn’t changed. He wishes he could say the same for himself, but even though he’s heard that a person can’t smell his own stink, he can tell that his night sweats are the odor of decay, of rot.
    He decides to go ahead and tell her about the dream, without revealing its source.
    â€œOh, Harry,” smoothing his dwindling hair as if he were a child, “it’s only a dream. There isn’t anything to dreams but dreams. You dream about what you think about.”
    He knows she’s probably right, but as he has more or less accepted The End and its smirking, scythe-wielding inevitability, all things great and small have become portents. This acceptance did not come easily or quickly; it just came, until one day he woke up and could swallow it. What Harry would like to tell everyone: You think you have accepted death? You think you’re a big boy or girl now, well aware that you won’t live forever? Just wait. Wait until you make the victory tour, going around one last time to visit everybody you don’t think you’re ever going to see again.
    When Harry appeared unexpectedly two months ago on the doorstep of the former Gloria Tannebaum Stein, mother of his children, forgiver of so much, he found that neither of them had the words to tie it all up neatly. They had their nervous cup of coffee. They talked, with her present husband in the next room, about the good times, pretending the bad never existed. Finally, silently, they agreed to not voice regret, to not curse fate or second-guess. To just get on with it. To compare notes on “the kids” and let it go at