Free The Tides by Melanie Tem Page A

him to flip the switch that would turn off the light outside his door and silence the dinging. 'We're short tonight. Again.'
     
    'You work too hard,' he admonished gently.
     
    'Tell me about it.'
     
    'I'm sorry to bother you.'
     
    'That's my job, to be bothered.' A thought occurred to her. 'Who turned on your light for you?'
     
    'My roommate. Before he left for supper.' He smiled apologetically, his green eyes darting back and forth across her face as if he were playing a video game.
     
    'Oh, Alex, that was half an hour ago! I'm sorry.' There were tears in his eyes. The nurses had explained that emotional lability was often a side effect of brain damage and you shouldn't take it personally, but Abby was still bothered by his easy tears. 'What do you need?'
     
    'Well, I wanted to use the urinal.'
     
    She was one of the few aides he would allow to do this for him, and, because she didn't know why, his confidence made her nervous. She brought the urinal, folded back the sheets and blanket, unzipped his pants, gently positioned his penis. It embarrassed her, but Alex, a quad for thirty years and, she supposed, used to this, stared quietly at the ceiling while his urine clattered into the pan.
     
    'My wife was in today,' he remarked.
     
    'I heard.'
     
    'I just don't understand her, Abby. She's not reasonable.'
     
    'What did she say?'
     
    'Oh, she said all kinds of things. She was here for over an hour, shouting the whole time. The kids were running loose in the halls.'
     
    'We can't have that, Alex.'
     
    'I know, I know, I told her.'
     
    'They could knock somebody down, running like that.'
     
    ''That's what upsets me, Abby. What she's doing to my kids.' His soft voice broke and tears ran down his cheeks. Abby straightened the urinal under him, not knowing what else she could do. 'She's just not a fit mother. She won't even cook for them. She never wants to cook for me when I'm home, either, but I just insist. I can't even go home anymore. She's got the furniture arranged so I can't get my chair through. It's my house. I pay the mortgage payments. She won't get a job.'
     
    His pee had stopped. Abby took the full urinal into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet, only then remembering that his output was supposed to be measured so the nurse could record it in the chart. Her spaciness annoyed her. She was annoyed with Alex. She had heard all this before.
     
    'Now she's accusing me of having illicit affairs.'
     
    'You're kidding.' Catching herself appraising his body where it lay helpless under her hands, she blushed.
     
    'Don't act so surprised,' he said with a grin. 'It's not impossible, you know.' She busied herself around him and said nothing, but waited to hear what more he would say about that. 'She's accusing me of having an affair with someone here. Someone who takes care of me.'
     
    'Well, you're not. Are you?' She laughed self-consciously.
     
    'Abby, she's talking about you.'
     
    'Me? Why?'
     
    'I guess,' he said, his fly still open, his restless eyes still traveling across her face so that she could almost feel the soft little trails they left, 'I happened to mention what a nice girl you are, what good care you take of me.'
     
    'It's my job. Does she want my job? Obviously not.'
     
    'She used to be a lot like you. I fell in love with her when she was an aide taking care of me, after my first wife put me in a nursing home. She used to say it wasn't a burden taking care of me, it was a privilege.' He smiled wistfully, his eyes on her face, and her heart went out to him.
     
    Scrambling to protect herself, Abby commented, more sarcastically than she'd intended, 'You sure have a way with the ladies, don't you?'
     
    'Who, me? My wife says I'm no thing but a paralyzed old man.' 'You're not old.'
     
    'Before we decided to get married we spent a weekend in the mountains together. She didn't seem to mind my body then. I don't usually approve of such things, but I wanted her to know what she was