Svetlana in Olive Drab

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He saw her struggling not to cry. He knew how it felt.
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TaLtos6
TaLtos6
1,930 Followers

I dunno, I was looking at a pair of people in their forties doing their grocery shopping when I noticed some BIG differences in their speech patterns. What was between them appeared to be based on a playful friendship and she seemed affluent to a fair degree.

It made me wonder how they got together. They were too new to have been together for very long, but it came to me that if you have a reason to try hard, by that time, you can let a lot of things go by the boards, if you find the right person.

So then I went back to my own grocery shopping, but my brain was already spinning its little cogs as I thought about new relationships at that point in life. There are the usual reasons, but I wasn't thinking of those. I thought about death and the wreckage that can leave.

I was thinking about putting this in the 'Mature' section, but I checked and that says May/December things. This is a romance. They're just not 21 anymore.

Before I knew it I was working on this in my head in the grocery store. By the time that I got in a check-out line to pay, I was a little pleased with myself. I wasn't thinking of a big long thing, but I now had the story in my little head. It makes a little difference climatically, but the Thanksgiving long weekend in this is the Canadian one, so it happens a lot earlier.

It wasn't until I got home that I realized that I hadn't gotten ONE of the specials that I was after. Not one.

~sigh~ 0_o

*****

Pete looked down, wondering a little at himself. His gaze took in his hands and they said a certain word to him as he saw the ridges of the veins and arteries underneath the surface of his skin. He'd have bet any money that right now, he wouldn't be able to see this clearly. He told himself that he ought to be trying to see through tears at this point.

But he wasn't.

He was looking at the backs of his hands, with an idle thought passing through as he wondered just when it had been that they'd transitioned on him again. He hadn't sat down to count the times or the nature of the changes, but he remembered when they were smooth and unscarred, the hands of a young boy.

He remembered when they'd grown larger into the hands of a teenager, young and strong and growing even stronger, and by that time, they already bore a very few scars. Most of those had gone by now, but he could still see the deep one on the top of his right index finger. He curled that hand, looking for the other part of that scar -- the one which had been across the back of his right thumb. But that one seemed to have disappeared somewhere back down the road.

He'd gotten them because he'd held a piece of reinforcing rod tightly in his right fist once. It had been all that he'd seen lying around one night when a man had tried to mug him, brandishing a knife. He was only seventeen at the time and he'd been scared shitless. The man was large, white, and looked to be in his early thirties. Pete could still hear the voice on him.

There hadn't been any 'Gimme your money and you won't get hurt' to it.

It had only been "Gimme your money, motherfucker."

Pete hadn't known what to do then, and he remembered a public service announcement that it was always safest to just give a mugger your cash.

It had been what he'd wanted to do, but then his assailant had stepped through the glare of a street lamp as he'd stomped over and Pete had seen those eyes. He didn't see much reasoning ability in there at all, and looking around, he'd seen the re-rod section lying there at the edge of the construction site nearby. The mugger had swung that knife a few times and Pete didn't think that his honest offering of all that he had on him would have prevented a whole lot.

He doubted that men such as this would even accept three and a half bucks.

He was sure of it when the knife connected to the rod and skipped down its length to open his finger and thumb as it had slashed past.

Pete wasn't a big guy or anything, he'd been only average-sized, but he'd prevailed - if winning a knife fight with a lunatic counts for much. It had only been the plan to keep the guy at bay until Pete could get a clear exit to run. But it became clear that it wasn't going to happen fairly early on. Pete chalked it up to the power of fear-driven desperation that a skinny teenager could stab a huge assailant through the chest with an unsharpened piece of re-rod. It hadn't gone in very far and it had the effect that Pete wanted. It stopped the guy's raging fury. Before anything else could happen, Pete hit him alongside the head a few times, dropped the rusted rod and run for his life through the rain.

He'd never gotten the cuts seen to, since that would have involved a trip to the hospital and he'd have had to make up a story - which he'd never been any good at. Some people could fabricate ornate and very plausible lies in an instant, but not Pete.

