Read Online Duet for Three by Joan Barfoot - Free Book Online Page A

quite a few things done today — blood pressure, an internal, and I’ve got some blood samples. Which reminds me I can’t stay much longer, I’ll have to get them to the lab. Now, if things get worse, or if these tests show any abnormalities, we’ll maybe have to check you into hospital for a day or so, Aggie, for X-rays and EEGs and so forth. Nothing strenuous, but I’d like to do as much as we can outside of hospital. Aggie tells me” — he smiles at June — “she’d prefer not to break her record of never being in a hospital except to visit somebody. And I’d prefer to avoid putting that sort of stress on her anyway. But we’ll have to see how things go.”
    This, June thinks, is much too vague and unsatisfactory, hardly a step in any direction, much less the right one.
    â€œBut as far as you can tell,” Aggie interjects, “I don’t have some awful disease.” She grins. “I’m like June, you know — I’d like to get it cleared up, although for different reasons. Mine are quite immediate. You can’t imagine how rank it is, waking up in a cold, wet bed.”
    Well, you have to admire her, she doesn’t back off. She runs right at a problem, even a shameful one. It’s like a teenager with acne going around pointing at his pimples and saying, “Look at that, boy, isn’t that something awful? I can’t wait till I grow out of it.”
    â€œBut what can we do in the meantime, if it keeps on happening?” June doesn’t want it forgotten, what the issue is here. “We can’t just keep on this way.”
    â€œDon’t borrow trouble, June,” Aggie says. So smug she is, so settled, in her big broken chair, with her cup of tea and her plate of cookies.
    â€œWe have trouble, Mother, there’s no borrowing about it. Something has to be done.”
    â€œTests are something.” George, unhappily trapped, is now flinging his hands about as if batting crisis out of the room. He may deal with physical issues of life and death with reasonable skill and equanimity, but this sort of thing is more difficult. Like a policeman called to a domestic dispute, he’s in the centre of old, unknown passions, right in the middle, where it’s most dangerous.
    It’s a bit much, the two of them looking at her with what, in Aggie’s case at any rate, must be a deliberate and studied, detached and academic interest; as if it were nothing to do with her. “Go ahead, June, say what’s on your mind, then.”
    â€œWell, what about me?” But that isn’t what she meant to say, nor is it the tone she intended. The words have twisted out bitter and sad, too much a plea and too little a statement, but now she can’t change or stop. “It’s too hard. I can’t do everything, and then something like this happens.” She could weep, except that she never would, in front of Aggie.
    In her grey skirt and yellow blouse and charcoal cardigan, in the black low-heeled shoes she wears for comfort, standing all day as she does, she takes a step toward them, threatening or appealing, and then steps back, with no threat or appeal to make.
    They should never have let it come to this.
    But her own skin is yellowing like old paper. It has become fine and wrinkled. There are purple veins that stand out in her legs. Even in these shoes, her feet hurt at the end of a day, and her hair has turned grey and lacks life. She is aging, she is almost old.
    â€œListen,” she says, although she may mean to say “Look”.
    â€œI can’t go on teaching and looking after the house and worrying about Mother. It’s awful, coming home and wondering if she’s been all right. And I don’t weigh half what she does, but I have to help her out of bed, and then if anything happened, I’d never be able to lift her. I’m just not young any more, and I’m not strong