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probably missed my calling.”
    “So the lay preacher came—”
    “Preacher came, and he gathers everybody around for Bible study, fine with me, but. Guess what, I open my book, and turns out I’ve got my Koran instead of my Bible.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “Caddie Ann, you’d’ve thought I let loose a basket of snakes. Especially Mrs. Brill, that one with the walker, she almost had a coronary. Christians have very little sense of humor, I’m sorry to say.”
    “So you want me to bring your Bible?”
    “No great rush, just if you remember.”
    “How are you? How’s your leg today?”
    “Leg’s fine, everything’s fine. I’ve got to go, Susan wants to use the phone.”
    “See, if you had your own phone—”
    “What do I need a phone for? Bye—don’t forget my history.”
     
    “Morning,” Caddie paused in the front hall to say to Magill, who was lifting hand weights in the Blue Room. “Have you seen my grandmother?” At least she assumed it was Magill. He wasn’t wearing knee pads today, but he had on a huge, bright orange football helmet with his baggy pants and oversize T-shirt. To protect his head in case he fell, she assumed.
    “Nope. Susan?” he raised his voice to say.
    Caddie hadn’t seen Susan in her wheelchair by the window, listening through headphones to a tape player. She and Magill were the two “young ones,” although Susan looked at least forty. She was a librarian, according to Nana; she was recovering from a stroke; she had a boyfriend named Stan. She waved to Caddie and slipped the headphones off.
    “Hi.”
    “Hi, Caddie.”
    “I’m looking for my grandmother. Have you seen her?”
    Susan nodded, then said something in her thick, lispy voice Caddie couldn’t quite catch.
    Susan gave a crooked smile and went back to her tape.
    “Oh, okay. Thanks!”
    “She, um…” Caddie drifted closer to Magill, embarrassed because she’d pretended to understand when she hadn’t, not wanting to hurt Susan’s feelings.
    “She went to Hershey,” Magill said.
    “Hershey?” That’s what she’d thought Susan had said. “Hershey, Pennsylvania? How come?”
    “Field trip, Cornel and Bernie, Bea and Edgie, Frances. They’re touring the chocolate factory.”
    “Wow.” How…all-American. “Well, how about that, I’ve been stood up. After I went and wrote Nana’s biography for her.” She held up the manila folder she’d put it in.
    “Thoughtless,” Magill agreed.
    She leaned against the piano, out of his way. “Are you going to write one? For the memory book?”
    He shot her a glance, as if he thought she was kidding. “Uh, no.”
    “Why not? You’re a resident—why don’t you write one?”
    He hoisted his rusty silver weights behind his head, up and down, knotty muscles coming and going in his stringy arms. He smiled and didn’t answer.
    “I could write it for you,” she said on an impulse. “My grandmother’s turned out pretty well. If I say so myself.” She tapped the folder invitingly. The truth was, she was curious about him. “Want me to?”
    “Sure, go ahead.”
    “Really?” He didn’t look serious. “Okay, what do you do?”
    “Nothing. No, wait. Today I got my shoes on by myself. Look, perfect bows, no Velcro for me.” He stuck out a running shoe—but then he had to grab the edge of the windowsill to keep his balance.
    “I mean before you came here.” Before his accident. It happened about fifteen months ago, and it was some kind of skydiving mishap, of all things,but the details were off-limits. Nobody talked about it, and that by itself was strange; after the state of their health, the main topic of conversation among Wake House residents was each other.
    He went back to doing curls, flexing the ropy tendons in his forearms. “Engineer.”
    “What kind?”
    “Biomechanical.”
    A skydiving biomechanical engineer. “How old are you?”
    He sent her some kind of look, but it was hard to tell what kind because of the football helmet. It wasn’t