EVERY DAY

by Cezarija Abartis

Nora left work at five o’clock. In another city, farther east, where it was one hour later, her mother was dying, but Nora would not imagine that for a while. Nora climbed into her Toyota and turned on the car radio. She switched from “gossip of” to “five dead in a multi-vehicle crash.” She laid her forehead on the steering wheel. At home, George waited to take her out to dinner, so she was lucky. They had been married for twenty years, and a friend had joked that avoiding divorce was the best way to wealth. So she was lucky. Her husband genuinely loved her, so she was lucky. Her mammogram last week was clear. How many more ways could she be lucky?

What she did not know was that her mother had seated herself at the kitchen table, fallen asleep, and never wakened. That death too was lucky, as deaths go. There were many worse ways to depart from life. Mr. Ledger downstairs had Alzheimer’s and talked about the people climbing out of his clothes closet. Mrs. Carter had a morphine drip because of the pain. Even they were lucky: they were old. Not like the patients in Pediatric. Not like the baby that had a television set fall on her head. Or the boy who was tangled in his bicycle and hit but not killed by a car.

Nora thought she would have to stop talking to the nurses on that floor. She took out her cell phone and told George she was on her way home. “I heard a joke,” she said. “How many doctors does it take to screw in a light bulb?” She adjusted the rearview mirror. “That depends on whether it has health insurance.”

“Funny,” George said. “I should tell you a lawyer joke, but I’ll wait. You’re coming right home? You’re not stopping anywhere?”

“No.”

“You’re not picking up anything at the store? Or sitting in the park?”

“No. No.”

“Good. I just…I don’t mean…I’m here and we’ll have a quiet dinner at the Bistro and watch some TV and you’ll relax.”

“I’m relaxed,” she shouted. “I’m relaxed.”

George kept his voice even. “Yes, Nora. I’m waiting here. Call me if something happens.”

Things were always happening. Miners dying in cave-ins, cars piling up, husbands shooting wives and then themselves. Out in the larger world, soldiers shooting soldiers and children and wives. George tried to console her with that’s the way it was. Did he think asserting the status quo was consoling?

She had to get a grip. No more indulging her melancholy. She should take up jogging and increase her endorphins. Or maybe steal the old lady’s morphine. You had to wrestle with the Angel of Death every day. Every day. Twilight settled in already, and it wasn’t even six.

She turned off the highway to their house. George waited, leaning against the door, his face tense as a drum. He said he had bad news about her mother.
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Cezarija Abartis’ Nice Girls and Other Stories was published by New Rivers Press. Her stories have appeared in Grey Sparrow Review, kill author, Slushpile Magazine, Underground Voices, Manoa, New York Tyrant (which also gave her story The Lidano Fiction Award), and Story Quarterly. “Every Day” was begun in an online writers’ group, ShowMeYourLits. Recently she completed a novel, a thriller. She teaches at St. Cloud State University.

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