Three Weeks in Spring

Prologue

He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t loved her. It was the fundamental condition of his life. It seemed as if he had been born loving her. But, in fact, he hadn’t loved her until he was eighteen and they met at college. She was old family, good manners, and what does your father do. He was at some momentary place between poet and thug. They were drawn together and sustained by a shared sense of humor that developed over the years into a complex and delicate instrument of communication, a ritual of relationship, inviolate and enduring.

Twenty-five years after they first met, and eighteen years after they married, her cancerous left breast was removed, and when she came out of the anesthesia and saw him standing at the foot of the bed in the green hospital room neither of them knew if the cancer had spread and she was going to die.

She said, “Easy come, easy go.”

He said, “Look at the bright side, you can probably get bras at half price.”

She smiled and nodded and closed her eyes and went back to sleep and he stood in the quiet room with the television set making antic motions but no sound and watched her sleep.