Axel
The bad day, when it came, arrived without warning on a Thursday that had started perfectly well.
Georgia had been strong that morning, strong enough that they’d talked over breakfast about driving out to the coast that weekend, the same coast as in the photograph Benjamin had used, though Axel knew nothing of that. For the length of the conversation he had felt almost normal, a man planning an ordinary trip with a woman he loved.
By early afternoon she was in bed, pale and folded around her own stomach, unable to keep down the ginger tea he’d made her, unable to talk without it costing more than she had to spend. He sat on the edge of the bed, useless, turning an old wrench over in his hands, a habit from decades in the shop.
“Stop fidgeting,” she said, eyes closed, voice thin. “You’re making the bed shake.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Just — talk to me about something. Anything. I don’t want to think about my own stomach for five minutes.”
He cast around for anything and landed, out of good material, on the shop.
“Marcus brought in a Buick today that a raccoon had apparently been living in for a month,” he said. “Full nest in the glove compartment. Chewed straight through half the wiring harness. Owner had no idea. Said he thought the smell was just, and I quote, ‘a new-car thing gone wrong.’”
Georgia’s eyes opened, just slightly. “A raccoon.”
“A whole family, from the look of it. Marcus found what he’s fairly sure was a nut stash under the passenger seat.”
“How did the raccoons get in?”
“Nobody knows. Marcus has a theory involving the vents. I have a competing theory involving the owner leaving a window cracked and simply not remembering, because this same man also told me, with total confidence, that his oil was ‘probably fine,’ when it had not been changed in four years.”
“Four years?”
“Four years, Georgia. The oil looked like something you’d find at the bottom of a well.”
She laughed, sudden and surprised out of her, sharp enough that she winced and pressed a hand flat to her stomach, still laughing. “Stop. It hurts to laugh.”
“I can stop telling you about the raccoons.”
“Don’t you dare. What happened to them?”
“Marcus caught two of the babies in a box and released them out behind the shop. The mother, from what I understand, watched the entire operation from the top of the dumpster with what he described as ‘personal disrespect directed specifically at him.’”
Georgia laughed again, weaker this time but real, tears standing in her eyes from the laughing rather than the pain now, and Axel sat on the edge of the bed telling her increasingly elaborate, increasingly exaggerated raccoon lore for the better part of twenty minutes, watching the tight, pale line of her mouth ease, some color come back into her face.
Later, once she’d drifted into an uneasy sleep, he sat in the kitchen with his wrench. There was nothing he could do about the thing that was killing her, no fix, no rebuild, no part to order and install.
But he could tell her about raccoons. He could make her laugh until it hurt, on a day when everything else already did.