It was clearly time. The various dependents, critters, and homeless waifs they'd taken in over the years had found their feet and voted with them, going on to their rewards, callings, or just deserts. So the place, though still inhabited by the increasingly decrepit proprietors of yore, already felt empty--at once silent and filled with echoes.
She found a place for them where there'd be other people around to help if they needed it, and began the long sad task of sorting, packing, and discarding a lifetime of memories.
"Oh, my." She sat on the edge of their bed, her knees suddenly weakened. "D'you remember this?" she asked.
It was hard to remember that those very focused deep brown eyes no longer saw anything. It's a wonderful thing to be so well loved that one's partner doesn't need to see in order to know.
She answered the quizzical look. "I had it on the first time we met."
"I remember." That smile. "Well, part of you had it on." She loved being teased, loved that he knew that about her. Everyone else was way too respectful.
"You made it yourself, didn't you?" he asked.
"On the sewing machine my mother gave me for graduation. I wonder if she thought I'd put aside all that 'doctor stuff' and be domestic or something."
He laughed. "Against hope," he said. "Engineering is in your blood."
"Yeah." She moved to the mirror, holding the dress up in front of her. Then, with a glance at the chair in which he sat, she flipped her everyday dress over her head, and replaced it with the bib-front wraparound.
"I do love seeing you naked," he said.
"In your dreams," she laughed.
"It never did fit very well," he said.
"No. Though if I'd thought about it as an engineer, it might have."
He snickered gently. She loved the variety of expressiveness in his laughter. "Then where would we be?" he asked.
"Not here, for sure," she said. "And, well, I rather fancied the model on the outside of the pattern," she admitted, thankful that he could no longer see her blush.
He was smiling.
The bib looked like it might be uncomfortably narrow ...
She watched his eyes roll off her face to her shoulders, bare but for a tie under her hair.
... so she cut it four inches wider ...
His eyes rolled down the shapely spine she turned toward him.
... which meant that the neck-strap, which moved not at all, due to the tensions and forces involved ...
Up again and forward over her shoulder, and then, like an ice cube her brother had once put down her shirt, dropped into her exposed cleavage.
... bent the top of the bib several precious away from her sternum.
A kind of deliciously chilly thrill of exhibitionism, through well-intentioned modesty.
She lifted him up, danced him across the bedroom, turned to push her bare back against his chest, and taking his hand, put it where his eye would never go again.
The other hand remembered where the tie was at her waist. It remembered where her breasts had been, then.
She found that they remembered him, too. This last time in a bedroom of their own. Perhaps the new apartment would be like her apartment, all those years before.
She laughed aloud, at how clumsy that had been, too overcome with the hurry of the moment to take time to think of the geometry problems, of coefficients of friction. Or, she supposed, for the poet, how hard it is to build a line in tens, or find the rhymes that sonnets would demand. Need, transcending the physical details.
Creative ambiguity. You'd think, being naked and all, that it would matter, all the physicality. But no. Not, at least, until it came time to unpile, remember which appendages were whose, which garments fit the strangely, and temporarily, separated bodies. Always temporary.
She closed his eyes, folded the dress and placed it very gently atop the discard pile, found jeans and a t-shirt, and went in search of a telephone. As she listened to it ringing, one sob told of the end of always.