Jerome had cut back on his drinking, some. Also cut back on salt. (Lula now used low-sodium salt, cooking. Why food tasted flat to him now.) He didn’t smoke much these days anyway, cigarettes were so damned expensive, and made him cough like hell, mornings. Taking the blood-pressure pills seemed to help. He guessed the pills had helped but the refill had run out. Hadn’t been back to the cardiologist in a year. If the beat beat beat kept him awake at night sometimes or pausing short of breath at the top of stairs he’d resolve to make an appointment but next day, so many distractions he hadn’t time. If he’d mentioned to Lula she’d have made the appointment for him, marked it on the calendar in the kitchen, she’d have nagged him about keeping the appointment but he never got around to mentioning it to Lula for specifically that reason (the nagging) and now they were in one of their spells of not-speaking to each other because he’d (supposedly) hurt her feelings over some trivial matter and God damn if he was going to make it up to her when it was so trivial he couldn’t remember what the fuck it was, even.

Not that he gave a shit that the woman imagined she was punishing him, he did not.

Oh fuck, he did. Felt like hell when his wife turned away from him. And he knew, she wasn’t feeling so well lately. All of the kids gone from the house now, just the two of them but God damn he wasn’t going to grovel.

There’d been other women. He hadn’t been faithful to Lula. Not one of the men, the husbands he knew, he’d grown up with, guys he’d gone to school with, not one of them had been faithful to their wives and (yet) most of the marriages had endured. They were Catholics, the marriages endured even when love wore out, frayed like much-laundered cloth in which stains remain. Till death do us part—bullshit like everything else in the Church but still, he and Lula were together.

What had kept them together was Lula forgiving him. And what allowed her to forgive was loving him.

A woman’s weakness, love without question. Love without doubt. Love like oxygen you’d suck through a filthy broken straw, fall on your knees in mud, anything to survive because you can’t live without him.

She wasn’t going to let him go, she’d said. After it had come out he’d been seeing someone and wasn’t going to apologize. He could try to make her hate him and even so, if she’d hated him, even then she would not let him go. That was love.