Read Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots for Free Online

we’re all awake, would you like to invite me in?”
    Then she stopped. Her face, always peppy and alert, fighting against the wrinkles, fell in on itself. She gasped.
    “Oh my gracious,” she said and covered her mouth.
    I looked at her eyes, followed them down. I’d forgotten. How could I? I’d lifted Joseph’s jacket and exposed him. His accident. He was still soaked. He hadn’t even complained. I wondered if he’d caught a chill, if I’d given my husband pneumonia.
    “Dottie!” I said, suddenly enraged at her.
    “Whoopsie-doo,” she said, turning around and scooting up the stairs faster than I’d seen her move in years. “I’ll be seeing y’all,” she called back. “Happy dreams!”
    I watched her, wanting to throw the collapsible chair at her strutting hips. I wanted to wrap Joseph up in my arms and hide him. Did she know what kind of pain he was in? Did she know what he’d been through? And this was how she treated him? Old age scared her, most of all when it crept up on her perception of herself. We’d known her for a million years. She’d aged too.
    “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him. “She’s a terrible witch.”
    “No,” he said, kindest man in the world. “She is who she is.”
    I was imagining really telling Dottie off, screaming at her with my fist in her face.
    “It’s not her fault,” he said and I wondered what I’d said out loud. He hadn’t been this lucid in months. He was right, I thought. I wasn’t angry at her. It wasn’t real anger that I felt. But anger kept a lid on the sadness, kept me from feeling like the stewed prunes I fed my husband, that he couldn’t feed himself.
     
    In the study, I helped him onto the bed. He sighed when he was on his back. His eyes were closed. I turned off the lamp and lay with him with my shoes on. Outside the window, the sky was a deep blue yawn.
    This room used to be nothing but books. Now pills and pill bottles had elbowed their way onto the shelves. Crumpled tissues and half-drunk glasses of red juice too. There were three active humidifiers perched on piles of books. There were four vases of browning flowers in dull water. Would it be so hard, so very taxing, for me to change them?
    Later, in the living room, I took out the newspaper and stared at the headlines until they turned into gray froth. Ada, rabbit of a nurse, big-eared, round-eyed, and upright, arrived with her medicine bag.
    “You relax,” she said before I could offer to make coffee. “I’ll take it from here.”
    She was my favorite. She didn’t go on about her family problems or try to get Joseph to be lively for visitors like the others did. She brought interesting fruits from Chinatown, rubbed the skins, and asked him to smell her hands. She read our books while he slept. She hummed and burned candles to fight against the plasticky, unaired stink of the place. If I was sick, I’d like to have her sit by me, her hand on my head.
    I opened the newspaper to an opinion piece that started with
Baghdad. Baghdad,
I thought. It was like a dream that became harder and harder to remember. There were whole sections of the city that I couldn’t bring to mind. My memory had gotten woolly. Old-lady pilly, scratchy, woolly.
    I read the first line three times, trying desperately to sort it out, but my mind was too thick. I wasn’t what I used to be. I used to read ravenously. Now it felt as though the words got stuck behind my eyes. I’d tried to get back into cooking too, but I couldn’t lift the heavy Dutch oven, and soup wasn’t soup without it. The smell of shellfish made me sick. It didn’t help that there were pills everywhere—on the cutting board, balancing on the sugar jar, always in danger of falling into something or being lost. I’d become superstitious. I didn’t move them, feeling as though they bore some ghostly weight and that any sudden shift might provoke a temperamental force that had been relatively good to us so far, keeping Joseph alive.
    I