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don’t know what I ought to do now,” he said. “I haven’t a clue.”
    When Crane heard his name called he got out of the chair. A thick, mannish-looking woman stood in the doorway beside the receptionist’s cubicle, lifting her chin to indicate that he was next, and he followed her down the single hallway and into a windowless white room. She had him step on a scale, then he sat on a stool so she could take his blood pressure and temperature. She asked him to roll up his sleeve.
    She thumped at the blood vessel on the inside of his arm and inserted the needle, loosening the rubber tubing she’d cinched around his biceps. They both watched as she filled three vials with his blood, then she had him fold his arm back against a cotton ball.
    She got a light blue hospital gown from a drawer and handed it to him. “You’ll need to put this on,” she said.
    He had a leg crossed on his knee and was examining a mole on his calf, comparing it to the stage-four mole on the skin-cancer chart hanging on the wall, when Dan walked in, apologizing for the wait.
    For the next half hour they talked about their inability to afford the homes they wanted, the sorry rise of evangelical right-wingers and how video games were turning out a generation of surly clerks, while Dan listened to his heart, looked in his ears, eyes and throat, pushed and prodded his abdomen, checked his reflexes, finally pricking him here and there with a pin and asking if he could feel it. Or that’s how it came to be lumped together in his memory, as a single blunted and humiliating episode, but about a hundred times easier than telling a man and woman that the child they’d loved and raised was now lost to them.
    He then sat on the end of the examination table, watching Dan at the sink in the corner. He made a fist with his left hand and thegrip seemed improved. His arm just tingled, and his legs weren’t cramping anymore.
    “Why don’t you put your pants and boots on and we’ll see what your heart’s got to say.” Dan was drying his hands.
    “Not my shirt?”
    “You’d just have to take it off again.”
    He followed Dan to a room at the end of the hallway where a young, pale nurse stuck electrodes on his bare chest and guided him onto a treadmill. “It goes easy like this if you don’t have much hair on your chest,” she said, her voice sounding more like chirping than speech.
    Dan stood at the head of the machine, studying the readout while they worked him into a trot and faster still, until he hardly had enough air to shout that he ought to be allowed to quit.
    Dan tore the printout evenly away from the machine, folding it back upon itself as he started for the door. “Come on down to the office when you’ve got your breath.”
    Crane stood crosswise on the inclined tread, gripping the handrail, red-faced and gasping, and the nurse helped him off onto the tiled floor where he stood leaning into her. She was strong for her size.
    He sat across the desk from Dan, still overheated, only half-listening to the telephone conversation Dan was having with a doctor at the Billings Clinic. He pulled off his right boot and sock, and when Dan hung up, writing something on a notepad, not saying anything at all, Crane said, “My foot’s blistered.” He moved the pad of a thumb over the blister forming on the ball behind his big toe.
    Dan held a slip of paper pinched up in front of him, both forearms resting on the desktop. “I should’ve told you to wear tennis shoes.”
    “It’s not my heart, is it?”
    “No, your heart’s just fine.” He leaned forward in his chair, and Crane took the slip of notepaper he offered. “Bill McCarthy’s a good guy,” he said. “He’s up in Billings but well worth the drive.”
    Crane nodded, folding the paper and slipping it behind the bills in his wallet. He saw the appointment was scheduled for one-thirty in the afternoon, so he wouldn’t have to wake in the dark to get there in time. He hated waking up at