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uncoordinated jaw, his mouth couldn’t trap the food, a dash of which seeped from one corner and onto the towel, creating a lumpy yellow tie. Quickly he wiped his chin with the towel, smeared it really. Paul looked horrified by the mess he had become. Yet he insisted on trying to feed himself again. Up came another spoonful, but soon after liftoff his spoon tilted sideways, spilling the yellow curds onto the lip of his plate. Still holding the spoon aloft, swinging it sideways like a construction crane, he began searching his tray for the fallen egg, unable to find it.
    “It’s right here.” I collected the morsels with a cafeteria spoon and fed him by hand, as if feeding a baby, stunned by the new routine. One minute I was crying at home, the next spoon feeding my husband.
    It was becoming painfully clear that he would need lots of rehabilitation to be able to return home—if living at home was even possible. If not, I would need to consider the unthinkable, the unspeakable, something so mind-blowing I didn’t dare give it words lest they act as a jinx, something that felt too old, too wrong. A nursing home . How could this be? Was life really so different than it had been only days ago?
    Wistfully, I replayed a phone conversation we’d had just a few weeks before. I was on the West Coast, and we’d talked for half an hour or so, about nothing, about everything, including a painful predicament I’d found myself in with a good friend.
    “Some mess, huh?” I’d simmered into the mouthpiece of the telephone. “How can anyone not love life, when given enough time it will exercise absolutely all the tender little muscles of one’s heart?”
    “You are an earth ecstatic,” I’d heard Paul sigh.
    “Was there any doubt?”
    “Just don’t get too nutsy about looking for answers,” he’d advised, half seriously. “As Confucius said, enjoy the heist. Don’t buck the current. Try to keep on top of the dung heap. Maybe you’ll find the open-sesame of matter after all.”
    I’d laughed and parried: “If I were Herod in the middle of the Massacre of the Innocents, I would pause just to marvel at the confusion of that image!”
    “Listen, puddin’ cheeks . . .”
    “ Puddin’ cheeks? ” My eyebrows had leapt up.
    “It’s part of my British ethnic revival. I’ve got to get back to work before the secretary blows the whistle on me.”
    “Blows your what? Sure you wouldn’t like to step into the darkroom with me and see what develops?” I’d said this in my best Mae West voice.
    “Ha-ha . . . something just occurred to me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “We can go on meeting like this,” he’d said tenderly. “Over and over and over.”
    “Thank God.”
    Then semi-jokingly: “. . . You know, your agnosticism is much too vocative to take seriously . . .”
    “Hey, I thought we just finished that part of the conversation. This is the part of the conversation where we make nice-nice and hang up.”
    I tried to push the memory away, but it floated like an iceberg, glassy, blue-streaked, riddled with air bubbles from an earlier age. Was that flavorful part of my life really over?
    As the hours splintered and Paul underwent another barrage of tests, my hope died a little with each one. His brain was woefully scrambled by the stroke, and, worst of all, he kept throwing childlike tantrums.
    “What shall we do?” I asked Dr. Ann, my voice flattened by despair. “Maybe I should take him to a rehab center somewhere? I looked up some on the Internet, and there’s one at the University of Michigan that sounds like it might be good. . . . I can’t believe I have to think about this. I don’t even know how to. The choices are overwhelming.”
    “I’ll help you,” Ann said, wrapping a strong arm around me, a swimmer’s arm. “We’ll figure this out together.”
    We were standing at the nurses’ station, out of Paul’s hearing, huddled at a counter in a wash of stark light, as if inside one of Edward