Morning in This Broken World by Katrina Kittle EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Katrina Kittle
- Language: English
- Genre: Friendship Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
VIVIAN
March 2020
Vivian stared at the five amber pill bottles before her on the Formica
kitchen counter. Well, what was she waiting for? She had enough pills, but
did she have enough guts?
She’d been too afraid to do a computer search when she considered
helping Jack die. Her handsome, smart-ass Jack. She’d stockpiled these
painkillers from various procedures throughout the years—her
hysterectomy, Jack’s rotator-cuff surgery, her trigger-thumb surgery. She’d
known if she’d decided to crush them up in pudding to help ease him out of
this life of indignity, she’d have to be careful. There could be no search
history in case there was an autopsy. She hadn’t known: Did they do
autopsies on Alzheimer’s patients?
But Jack had passed. On his own. Her sharp sorrow had been mixed
with relief that his confusion and pain were over.
And two days after he was gone, she’d finally researched: How much
Oxycodone will kill a person?
She had enough.
These pills sang to her. For the month since he’d passed, through the
blur of writing an obituary, planning his service, ordering death certificates,
and making the thousand phone calls about life insurance, long-term-care
insurance, and Social Security, the five pill bottles hummed a siren song to
her. From their Ziploc bag inside the canister of cornmeal she never used
(there wasn’t even a working stove or oven in this Assisted Living
apartment), their serenade rose, silvery, soothing, and full of promise.
Sometimes the pills made her paranoid, when their harmony was so loud
and others were in the apartment—aides checking on her, although she
didn’t need services; the cleaning lady; the head of social activities asking
her to come to this concert or that trivia game; the director herself
wondering if Vivian might like to return to the Independent Living dining
room rather than eating alone in her apartment again. Vivian would tilt her
head and study their faces. Did they truly not hear it? Were they just
pretending?
What was stopping her, really? The love of her life was gone. The
home they’d created together, their castle, their oasis, now for sale. Their
daughter, their only child . . . well.
Vivian picked up one bottle and turned it in her hands, hearing the
reassuring rattle.
Ann-Marie was gone, too.
She set the bottle down, and that same hand went to the buttons of her
blouse. Two fingers slipped between the buttons and found the chickpeasize lump to the left of her sternum, at the top of her left breast. She rubbed
her fingertips over it, as if it were a worry bead. There was this, too.
Treatment and surgery? Alone? No, thank you.
She had friends. She had dear, dear friends. But nothing seemed to
matter. Nothing seemed worth it. She’d just told this to her neighbors at the
house, Steven and Drew, “the boys” as she called them. The boys had
known and loved Jack long before his decline. They helped care for Vivian
and Jack’s house once they’d had to move to Sycamore Place, this
sprawling, multistory facility chosen for its “continuum of care”—the
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