CODA
Lily spots him near the checkout line: he's carrying a toilet tank repair kit and it looks as if he's beginning to lose his hair again-the Chicago Bears baseball cap can't disguise his lack of eyebrows or the way this gives him the smooth, surprised expression of a newborn-and Lily knows she should walk right up and reintroduce herself, chat a bit, then wish him well, but she can't-just this glimpse floods her with so many memories that she has to put down her pot of jasmine and run to an aisle where she won't be seen; and there, beside the furnace filters, she recalls their first encounter: the way he had visited her husband's hospital room and jovially shared his story of faith and remission, and the way her husband had afterwards pronounced him Too Fucking Cheerful-and the inspirational emails that followed, full of exclamation points and clip art (but lacking any personal greeting), and the way she had so wanted to believe that God would change their destiny if only she asked, and then, when Sam was dying, how those prayers had seemed like hubris; and it is several days later, her jasmine now planted beside the old lamppost, that she admits she is still feeling unsettled, unable to stop thinking about the way the man in the Bears cap had always ended his conversations with Rejoice and be glad in it! and so she searches the dictionary for a word to make sense of it all, a term or a phrase that combines, for example, admire and despise, but she learns that these are antonyms, as far apart as create and destroy or light and dark, and her frustration mounts until, while she is leafing between ridicule and scorn, she finds a different, better, perfect word: schadenfreude.
©Stephanie Harrison, first published in The Pinch
Updated 09/07/10
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