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slight, like a faint lisp, but it stung. He felt alone. His mother’s scattered relations had put in ritual appearances, but they were all busy with their own lives and he could not ask any of them for help. He had not heard from Julia. Burl was his main support, but mostly on the telephone. Burl visiting the sick was similar to an excitable terrier gate-crashing a board meeting.
    Burl dropped by the hospital room early one morning on his way to a painting job. Reed had just arrived. He had returned to work, thanks to some potent speed, and he was at the hospital early, after his shift ended. He was helping his mother with her breakfast. Her right hand was weak, and she dropped the spoon. Her speech was improving, though she was still addled from the drugs.
    “That sausage looks almost good enough to eat,” Burl said to her teasingly. “And is that eggs? Hen products? Why, this place is a veritable spa! Who would have imagined?”
    With some difficulty, she told him, “I felt hydrophobies in my stomach all night.” After eating a bite of cereal, she said, “A camouflage fell across my eyes.”
    “I’ve had those too,” Burl said. “If not one, then the other.”
    Reed could tell that his mother was glad when Burl left. Burl seemed to know, too, that he shouldn’t stay long with her, because he fidgeted too much and talked too loud, so he waited for Reed in the family lounge down the hall. A little later, Reed found Burl pacing by the window. Burl was wearing paint-splattered jeans, an immaculate white T-shirt, and a greasy, stained cap he had worn for several years. A man in blue work twills was asleep in front of a television set, tuned to the Golf Channel.
    “He watched the Golf Channel all night long,” a pudgy woman in pink pants said to Reed. “His daddy had triple bypass yesterday.”
    Reed joined Burl at the window and they watched cars in the parking lot.
    Burl said to Reed, “Don’t forget I’m your Prayer Warrior.”
    “Weren’t you my Prayer Warrior
before
she had the stroke?”
    “I’m not God.”
    “I thought you had a direct line.”
    “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Burl tilted his hand back and forth in the sign for uncertainty.
    “I wish I could call Julia and tell her about what happened.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “I’m afraid to. I don’t want to make her feel sorry for me.”
    “Won’t she want to know about your ma? Didn’t she like her?”
    “She’ll know. The hospital admissions are in the newspaper.”
    “But she might not read it.”
    “She’ll know somehow.” Reed rose from his chair and flexed his biceps. He felt stiff. He needed to work out. “I’ll call her. Just as soon as the time is right.”
    “I’ll say a prayer on that.”
    Burl’s faith was a quixotic, fluctuating matter. Reed, not knowing when to take him seriously, often teased him about it. Burl had thrown rune stones, practiced meditation, gone to a snake-charmer fortune-teller, tested out every charismatic leader in the area, even slipped into the large uptown Presbyterian church only to pronounce it the dullest and least inspired of the Christian denominations. Burl liked to say he had a searching soul.
    Reed’s mother had given him a deliberately unconventional upbringing. She took him to a variety of religious services, although she was not a believer and did not expect him to be. She told him, “It’s refreshing to see how the other half lives.” They cruised Jewish temples, Catholic churches, and several black churches in an old part of the city where most white people at that time were too scared to go. And they dabbled in the Protestants. He thought the Baptists were more fun than the Methodists, but his mother found the plodding placidity of Methodists hysterical. Reed and his mother had attended church only sporadically. Most Sundays after church, they went to Captain Mack’s, a home-cooking eatery that featured liver-and-onions. On Sunday mornings when they didn’t go to church, she