Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Read Online Free PDF

asked him about her. I was too afraid. I imagined saying
our daughter,
and his eyes lighting up.
    Where is she?
he would ask then. I had a recurring dream of him passing away in her arms, his face full of emotion, hers too, together.
     
    He leaned back and I ran my fingers over his head, waiting for him to fall asleep. I sang a song that he used to sing to me when I was pregnant. It was the only time we used Arabic in America, in song. Even in our home, on quiet evenings alone on our couch, we insisted on being Americans. We made latkes for Hanukkah. We practiced our vowels. We listened to Buddy Holly and Sinatra, and we watched
The Honeymooners
. Some nights, I’d fall asleep crying for Elizabeth Eckford.
    “Okay,” he said out of nowhere. “Let’s go for a walk.”
    If I were ten years younger, I would have jumped up and clapped my hands. I would have given him a giant kiss on the mouth. But I didn’t. We hadn’t walked together in months.
    I said to him, “Great.” It sounded pathetic, weak. But my age had caught up to me recently. My mother used to say, “Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.” It’s true. I never imagined that one day my brain would be racing and my body would be unable to keep up. Like trying to start a car that won’t turn over. I was so used to asking him constantly and hearing no response that the very exercise of asking felt like enough positive effort. Expectations change. And then again.
    “Fantastic!” I said and gave a double thumbs-up, grateful that he wasn’t looking at me but at the carpet, at the long trek to the door.
    I prepared a small bag with water and painkillers and a granola bar. I carried an extra fleece in my arms and cab money in my shoe. I put on a backpack that concealed a collapsible chair.
    Joseph was wearing navy sweatpants, one of my old cashmere sweaters, and a down coat that slumped onto his shoulders. He was a tiny cardboard cutout of himself. His outdoor slippers flapped against his feet. In the elevator, he held the rail so tightly that his knuckles lost their color. It bolstered me. He still had some strength, somewhere. I imagined him hugging me. I imagined that I wouldn’t be able to get out of his embrace if I tried.
    “Isn’t this something?” I said. He blinked.
    We began down Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The air was unseasonably warm for early December. The sun was all through setting. The outdoor restaurant on our corner smelled of garlic. People strolled. Their leather handbags shimmered in the streetlights. They smiled at me. They could see it too, these strangers. How old he’d gotten. How I’d been left. I wanted them not to walk so quickly. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d stopped, said we were a handsome couple. We looked like we belonged together. It had been so long since I’d heard something nice. I found myself craving it, begging silently for it.
    Joseph had had the spirit of a twenty-year-old until around his birthday a few years ago, when the cancer settled into his prostate like a snake curling into his lap. That was the year after we closed our restaurant; the year the winter was so cold we stayed in the house for days ordering in boxes of black tea, paper towels, and Chinese; the year we stopped cooking together.
     
    His pace was so slow, so achingly slow, and soon my leg cramped because of it.
    “I’m so proud of you,” I said.
    As he pushed forward, Joseph did a kind of back-and-forth maneuvering, an attempt to keep all his parts intact, to keep them from deserting him. After half a block, he stopped.
    “What?” I asked, looking around.
    He looked at me like I was breaking his heart.
    “Shall we turn back?” I asked. In my head, I had the answer all ready. I wanted him to go on. I wanted him to walk steps ahead of me, to turn around and say,
C’mon, slowpoke. Hup two.
    “No,” he growled instead. “We’re walking.”
    I tightened my grip. He was giving it all he had. He continued his shuffle. I