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you new?” She glanced at my ID badge. “Daniel Redding?”
    “Just to the night shift,” I told her. “Call me Syd.”
    She was thirty-five anyway, I guessed, probably forty. Her rings, a fat diamond, a heavy gold band, an opal, hung from a safety pin on her smock. Her hair was streaked in blonds and blacks and layered back. She had hazel eyes and clear skin and a full and generous mouth, and she had that look that long pain brings, the kind you endure, whether it is physical or something else. I did not think she was quite beautiful. I had always liked the word handsome when I read it in a description of a woman, and wondered what sort of a real one it would fit. Here, I thought, was one.
    “Don’t tell me my husband chased you away.”
    And so I knew who she was—Ted Kessler’s wife. It was right there on her own badge. I had seen her up here before, of course, on a few occasions, but hadn’t made the connection.
    I said, “Okay, I won’t tell you.”
    She laughed and then in a gesture that felt both incongruous and endearing reached across the dead body, her hand open, palm up, beckoning. I wasn’t sure what she wanted. I put out my own hand, and she grasped it and placed her other hand on top of it. I thought maybe we were going to pray.
    “He does it to everyone, sooner or later,” she said. “I’m Joyce. Welcome.”
    In the basement I set the tray on the counter in the office and washed my hands, which were trembling as they did when I let myself get too hungry, though I had eaten not long before that. I wrote “Cancel” on the order and tossed it on the table where Phyllis was playing solitaire and eating a cheese sandwich.
    She said, “What happened?”
    “Dead.”
    She nodded and moved a card.
    “She was a hundred.”
    “Hm,” Phyllis said, never looking up.
    In the lounge, Ray sat with his feet on the table. Oween, the clerk, was at the sink, washing out the coffee pot.
    I said, “That one was easy.”
    Oween sucked in her breath and said, “You talking ’bout that old Mrs. Washington?”
    I nodded.
    “She pass?”
    “Yes.”
    “Lord in heaven. Can you imagine?”
    “I can,” Ray said. “Dying is what old people do best.”
    “I’m talking ’bout havin to live on this earth for that long.” Oween opened a foil packet of coffee and poured it into the machine and closed it and turned it on. Taped to the machine was a sign written on a paper towel that said: “Coffee ¢25, if you dont pay this WILL be terminated.” Someone had crossed out the word “This” and written “You” over it.

    I came home one weekday morning in that same gray season, a time when the street should have been as quiet as the dead, to see Donny bent under the hood of the Road Runner.
    I’d always seen him as a stupid boy and later a stupid boy-man, twenty-four going on fourteen who, if you told him you thought down was a pretty direction, would jump. He’d been a year ahead of me in school until the fourth grade, when he got held back. It was a kind of attraction-repulsion dichotomy between us. Donny was big early and I was not until much later, so the natural progression was that he thumped me around a little now and then, a well-timed shove that put me on my ass or a quick abdominal uppercut to short circuit my breathing. In retaliation, sometimes delayed for several days, I’d lay into him with my tongue (“Dimwitted dickhead!”) and often as not make him cry before I left with a final epithet flung over my shoulder (“Fat-fuck flunker!”). It makes me cringe even now to remember the alliterative viciousness that came to me so naturally (“Repulsive reject! Reeking retard!”). Nothing he did to me could have hurt so much, and the sight of that big blotchy blob of a bully-boy blubbering tears and snot down over his lip, the fact that he had such a soft spot, that he could be so wounded after seeming almost animal-like, a product of nature’s grosser forces, fascinated me.
    I went inside and