So he'd just gone home and cleaned it up himself and the major part of the reminder of that night was still there on his finger. He thought about that night for a second and he remembered how he'd tried for a few days to find out about any injured muggers by listening to the radio and trying to get a look at any newspapers that crossed his path.

He'd never heard a thing, but he knew that the man he'd left behind him had been dead at best and if not, then if there was anyone at all who'd loved him, they might have been faced with remembering to bring him a new coloring book for his birthdays for the rest of his life.

Pete had been a teenager then and wouldn't have dreamt of harming anyone. But he knew that it would have been him found dead the next morning and he'd been scared to death.

Pete remembered the changes to his hands when something had happened to him at near to eighteen. He'd suddenly seemed to have discovered the refrigerator, and had found himself with a raging metabolic rate. He could out-eat any junkyard dog, eating anything, everything, at any time and as much as he could hold and nothing would ever show on him.

He grew taller at a time when that was supposed to be over for him and he grew leaner. The jobs that he'd had to do back then just formed his body. He'd never been big or the muscleman type, but Pete had a build on him back then. It was still there too, not that anybody would give a shit now.

But Maggie had.

Maggie had been a shy and rather short girl back then, the sweetest thing that Pete had ever set his eyes on and it was as though neither one had any say in what happened. They'd just gravitated toward one another and gone from there.

They'd never had any kids. Maggie couldn't for some medical reason with a long name. She'd felt bad about that and Pete felt for her because she was his world, but Pete only felt for Maggie. Whatever it had been hadn't changed a thing for Pete.

He'd had the love of that girl. That made everything all right.

The world went on, spinning in its crazy way, but at least it was round and it made sense to them. They had each other.

He wondered if he'd just been short-sighted, but he supposed that the way that it was supposed to go was that they went on forever.

He looked up and saw Maggie's face there in the hospital bed, her eyes closed for the last time.

After more than thirty years of his doing anything for her and always being ready to do more of whatever she'd asked of him, Pete now realized that he was unemployed at the only job that he'd really ever wanted.

He was intelligent and well-spoken and he had a lot of skills, but all of those things were only attributes which had enabled him to keep them fed, clothed, and in possession of the things that Maggie had said that they'd needed on the rare occasions that she'd mentioned anything.

He supposed that there had been ample time for him to come to the realization that one day; he was going to lose her to the disease which had claimed her today. Maybe that was the reason that he wasn't crying.

He thought that he ought to be crying.

If anyone deserved his tears, ...

After a little while, he began to feel a little foolish, sitting here with his dead wife. The nurses and the staff were being wonderful and he knew that they'd give him all the time that he needed. But it had already been over an hour and he supposed that he'd better go, so he kissed Maggie's lips for the last time and said goodbye almost silently before he jammed his now old-looking hands into his jeans and walked out.

He decided against a look back before he went, since he knew Maggie better than anyone, and to look back like that wouldn't do her any justice at all.

Maggie had never lain still -- even in her sleep -- for this long in her whole life. He knew that fact like he knew his own name. He'd so often lain in bed beside her just looking as she'd slept against him or on top of him. Lying still just wasn't her, so he decided that he didn't want to see her any other way.

He left the room and walked down the hall, stopping at the nurse's station to thank them and nodding that he guessed that he'd be alright. He walked down the long corridor and saw the light of a new spring day out there through the glass doors.

He realized then that he didn't care about that and then he had a thought wondering why the world around him was still in color, because it sure didn't feel that way to him anymore.

--------------------------------

He'd had Maggie's body seen to and other than the funeral and accepting the condolences of Maggie's many friends and coworkers; Pete felt the full crush of this on him after everyone had gone back to their lives.

But Pete didn't have one of those anymore. He'd spent the rest of his bereavement leave sitting alone in the house that he'd shared with the only girl that he'd really ever loved.

But she wasn't there anymore.

