Read Acceptable Losses for Free Online Page A

her coat. “I’ll save it for later. Now I just want to freshen up and comb my hair and then you’re going to make me a drink and take me out to a nice restaurant where we can have a decent meal. My mother’s gone vegetarian since the last time I was there. Menopause in the kitchen.” She squinted at the ceiling light, which they rarely turned on, but which was blazing now, along with every other lamp in the room. At her age, she said, she reserved overhead lighting for her enemies. “What’ve you been doing here—having a photographic session for a Playboy Bunny-of-the-Year?”
    “I was looking up a telephone number,” he lied. He switched off the ceiling light. “The drinks’re a good idea, but I thought we’d have something here—eggs, whatever we have in a can. I had a late lunch and a big one and I’m not hungry.” The explanations were beginning already, but it was too soon to explain why he preferred his own home to what might be waiting for him at the corner of the block on their way to the restaurant.
    “Oh, come on now, Roger,” Sheila said. “Sunday night.”
    He hesitated, almost asked her to sit down so that he could tell her the whole story. But he didn’t want to spoil her homecoming. If he could avoid it, he didn’t ever want to tell her the whole story. “A restaurant it is,” he said. “I’ll have your drink ready.”
    She peered at him intently. He recognized the look. He called it her hospital look. He had met her when he was lying in bed with his leg in traction after being hit by a taxicab. He was in a semiprivate room, sharing it with a man whose name was Biancella, who also had been run over and who was Sheila’s unmarried uncle. They were very close, largely because they shared the same despairing opinion of Sheila’s mother, who was Biancella’s sister.
    The two men had become friends in shared misery. Damon had found out that Biancella, a small, dark, handsome man with grizzled graying hair, ran a garage in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and came to New York only once a year, to see his niece. “This would never have happened in Old Lyme,” Biancella had said tapping the hip-high cast ruefully. “My mother warned me to stay out of big cities.”
    “I’ve lived in New York for years,” Damon said, “and I stepped off the curb just like you.”
    They laughed at their mutual carelessness. They were both mending and they could afford to laugh.
    Sheila came to visit her uncle every day after her work in the nursery school was over and it was in the semiprivate room that Damon had discovered her hospital look. Biancella always tried to put on a cheerful and uncomplaining face when his niece came into the room, no matter how bad the day had been for him up until then. And he had had some very bad days indeed, lying in the bed across from Damon’s. But with one glance, as she came into the room, Sheila would say, “Now, don’t try to fool me, Uncle Federico, what’s wrong today? A nurse is bothering you, a doctor is hurting you, what?”
    Invariably, she was right. In the three weeks that she had been coming into the room, she had more or less adopted Damon, too, and his attempts at stoicism were swept aside by the dark, handsome young woman with the grave eyes, and again and again she had made him confess that all was not well with him, that they were not sedating him enough so that he could sleep, that his complaints to the doctors that his cast was too tight were being ignored. She made herself unpopular with the doctors and some of the nurses with her demands for immediate treatment, but as Damon watched her arranging her uncle’s pillows, coaxing him to eat the delicacies she had brought him, which she insisted Damon share, speaking soothingly in a low, rich voice to her uncle about news of the family, entertaining him with bitterly comic anecdotes about her mother, telling him of plays she had gone to see, the performances of the children in her classes, Damon began to