The Mazda’s parked in the disabled spot outside Home Depot. The heat hits me like something solid and I spy Frank slumped forward onto the dashboard. For a moment everything is bleached to a bright grey and I think he must be dead, his neck bent like that. Behind me, a voice on the public address system, its message lost in the depths of the air-conditioned store. I’m gripping the hammer, my only purchase, like I could use it right now.

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“Frank!” I yell, yanking the passenger door open.

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“Jeez Rosemary. Gave me a fright,” he mumbles, wiping his mouth on the handkerchief he keeps clutched in his hand.

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“You fell asleep,” I shout, like he’s an infant, or hard of hearing.

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He has his hand on the breast pocket of his plaid shirt, which is always a precursor to him saying something like, ‘you shouldn’t go around scaring people like that Rosemary.’

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I slam the door and walk round to the driver’s side. By the time I’m seated he’s done grumbling and put his belt on.

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“Seven ninety-nine. Before you ask. The hammer Frank! The hammer!”

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I reverse out as he turns painfully in his seat to tell me to watch out for something that isn’t there. The Mazda’s gears grate if you’re not at a complete stop before finding first. Frank always used to say he preferred a stick, but he hasn’t driven in years and I want an automatic.

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He’ll be wondering what’s for dinner. Or whether I’ve seen the school bus pulling out. Or wanting to comment on the heat. Fifty-two summers we’ve spent in Texas but he still never tires of talking about the heat. Half a century of flat dusty nothing, three kids, long gone, decent jobs, a pack of dogs, but he wants to talk about the weather.

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Days like these I long for Colorado. Roaming the hills with my twin brothers, playing games, trying to slot in beside them and their secret world. My teenage years, wild and free. I miss the green, the air, but Frank never liked my brothers and we’ve only been back a few times. To bury them, one after the other, in the plot beside mom and dad.

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Frank jams his foot on an imagined brake on his side of the car. Like a cartoon on the TV, it’s ridiculous. I signal and pull into the outside lane, accelerating away from the mess of fur and blood on the highway.

“Deer,” Frank announces, like he’s an expert on roadkill. Like someone’s listening.

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I don’t mean to bully him but nowadays he pisses me off. He repeats things, fusses all the time, pretends he doesn’t hear. I’ve given up being gentle and I’m not sure whether he’s hurt or if he’s even noticed. I’m not an angry person usually, but in the airless heat of the Mazda, I can feel my fury like poison in my blood.

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We’re out on the highway and with the windows down I can only hear wind and the rush of trucks heading east. Frank’s eyes are on the road.

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It’s less than ten minutes to our turn and we pull onto the drive and I park under the carport. Frank doesn’t like me parking here as he says the structure’s unsafe. He should know. He built it. It’s a wooden frame and he reckons termites have gotten into the uprights. I grab the hammer off the back seat and leave him sitting there. 

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Inside it’s shady and cool. I left the air conditioner on in the kitchen and with the doors closed it offers a moment of calm, of stillness. There’s a bottle of Pepsi in the fridge and I pour a large glass and drain it in one, stifling a burp. By the time Frank’s shuffled in, I’ve got bread, margarine, cheese and tomatoes out onto the counter.

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“You fixing a sandwich?” he asks.

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“You were asleep back there. Why don’t you go lie down? Take a rest?”

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He’s crowding me at the bench.

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“You wanna sandwich Frank?”

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“What’s for dinner?”

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“Why don’t you go watch TV. Quit bugging me.”

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If I let him, he’ll pretend to be outraged that I’m eating in the middle of the afternoon. I know he’d like a slice of cheese but instead he’s itching to mention my weight, how the doctor said I should only eat at mealtimes. I cut him a thin piece, but he’s already turned away, mumbling to himself.

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It never used to be like this. Not so long ago we got along fine. He kept working and now I think that it was his job that preserved him. He had so many clients and he said he didn’t want to let them down. Small businesses, mainly. Accounts, payroll. But when everything moved to computers, he was left behind and within a couple of years nobody wanted him anymore.

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My cousin Coral who calls every Sunday says I’m in mourning. That I’ve lost the man I loved and now I share a house with someone different. I thought about that a lot recently.

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On our wedding day he wore a blue suit that matched his eyes and I thought he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I was the luckiest girl and I pretend to myself that that was the happiest day of my life.

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He was a good dad to the kids too. Better with Dan and Marlon who he’d gotten into all kinds of projects out in the shed. I don’t think he knew what to do with Annie. She was smart and read books and he didn’t know how to handle a girl. But he was always good to her and we got her through college and her law exams.

