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going to turn the sheets green.’ I’d shower at work, and I’d shower at home, but I couldn’t get rid of it. I even spit green.”
    “Lucy probably liked a clean house.”
    “She was the best woman. But I put my country first. Now I’m sorry I did. I never should have let Lucy go.”
    Reed had been working days, but now he was swinging to the night shift, which meant fooling around with his caffeine intake. Burl gave him a few whites—he called them “speedies”—to make it through the transition. Reed was off Tuesday, then he was due to go in Wednesday evening at seven. That day he ate an early lunch, then took a sleeping pill to get some rest in the afternoon before the first evening shift. He had just gotten settled in his darkened nest when the telephone rang. He had forgotten to turn off the ringer.
    “Hey, Dad?” It was his daughter, Dana.
    “Yeah. Hi, babe.” He could visualize her in the pink tutu she wore when she was a child taking ballet lessons.
    “I didn’t expect you to answer,” she said. “I thought you’d be at work. I was going to talk to your machine.”
    “I’m on nights now. So you’d rather talk to the machine than to me?”
    “Did I wake you up?”
    “Not yet.”
    “I just wanted to know how you were. Every week or two I hear about something awful going on at the plant.”
    “Don’t worry, sugar. They’re talking about legacy waste, stuff from ages ago. They’re cleaning it up. It’s safe now.”
    “I’m praying for you.”
    Reed didn’t want to know what perversities his kids might be into. It was simpler that way. Still, he was moved by his daughter’s concern. He didn’t want his kids to think of him as diminished, like some gutless victim. But when did Dana start praying?
    Reed lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, Julia on his mind. It was a fine spring day outside, and he thought he could hear birds chirping, but it was only imaginary music in the white noise of his box fan.

4
    In retrospect, Reed knew he should have expected his mother to have a stroke. But he was thick-headed, oblivious, and too immersed in his own problems to monitor his mother’s health. About ten days after his camping trip, a Sunnybank aide called to tell him that his mother was in the hospital. It was seven-thirty a.m., and Reed had just arrived home after a twelve-hour shift. In a whirl, he threw food at Clarence and without showering or changing clothes, he flew his battered blue pickup to City Hospital. She didn’t seem to recognize him. She tried to speak, but her words rolled around in her mouth like marbles. Although her right hand was limp, she managed to point to her leg. It was a two-by-four, Reed understood her to say. He hadn’t known that tiny warning strokes called T.I.A.s had been puncturing her mind like BB shots for some time. She hadn’t complained.
    Reed, in a daze of disbelief, took off work to stay by his mother’s bed. He spent the first two nights in her hospital room trying to sleep in a recliner chair, which realigned his spine with seemingly murderous intent. Her I.V. drip bag made him think of a douche bag, but he didn’t know why, since he had little actual familiarity with douche bags. Each morning, the doctor—on his five-thirty rounds—woke her up to check her responses and wrote on her chart that she was confused and disoriented. “She’s dreaming,” Reed told him. “I’m dreaming myself at this hour.” She was drugged to the eyebrows, he thought. The notion that she could die made him feel angry and helpless.
    When he telephoned his sister, Shirley, in California, she told him she couldn’t come unless their mother took a turn for the worse. Kids, career. “Sounds like she’s over the hump,” Shirley said.
    “Everybody asks where you are, Shirley,” he said. “They say what does a son know about taking care of his mother?”
    “Let’s face it,” Shirley said. “She’d rather be around you than me.”
    The edge in her voice was