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said, as if the commercial had triggered an opportunity to bring up the subject. “I didn’t want to do too much without you. But I needed a roof over my head.”
    “She was worth a lot, wasn’t she?”
    “You bastard. Don’t start that again. We’re going to have to deal with some things, and we may as well be civil about it.”
    “The money, you mean.”
    “Shut up. All I’m asking is that you sign the papers and let’s get on with our lives. Whatever we can salvage, that is.”
    “We probably saved a ton on the cremation, since the job was half-done when you turned the body over to the aftercare vultures.”
    “I had to make arrangements. I couldn’t wait–”
    “–for me to attend my own daughter’s funeral?”
    Renee jabbed at the television remote and muted the sound. Jacob watched the silent interview guest fighting her hem line. The woman’s knees were a little too knobby for his taste. Back when he had taste, that was. He turned his attention to the fly in the syrup.
    Wasn’t there a saying about the fly in the ointment? Dr. Masutu’s tranquilizer worked miracles, freed his mind to explore the foolish. Jacob had stopped fighting, and the injections had been replaced with twice-daily pills. Diazepam. The quicker-picker-upper.
    Or the easier-to-forgetter.
    Or the don’t-give-a-damner.
    “Jake, we’re going to have to talk about it.”
    “There’s nothing left to talk about.”
    “There’s plenty.”
    “There’s nothing. It’s all gone.”
    “No. There’s still us.”
    “There’s no more ‘us.’ There’s just you and me. Or maybe just you.”
    “Don’t talk like that. You’ve always despised failure. That’s not the Wells way.”
    “I’ve had a lot of time to think. Hospitals are good for that, maybe even better than prisons.” Jacob pulled the straw from his milk carton and poked it into the syrup near the fly. The fly’s wings beat frantically.
    “I know this is terrible. But maybe we can get through it together. Start over.”
    “The way we did after Christine? You saw how that one turned out.”
    Renee finally sat, in the oak and mauve vinyl chair near the window. The sun had grown a shade more yellow outside, rising above the fog that hazed the horizon. In the old world, the happy distant past, Jacob would be at his desk at the M & W office, talking on the phone, cutting deals, lining up subcontractors. Or else out on the job site, looking at blueprints as a bulldozer ripped brown gashes in the mountainside.
    Developing.
    That was an interesting word, with several connotations. Developers made things happen. But development was also the term for a baby’s trek through the cycle, from microscopic fertilized egg to alien peanut creature to bawling, squealing reality.
    “Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “The kids were born in this hospital.”
    “That’s not so funny.”
    “Think about it. They took their first breaths from this very same air. The same sick air.” He waved the hand that held the straw and the fly finally broke free and arced across the room like a crippled bomber returning from a death run.
    The door swung open. A nurse came in, a male with a sour expression and two days of stubble. He stared at Renee as if she were the patient, then wiped his palms against his hospital blues and slipped on rubber gloves. He squeezed ointment from a tube and rubbed it softly into the skin of Jacob’s arms.
    “You’re looking good, my man,” the nurse said. His ID nameplate read “Steve Poccora” and his picture beneath it was clean-shaven and smiling. The smile looked as if it had been computer-generated in a photo manipulation program.
    “The doctor says I’m getting better every minute,” Jacob said.
    “Aren’t we all?” Poccora said. Then, to Renee, “We’ll have him home to you in no time.”
    “No hurry,” Renee said.
    Poccora started to grin at the joke, sensed the coldness in the room for the first time, then rubbed the ointment faster. Jacob