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He’s already asleep in the armchair and I have no idea how he does that. I used to think it was an act. To avoid having to listen to me. But now I’m sure he just sleeps, whenever and wherever he likes. Sleeps, eats, watches TV.

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“What’s the point of you Frank?” I shouted too loud in the back yard a week ago.

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It was a horrible thing to say but I’d only asked him to cut back some of the dead foliage on the bleeding hearts that run along the trellis. He’s perfectly capable but he seems to have lost the will to do much of anything.

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I had him checked out when he turned seventy-five. I was almost willing the doctor to tell me he’d had a minor stroke or that his heart was failing or his blood pressure dangerously low. Something that might explain his general decline. But he’s fine. Whatever he’s lost isn’t something a doctor can find.

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I make an effort to remember the man I shared my life with. Some nights I pore over old photo albums, spending hours studying every detail. My finger traces Frank, and the kids, and it’s like I can conjure something of that moment again. There’s a photograph of Frank reversing a friend’s boat on a trailer into Lake Travis. It amazed me, that he could do that. His shirt off, leaning out of the window, one arm on the wheel. The trailer disappearing into the water until the boat was floating free. Back then he never failed to impress me.

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And now I stand over him and want to prod him awake. I imagine a knitting needle jabbed once, twice, below his ribs. Or a large glass of iced water, right in his face.

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This feeling scares me. That I could do this to the man I love. The man I loved. I hate the idea that I could be so cruel. That I have this thing inside me that’s grown unchecked over years. Layers of accreted pain and hurt and something else that might be boredom or my hormones or the wires in my brain. 

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He’s dribbling and I return to the kitchen to get the other half of my sandwich. I’ll call Dan, our eldest, in a bit. He’ll be finishing work in Baltimore soon and I can catch him on his drive home. It’s an hour in the car and he says he understands, about Frank, about how I might need some help. I imagine him sitting in traffic, listening to me talking about his father like it’s some dull radio call-in.

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I worry that I’m going to catch what Frank has. That if I let myself succumb, I’ll be like him in no time. All my ambition, my get-up-and-go, shot to pieces. I see him and I see a geriatric. We’re the same age but you won’t catch me sleeping in the day or stumbling around the house in my slippers. Frank’s let go, given up, and I’m nowhere near ready for that.

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I’m scared of the rage that’s built up inside me, just below the surface. Frightened of what I could unleash. And that I too might be reduced to falling asleep in a chair just before four in the afternoon.

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The man in the other room is no longer recognisable to me. I know I stood facing him in the huge church on Congress Street and I said that I would love him in sickness and in health. But that was fifty years ago and now I wish that I hadn’t. That I’d spotted that clause, asked for it to be amended, requested something different in the knowledge that one day things might get like this.

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I told Dan last week that I didn’t think his father had long left. I heard the blast of a car horn as he pulled onto the side of the road. I’m not sure why I said it now. Wishful thinking perhaps. Dan had said he would come visit, and I’d backtracked saying I didn’t think it was imminent. That things hadn’t gone that far.

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Frank sleeps in Annie’s old room down the hall. I hear him in the middle of the night, rattling like a radiator that needs bleeding. It’s beyond me how he can sleep through that racket. One time I walked into the room, switched on the light and stood over him.

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“Why do you do this to me!” I shrieked and he just kept going, like he was daring me to grab a pillow and press it over his face. I imagine doing that now. One of the cushions from the couch. It’d be all over in a minute, and I convince myself it would be doing us both a favour.

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“He has quality of life,” says Coral, on the phone. “He still has all his faculties. Doesn’t he?”

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I think about all the things he used to be able to do. Reverse a trailer. Build a carport. Manage the finances. Piss straight.

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I bought the hammer because I want a bird box in the cedar in the backyard and Frank couldn’t find the one in the garage. I weigh it in my hand, the rubberised grip is just right in my palm, and I let the head swing.

There are hummingbirds at the bleeding hearts on the trellis and I open the bottle one handed and wash the pills down with a glass of water, unable to let go of the hammer. It’ll be twenty minutes before I can start to relax, before the muscles in my jaw, my wrists, get loose.

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From the other room I hear him snoring loudly and then it stops abruptly, and I hold my breath too. It’s silent in the house and I dare not breathe. I tell myself that if he makes another sound, I’ll take the hammer and swing it against the side of his head. I don’t think about the mess it would make or any of the consequences of such a violent act. I just know in this moment that if he breathes, I could do it.

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The air conditioning hums and, far off, the sound of a church bell.