He made a few trips to the cemetery, thinking that maybe it might help him to talk to Maggie. But she wasn't there either. Her body was six feet under the tombstone that he looked at. It was his first real clue that being a widower was a shitty existence.

On the whole, his life wasn't even just a pale imitation of what it had been once. Now it was a non-life. He could look after himself. He'd never been one of those men who marry somebody and they become the replacement for their mothers. Pete could cook well.

He just couldn't see a reason why he'd want to anymore, other than for basic sustenance. Things which he'd once enjoyed making for himself and Maggie just didn't appeal to him anymore.

Fuck, he said to himself, breathing didn't appeal to him much anymore either, but he kept doing that rather automatically.

He got up and he went to work day after day. It gave him his only excuse to leave the house.

He noticed a change then. The end of his shift had always been something to look forward to. He'd traded his time for the pay and gone home to his wife for years and decades. Now, what was the point?

There was no one there.

There would never be anyone there ever again.

He even looked forward to doing the housework, since it gave him something to do. But after a while, he came to realize that he didn't have the drive anymore and rather than get bogged down in something that Maggie could have done so much better than he could -- other than the big spring and fall cleanings that he'd once looked forward to because he and Maggie had always made the work of it fun between them, he'd hired a cleaning service.

A nice pair of ladies came around twice a week and the job got done.

Since they'd never had kids, the two of them had lots of disposable income, so it wasn't a problem. He'd always bugger off when the cleaning ladies showed up. Rather than get in their way, Pete would head down to the only store in the little place and spend an hour or two drinking coffee and chatting with the locals as they bought their scratch and win tickets and talked to him while they scratched and the government won almost all of the time.

So Pete's life was a rather empty one and it was as lonely as living on Baffin Island, though perhaps not anywhere near as cold.

He could see himself getting a dog one day for company and he knew that he'd enjoy that; just a lonely man who was too young to die of old age (but already feeling quite dead and gone), and a large dog. But he was still working and planned to be for a few years yet. He understood dogs and the sort of companion that he'd have wanted didn't deserve to be cooped up until his or her master returned, so that would have to wait a few more years, but is was on his list of things to try in desperation.

----------------------------------

Pete got through the rest of the spring and then the summer and he was staring fall in the face before he knew it. He tried to stay on top of the yard work and he even learned that his knees weren't the same as they used to be as he tried to keep Maggie's flower gardens weeded. He had no idea what he'd do next year. He wasn't a gardener.

He made a mental note to go to a landscaping place that he knew sometime before the snow flew. He wanted to set something up so that he could pay somebody to keep the gardens up. He knew that he'd enjoy them more if he didn't have to weed them.

Suddenly -- and it hit him like a bolt from the blue -- he remembered that he had a motorcycle. If it weren't for his knowing the reasons why he'd likely forgotten about it, he'd have laughed.

But then, there wasn't all that much to laugh about anymore.

His love of the two-wheeled wonders had begun before he'd met Maggie. Back then, he'd ridden around on a Yamaha two-stroke, since it was cheap and it gave him wheels. By the time that he'd met Maggie, he'd made it up to a Honda 305 that he'd bought for pretty much a song and he'd fixed it up.

He felt like the motorcycling equivalent of Archie, but Maggie didn't mind it and they went everywhere together. Later on, as the years rolled past, he'd always had some form of roadburner. Maggie didn't care, as long as there was a little bit of room for her skinny little ass and he took her for a ride now and then, she said.

Now and then.

They rode everywhere together, as long as it wasn't snowing.

She seemed to be more excited than he was the day that they went to pick up his Harley. She followed him back in the car and she made a point of pulling up next to him at a light to power down her window and make slightly naughty suggestions to the lean and handsome biker in the next lane. She'd had to shout her ideas a little bit and there were times when he'd glanced at his mirror and seen the shocked faces in the car behind him.

He'd mentioned it to her when they'd stopped for coffee about halfway home and Maggie had turned crimson -- but she'd still laughed. That was just Maggie.

He hadn't ridden it since about a week before she'd passed on in the spring.

