Perfecting the Odds Read Online Free PDF Page A

amassed inside. He studied her, almost guilty that he didn’t automatically console her, but even her frantic laugh-cry was beautiful. He couldn’t do anything but watch in awe of her strange abandon.
    S he bent over, placed her hands on her knees and took a few deep lungsful as if finishing a long distance run. Releasing a squeaky breath, she stood up and swiped her face.
    “I’m married , Michael.”
    “I know . I just--” Michael managed, shame like tangible hands pulling him from her.
    “Well then, let me tell you something you don’t know,” she said with unmistakable cynicism. He’d just opened a huge fucking can of Karis’s verbal beating.
    “My husband, Robert, is at Johns Hopkins receiving palliative care. Palliative, meaning all doctors can do is try and relieve the pain because he has terminal cancer. It began as the “always-curable” testicular cancer. Unfortunately, he was too goddamned bullheaded to go to the doctor when he first had symptoms. He decided that hiding both the symptoms and diagnosis from me was to protect me…because that makes a lot of fucking sense.” She flashed a crooked smile with a snort of disgust. “The cancer metastasized to his lungs then his brain. And you know what, Michael?” Hooked to her confession, his name had him wedged between the bricks of the bar and her next statement. 
    “I’m . so. fucking. angry,” she growled, echoing her rage into still air. “There are moments I hate him so much I feel like I can’t stop the goddamn knot twisting in my stomach, and I run to bathroom and lose everything over and over…. so here I am.” She flung her hands in the air. “Wife-of-the-fucking-year! At a fucking bar. Getting hit on by fucking drunk guys. Indulging in a fucking stranger’s goddamn smile. And, you know what else?” Nearly trembling from her rant, he lifted his brows. “I couldn’t wait to get out of his goddamn hospital room.” Her chin quivered with the promise of more tears, but she stared beyond him. She was somewhere else at that moment, somewhere silently fighting her demons, and fuck , that gnashed at his gut. Michael willed his hand to stay at his side. He wanted nothing more than to thumb away the tears, press his lips to her head, and tell her it would be okay. But he knew all too well it wouldn’t be okay.
    She finally took a deep breath and nodded toward the bar. “My best friend in there, Eve…the one with the killer figure…she made me come out tonight. She said it would ‘do me some good’ to have fun. Fun ! ” She laughed disparagingly before sitting down against the brick wall. Allowing a safe distance between them, he slid down next to her. Minute by minute passed as she slowed her breathing.
    “I guess she has a point.  I’ve been watching Robert die for months now… months .” She shifted her eyes to him again. “The surgery, the radiation, the chemotherapy…waiting… estimating how much time I’ll have with him, watching him transform into something I don’t even recognize anymore.” — She paused— “He was intubated about a month ago, and if I’d known…Shit, who the hell knows what I would have done.” With trembling hands, she smeared the mascara lines into her cheeks. “The hardest time is at night. I press my face into his pillow and just breathe him in… I can’t help it…I just need to feel not so….alone.” Her voice broke, and Michael quickly shifted toward her to grab her hand, but just as suddenly, she stood and started pacing again.
    Michael stood, pressing his back against the wall.
    “I’m so tired of all of it! One day I want him to just die, to be out of misery. The next, I’m begging God to give him one more day. So tell me, Michael--.” He blinked rapidly as she paced. “How am I supposed to have fun when all I want to do is...is wrap my arms around him and tell him I hate him for lying to me...for not trusting me to be able to handle it… but that I’d trade places if I