Fragments

As he drove home after his visit with Irene, Jack was troubled by the thought that these had become a routine. A courtesy to an old lady, an hour or two spent sitting with her on the last Thursday afternoon of each month.
Irene had reached that point in life where decline was precipitous -- where if he stayed away for two or three months, she appeared much more fragile and disoriented than she had during the last visit.
Jack had an idea that at some point this decline would stabilize, that she would reach some plateau again, but he wasn't sure. Today, she seemed to have shrunk two or three inches and he noticed that her hair had thinned considerably.

*****

I don't know where this came to me from. The character names are from an Alice Munro story, but the characters themselves and the words are not. Nothing else about them came to me. Just this. Actually, since I changed the man's name from Sam to Jack, not even that.

*****

Jack wasn't sure what Irene's relationship to him should be called. Once she had been his mother-in-law. That was simple enough. But then Alice had died, and it wasn't clear anymore. Especially after he married Zoe, three years later.
I've gone from A to Z, he thought, amused that that had never occurred to him before.
But he had continued to enjoy Irene's salty sense of humor, and had appreciated her down-to-earth advice, especially since he got nothing of the sort from his own mother, who was depression-prone and had never had much common sense.

*****
"That one's a handful," she said. "From the time she was little, she knew how to get her way."
Jack didn't tell her about the suicide threats, the drugs, the drinking, the abortion at 13. No reason to get her upset, he rationalized.

*****