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throat, all those hideous things spewing from his mouth. He would hear her gasp until the end of his days.
    “Charles?” He raised his head now. “Charles?” the voice said again. Caroline Silver was striding across the courtyard. She worked in the marketing department for Jefferson Hospital, and Charles edited their promotional magazine for donors. The magazine only came out biannually, so Charles hadn’t seen her or talked to her in a while.
    He watched as Caroline crossed the square, trying to smile. “I’m here to see Jake,” she explained, shaking his hand. “For a late lunch meeting. Goodness, it’s been a while, huh?”
    “It has,” he answered. And then she cocked her head, her expression shifting. Charles could tell she was reaching back to recall just how long it had been since she’d seen him, remembering what had happened between then and now. And then, as though Charles really did have an inside view of her head, Caroline shifted her weight and covered her eyes. “Oh, Charles. Your father. Oh my goodness. I’m so, so sorry.”
    “It’s all right,” Charles said automatically.
“We read about it in the paper. How awful.”
“Yeah.”
“I meant to call. I didn’t know what was appropriate, though.” “It’s fine. Really.” He smiled at her. “Thank you.”
“What a shame.” She clucked her tongue. “He wasn’t even very
    old, was he?” He shook his head. “Healthy every day of his life before it happened.”
“You must miss him.”
The vendor on the corner slammed the metal lid that housed the hot dogs unnecessarily hard. Charles stared across the street at a budding dogwood tree. Further down that block was the Italian restaurant his father sometimes visited for lunch. Once, when Charles had walked down this block to a lunch place on Walnut, he’d glanced into the Italian restaurant’s front window and seen James alone at the bar, with his tie flung over his shoulder and a glass of amber liquid in his hand. There was a ball game on TV, and the waiter was leaning on the bar, watching. Charles’s dad had looked so comfortable being alone, a posture Charles had never mastered himself. Charles had panicked, crossing furtively to the other side of the street so his father wouldn’t see him. He had no idea what James would have done if he’d noticed Charles walking by. Ignore him? Grow furious that Charles was walking down his block, invading his space? One thing was certain, his father certainly wouldn’t have invited Charles into the bar—despite his mother’s Pollyannaish suggestion the day before his interview, Charles and his father never met for lunch. What would they have talked about?
Caroline shifted onto her left hip, waiting for Charles’s answer. Did he miss his father? He didn’t really know. “I—I should be going,” he said, turning blindly toward the street.
“Of course,” Caroline said, her voice dripping with foolhardy sympathy. Maybe she thought he was too overcome with grief to properly respond. Charles still said nothing, focusing instead on the shiny spots of mica in the sidewalk, the xylophone part of a Rolling Stones song he’d heard on his iPod that morning thrumming absurdly in his head. Finally, Caroline patted his arm and told him to hang in there. Charles watched her push through the revolving door, cross the lobby, accept a badge from security, and disappear around the corner toward the elevator bank.
Charles leaned against the cold slate of his building, wishing he could nap beneath one of the big stone benches. The burbling fountain smelled pungently of chlorine. There was a sharp pain at his right temple, maybe the beginning of a migraine. The cleaning ladies were still standing on the corner, chatting. Was one of them her? The security guard who’d called the ambulance for Charles’s father had met the family in the ER lobby later that same night. “A cleaning lady found him,” the guard had said. “She called down to the front desk,