“A hastening,” he said. “How about a hastening?”

Hastening time, hastening the inevitable while it’s all still in our control.

Control. It’s always been about control, and don’t we all know that control would not even exist if not for the truth that when things go out of control there is no getting it back: the match catches, the tons of steel slip from the track, a loved one forgets to look back or says something that can never be erased.

Ever since he proposed it, I am left to wonder every time he leaves the house what is on his mind. There are things he says he has to do first. He needs to go back to his boyhood home just once more to see if what he hid there still remains. We have ridden by the place several times, always driving by the site of the train wreck first. He has pointed to the room where he slept and described what he calls “the lucky jar”; he always laughs, as if embarrassed, and yet it clearly is still very important to him. The last time we rode by, there was a child out in the yard wearing a big fake mustache, with a rope sticking out of the back of his pants and dragging behind him like a tail. I waved to the young mother half hidden behind the door.

“I’m ready to go soon,” Frank said, and I told him that I wasn’t. I told him that I have always loved him more than life itself, but now I am thinking that might not be true; I love my life. “I don’t want to leave.”

“But we are anyway, and you can’t change that.”

“Not the way you suggest.”

I know where he keeps his gun. It belonged to his stepfather, and I have always hated having it in the house. I put it in a lockbox, which I then hid away.

“I won’t do it today,” Frank said, and now the words hang in the air, whether spoken or not. Is this the day? Do I trust him? There was a time early in life when I would have trusted him with everything I owned, but no longer, not in the same way. It’s like an electrical cord that gets chewed or frayed; it still works, all taped and bandaged, but the damage leaves you handling it with caution and a little uncertainty, a little fear, and when he sensed my fear, he said, “Have I ever lied?” And I said, “Yes. Yes, you have.”

“If I choose to do this,” he whispered late one night; perhaps he thought I was still sleeping. “If I choose this, will you still love and respect me? Will you spin it for the kids so they will understand and forgive?”

I waited a long minute, his arm barely brushing mine, and then I said, “Haven’t I always?”

Frank