Left for Dead by J. A. Jance Page A

while he worked. That hadn’t happened in a very long time.
    Not that anything had happened. It hadn’t. Not yet. But there was the possibility that something would happen. He had a hope that something might happen, and that made all the difference.
    Finished with the trim on the dining room window, he moved on to the ones in the living room. That was when the whistling stopped. For years, the broken seal in the old windows had left a film of fog between the living room and the outside world. Through the blur, no one could see in or out. Now it was all there and clearly visible—Christine, or at least the shabby wreckage of Christine and the dilapidated fifteen-year-old Christmas tree with its burden of dusty ornaments and strings of mostly nonworking lights.
    He had told Christine years ago that once the last of the lights burned out, the tree was gone. No matter what she said, he was taking it down then. Recently, he had come to suspect that she must have a secret stash of lights hidden somewhere and was using the spares to replace one or two dead bulbs at a time. It reminded him of that lady in one of the old Greek legends he had read back in high school. Her husband had gone away on a trip and was supposedly lost at sea. Someone wanted to marry her, and she said yes, but she told her would-be suitor that she had to finish weaving a rug first. So every day she wove like crazy, and every night, when no one was looking, she tore up that day’s work.
    If that was what was happening, Christine was a lot cagier about it than Phil had given her credit for being. On the other hand, maybe some of those old lights, made back in the day when Christmas lights came from the U.S. instead of China, were just that much better than the ones you could buy today. Better or worse, depending on your point of view.
    Christine sat there now, in her chair next to the tree, watching him, but not with any kind of curiosity or connection or interest. He might have been a living color image performing on a television screen; not that she watched TV, either. She mostly stared at the tree, day after day, year after year.
    Phil stopped painting and studied her. Trying to remember the old Christine, which wasn’t anything like the old Christine who had been on television a year or two ago. His wife’s hair had been reddish brown back then. She had worn it short and curly. He hadn’t realized until much later that the curl came from the beauty shop and probably most of the color, too. Now it hung past her waist in long gray strands that were lank and greasy.
    That was something Phil knew he’d have to deal with tonight—bath night. Once a week, on Saturdays, they waged the bath night war, and it was hell. Once a week, whether Christine wanted to or not, he insisted that she get up out of her chair and strip off that week’s shapeless muumuu and grubby undergarments. After what was often a physical struggle, he’d maneuver her into the shower and turn on the water. He remembered seeing clips on America’s Funniest Home Videos when people tried to bathe their cats. It usually ended badly, with the cats yowling and scratching, and this was the same thing.
    Eventually, he would wear her down. She’d give up. She’d go ahead and soap her body and shampoo her hair, but it never happened without a fight. It made him glad that his grandfather had built his little house in the middle of five acres. Otherwise the neighbors, hearing the racket they made each week, might have assumed he was trying to kill her.
    Which he wasn’t. All on his own, Phil was doing what he could to care for Christine, or at least what was left of Christine, and doing it to the very best of his ability. He owed it to her. Because what had happened to her was his fault—all his fault.
    Things were so different now, it was hard to remember how happy they’d been once. He and Christine had moved back home to Patagonia after Phil finished putting in his twenty years in the