The first summer that he hadn't ridden in, ... he had to think about it.

Thirty-two years.

He opened the garage door and spent the Saturday afternoon doing little things that he'd overlooked, and one of those things was to hook up the charger for a couple of hours. The next day, he started it and went for a short ride. That night, he hooked up the battery tender just to keep a small charging rate going if it needed it. This was the dreaded third year, after all. Every three years, the premium battery would die on him.

He took it to work the next week, and he got that sinking feeling when he came out to ride home. The bike started, but the first crank had sounded as though it wasn't going to happen.

Every night, it went back on the tender to keep it topped up.

The weather grew cold early and he prepared to put it away for the winter, but he kept that little charger going and he kept to his winter routine of going out to the garage to start the bike once a week and let it run until it was warm.

But there were a few things wrong. The battery never seemed to take a full charge, though the little charger was on it at all times, so he guessed that this battery had gone the way of the others. The weather warmed up again, so he bought another battery and installed it and then on his way to work, he'd stopped for gas and when he'd hit the starter, all that he heard was click-click-click.

He was out a half a day's pay by the end of it, not to mention the cost of a flatbed tow to his home.

He charged the battery fully and it seemed to be alright then. But there was still something wrong, and it was with him.

Without Maggie, ... he'd fallen out of love with the bike.

He prepared to spend Thanksgiving weekend online, thinking that he'd been through the imports back in the day, and he'd run the beasts which could go faster than he could think, and he'd had his Harley.

He found that he didn't really want any of them anymore.

And there was something else.

He lived just outside of a small town in the middle of nowhere. He didn't mind that so much. Without Maggie, he knew that he was only living so that he could die himself one day. It just hadn't worked out well for him.

If he could have imagined such a thing; that he'd be widowed one day, well he'd probably have guessed that it would happen by the time he was seventy-five or eighty.

But he was forty-eight.

He slurped his coffee and stood up to go the bathroom. It might have been his dark thoughts, but he looked at the mirror in passing.

His hair and his goatee had turned white since the last time that he'd paid much attention.

He decided on a store cup of coffee and he walked out to his car.

One kilometer to buy a cup of coffee.

With luck, he'd meet up with a local and he might have two -- one sipped just as he listened and chatted, and the other one to bring home. Oh and he might need milk or something as well.

One kilometer was a short haul in a car and too long a walk.

Well, if he wanted to drink his last coffee of the day at home online.

He was in his car and looking at the closed garage door.

One kilometer was a short haul on his bike, too.

And it wasn't one of the land yacht Harleys either that had places for everything. On his, there was no place to put a fucking cup of coffee.

That made him remember the time that he'd stopped three days after getting that fat pig in the garage. He'd gone to the same grocery store that he went to every day to bring home one day's groceries for him and Maggie. There were no kids, so they liked to eat fresh and it was on his way home.

That was when it hit him.

Almost twenty thousand dollars and unless he was about to spend a whack more, ...

There wasn't even a place to put a pack of gum.

He bought saddlebags for when he needed them and almost always carried a tank bag after that anyway.

He though that now he just preferred to putter the back roads and you don't need 750 pounds of overweight chrome to do that -- not if you were gonna buy a store coffee.

He drove to the store and forgot about it for a few hours, just a lonely man who missed his wife.

---------------------------------

Natalia knew.

She saw it in the body language -- the way that the doctors walked and stood as they emerged. Only doctors moved that way. The nurses were always too busy. The ones which she saw were already shooting out of the room, pushing carts of things and trying to get a look at whatever fate and the carnage of the nearby highway would be bringing them next in terms of human wreckage from out there on a Thursday before Thanksgiving weekend.

Doctors didn't move that way, not afterwards; not after they'd done all that they could as whatever sort of team they felt that they belonged to.

Natalia looked down past her own lightly bandaged knees at the same four square feet of terrazzo flooring that she'd been staring at for the past two and a half hours and she waited.

TaLtos6
TaLtos6
1,930 Followers
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