The Candle by Ian Rogers

THE CANDLE
    “Did you blow out the candle?”
    Tom lowered his book and turned toward Peggy.
    Peggy lowered her own book and bit her lower lip. Why was it that she could remember what she had for breakfast every day this week, could even remember what she was wearing on most of those days, but couldn’t remember if she had blown out the candle in the living room?
Is this what middle age is
? she wondered.
The loss of short-term memory
? She hoped not. She was forgetful enough as it was; she didn’t need to help it along.
    “Yes,” she said finally. Then: “No. I don’t know.”
    Peggy watched as Tom laid his hand on top of his book. She noticed the wrinkles on his fingers, the white hairs on his knuckles, and thought,
We’ve gotten old, how did this happen
?
    He looked at her fully now. “Well,” he said, “which is it?”
    “Huh?” She looked at him quizzically; her own book had slumped forward and was now lying open on her chest. “I’m sorry, Tom. I must be sleepier than I thought. What did you say?”
    “I asked if you remembered to blow out the candle.” He was getting impatient. “In the living room?”
    She bit her lip again, and Tom had to repress an urge, one that had been growing stronger over the twenty-six years of their marriage, to reach out and pull her lip from under her perfectly capped teeth. It drove him crazy. Biting her lip while she was trying to remember something was one of her half dozen or so little gestures. It was enough to drive a man nuts.
    “I really can’t recall,” Peggy said at last. “I remember lighting it, of course, because the window was open and the smell of oats was really strong tonight. And I remember turning off the lamp after the movie was over. You put the DVD back on the shelf and I picked up the glasses on the coffee table. . . .” She trailed off, lost in thought. “But I don’t remember if I blew out that darn candle.”
    “Well, can you go check?”
    “Why can’t you go?” she asked, a little testily.
    “Because you lit the damn thing,” Tom replied, a little testily himself.
    “Because I lit it?” Peggy repeated. “What are you, six years old?”
    “Are you?” he shot back. “What is it, are you afraid to go into the living room in the dark?”
    “Are you?”
    “I’m already comfortable.” Then, as if to accentuate this fact, Tom nestled a bit further down under the covers and picked up his book again.
    “I’m comfortable, too,” Peggy replied, a bit indignantly. She opened her own book as if she was deeply engrossed in it, a tight little frown squiggled on her face.
    Tom heaved a big sigh. “Listen, Peg, I’ve gotten up twice already. Once to make sure the side door was closed and locked—because you couldn’t remember if you did
that
—and again to feed the stupid cat.”
    Peggy looked at him and decided it was probably easier to submit now than to continue arguing about it. On the day she had married Tom, her mother had given Peggy two pieces of advice:
Don’t sign anything until your lawyer’s looked at it first
and
Never go to bed angry
.
    “Okay,” she said, closing her book and putting it on the nightstand. “But this means you’re making breakfast in the morning. Blueberry pancakes,” she added.
    From behind his book, Tom snorted good-naturedly to show that he was a good sport, that bygones were bygones.
    Peggy flipped back the coverlet and slid her long legs out of bed. She was quite tall—taller even than Tom’s considerable five feet ten inches—and while she had always taken pride in her long legs, she didn’t much like looking at them anymore. Like Tom’s hands, they were starting to show their years. Not that it mattered. Her legs had the years
and
the mileage. When the floor creaked under her feet, she thought that part of the sound—surely not the greater part, but some part at least—was the joints in her knees letting her know that her days of junior varsity soccer and ringette were