Plausible Deniability
The problem with being sick, she thought, is that everyone wants to take care of you but no one wants to indulge you, and what is the point of being cared for when what one requires most when one is sick is indulgence?
She was tired of the flu, so she got out of bed. Her best tactic in dealing with illness, the last weapon against disease in her arsenal, was denial.
She would not be sick.
She fed the dog, washed the linens, showered and dressed, ate, got Dad’s coffee, emptied the dishwasher, caught up on emails, rescheduled Hugo and Shawna and Mac, asked Brenda and Rita to take the lead in the Zoom presentation tomorrow, which she would attend but would let her voice excuse her from leading. She graded all the papers.
Then she woke Kat and told them they would be going to get Kat’s hair done as planned. Kat dutifully showered and dressed, but then they said, “I can drive myself. You look like you still need to rest.”
“Nonsense,” she answered, “But if you insist, here is the credit card. Accept any upgrades Jen suggests that sound good to you, but absolutely the tint that makes you all platinum and no yellow. And no shopping on the credit card. Hair only.”
The child was sweetly obedient and left happily.
Her father and brother found her struggling to build the last of the four chairs, her face dripping with sweat. “Let me take that,” her brother said, and she answered, “Good. I need to take the broken fire pit back to the garage since the kids can’t pick it up today.”
Her father stared at her like she had sprouted a second head. “No, we’ll carry it back. I think it will take both of us.” And they took it back, and her brother tightened all the screws she had aligned but had not finished screwing in on the chair while she took the first load of linens out of the dryer and put them on the bed.
Is there anything better than clean linens after days of a sickbed?
She watered the plants, brewed herself a cup of tea, noted how much easier it was to get people to do things if only one remembered never to ask them to do anything, and she promised herself that she would never again castigate her fellow women for manipulating their loved ones.
Kathy Silvey
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