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Even though I had no words of wisdom to offer, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
He lifted his head and his eyes scanned my face. “Do you want to hear about it?”
I hesitated, pursing my lips. “That depends. Are you going to tell me that Alison is the love of your life, you’ll never get over her, and you think about her when you’re in bed with me?” I tried to keep my voice light, like my insides weren’t all twisted up at the very thought.
His eyes crinkled at me the way they had at the farmers market, going warm like melted chocolate. “No.”
My insides untwisted at the sincerity in his tone. “Then sure. Tell me all about it.”
He kept looking at me, his gaze sliding over my face, his own expression thoughtful. Apprehensive, almost. Finally he said, “Coffee?”
“Okay.” I figured jam would go well with coffee, so I grabbed the bag and followed him into the kitchen.
I settled onto a barstool while Michael spooned coffee beans into the grinder. He still wasn’t talking. I was beginning to suspect that the coffee was a stall tactic and he didn’t want to talk about it at all. I offered him an out. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to. I’ll get Suzie drunk and she’ll spill everything. Spoon?”
He handed me a spoon from the silverware drawer. I reached into the bag and pulled out a jar of blackberry vanilla. Yum. I screwed off the top and dug out a spoonful. So, so good.
“Mmmm,” I said.
Michael looked up from the coffee maker.
“Are you going to talk?” I asked. I took another bite and licked the spoon clean. He still didn’t answer, just stared at me, so I held out the last spoonful to him, doing the polite thing although I hoped he’d decline. “Jam?”
He rounded the counter so that he was next to me. He ignored the spoon, grabbed a fistful of my hair to tug my head back, and kissed me deep. His tongue swirled against mine, tasting.
Mmm.
Maybe we should forget all this talking business and take the jam to the bed.
He nipped my bottom lip gently and then pulled back. “You’re right. That is good.” He went back to making coffee. “So, Alison. It’s simple, really. We fell in love, got married, and when I couldn’t give her what she needed, we split. That’s the short version.”
I swallowed the last bite of jam. “You don’t have to tell me more than that if you don’t want to.”
He poured a mug of coffee for me first, added a generous dose of cream, and then added another splash after appraising the color. He pushed it to me. “You don’t want to hear the long, messy version?”
I looked down at my coffee. Even without tasting it, I could tell by the shade of pale brown that he had added the perfect amount of cream. It was such a small thing, but it said so much. He paid attention, always. There was no doubt in my mind that he would have done everything in his power to give Alison whatever she needed. “I want to hear it.”
He poured a mug of coffee for himself and leaned against the counter. “You know about my dad. We just went to see a Huntington’s specialist at Johns Hopkins.”
I nodded. Michael didn’t talk about it much, other than to say his dad wasn’t well and was steadily becoming worse, but Suzie had told me all about it soon after we became neighbors. It had been necessary since I had occasionally been called upon to babysit while Suzie and Sam handled things with her dad.
Harry West had been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease about four years ago, before I had moved to Hart’s Ridge. Huntington’s packed a mean three-tiered punch, according to Suzie. There were the physical symptoms, like seizures and rigid muscles and problems speaking. There were the cognitive symptoms, where your brain seemed to slow down and not work properly. Finally, there were the psychiatric problems, like depression. The depression came from changing brain chemistry, not just the fact that knowing your life will be cut short in a very uncomfortable way would make anyone sad.
Eventually, Huntington’s was lethal, but that could take ten years or thirty, and in the meantime, there were treatments to ease the symptoms but no cure. Until recently, Harry’s symptoms were considered mild. Then about six months ago they had gotten worse, quickly, and that was a big part of why Michael had come home.
“After Dad was diagnosed, Suzie and I got tested.” He took a sip of coffee and I raised my eyebrows in question. “It’s inherited, Nora. A person who has a parent with HD has a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease.”
“Oh my god,” I whispered.ThatI hadn’t known. Suzie had never said.
Then my stomach sank into a black hole. He wasn’t telling me this in an “Oh, my dad is sick and life is hard” kind of way. He was telling me this in the context of his divorce. Which meant—
PANIC.
“Suzie’s okay,” he continued, oblivious to my rapidly deteriorating mental state. “That means she won’t pass it on to her own kids, but HD is a tricky fucker. My test—”
I needed him to stop talking, right this very second, before he broke my heart. I clambered onto the counter separating us, clasped his head in my hands, and rained desperate little kisses all over his face.
“Don’t.” I couldn’t bear to hear him say the words.
