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”
    “Okay, so how to make and answer calls. I don’t want to know about voice mails and menus and things.”
    The two generations had a bad time of it. Lucy could not imagine what it was that Benedict understood, and Benedict couldn’t imagine anybody not understanding it. He sat beside her and pressed buttons. Lucy said, “What did you just do? I don’t know what you did. Benedict, you need to let me do it.”
    “So press Code Entry.”
    “Which is that?”
    “Mom! Where it says ‘Code Entry.’ Press.”
    “Press where? I don’t see where it says ‘Press.’ ”
    “ ‘Select.’ Mom! SELECT. Press it!”
    “Oh! I see! I’ve pressed ‘Select.’ Now it says ‘Code Entry’ again. Should I press it?”
    “MOM!”
    “I think I got it,” said Lucy after a while. “Benedict, go home. No need for you to hang around all night.”
    “Okay, Mom. After I see Haddad’s husband. We have to go to his office and get ourselves tricked out like social workers. Mom will you be okay?”
    “I’m fine.”
    Salman Haddad, the hospital’s chief security officer, was a good ten or more years older than his wife. He was an elegant little brown man with a scholarly look, or was it the rimless glasses? His assistant was a large unsmiling woman groomed in some formal, corseted fashion. She was probably overqualified for her job and did not think it ought to be her business to be obliged to explain to yet another lot of interns that it was Phyllis on the second floor they needed to talk to.
    Phyllis on the second floor was a cheerful, plump, competent woman who looked at home on her chair behind her desk. She set Bethy, Benedict, and Al Lesser up with identification tags, clipboards, and batches of Intake Forms for Seniors. Mostly they’d be seeing patients in the ER or on the floors, but Phyllis walked them down the corridor and unlocked the door to a windowless cubby.
    Benedict said, “Bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a broom closet.”
    “Used to be a broom closet,” said Phyllis. “Two desks, two chairs, and a chair for the patient. You,” she said to Bethy, “can use one of the desks in my office.” Bethy, instead of thinking Sexism!, thought, Because it’s me, and her heart was sore and angry to have been assigned no desk in the broom closet, and with a free-floating soreness reinforced by the intuition that her father and mother’s hearts were sore for her.
    “You’ll do Rhinelander, Francis,” Phyllis said to Al. “Blacked out in his hotel.”
    “What if I don’t know the medical terms?” Al asked her.
    “Don’t have to. They take the medical histories, you do their lives. You ask them do they know where they are, and then you go down the questions on the Intake Form, write the answers on the appropriate line, bring the form back to us, and we file it.”
    To Benedict, she said, “Your first is Gorewitz, Samson, on his way over from Glenshore General Hospital. Cerebral accident. Possible sunstroke. Possible hypothermia.”
    And Bethy thought, What about me!

II
The ER
    The waiting area was a familiar third world where Lucy, or Lucy and Benedict, had sat with Bertie. There was nothing for the dozen or so patients to do but sit and wait, reread the Out of Order notice attached to the candy machine, and wish they were next. Today, of course, Lucy was here as an observer. How could she have left home without a book!
    The door opened and here came two new people to look at, a woman in a blue buttoned blouse who was leading a crooked old body by the elbow. The old person looked all nose and chin; the woman in the blouse, neither old nor fat, had abandoned the search for a shape. Her bare legs were mapped with varicose veins. She led the old person to the bench next to Lucy and said, “Sit. You sit here, okay?” and then she went and waited behind an unusually tall old man with a smashed face, who had to bend his head to talk with the nurse through the triage window. When he had finished and