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window. He had closed his eyes and fallen asleep behind the steering wheel. “Bender,I’ll drive.” She shook him awake, enough to get him out of the car and into the passenger’s seat.
    She climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted it for shorter legs. Before she could tell him that Sherry was coming to open up the house, he had fallen back to sleep. Since she had to take Bender to Duke first anyway, Sherry would have the house opened up and aired out a day ahead.
    A card of pills was in his shirt pocket. He had taken sleeping pills for as long as he had been taking surgical shifts. But the small yellow pills did not look familiar to her. She would look them up later. Whatever they were had the same effect on Bender as cold medicine on Eddie. She took a deep, cleansing breath and aimed the car for Raleigh.
    She found a country music station but turned it down low so as not to ruffle Bender’s intellectual sensibilities. Bender was pale. Beads of sweat formed just above the bridge of his nose between his brows. It was the first time she noticed that he truly appeared sick. She felt a sinking responsibility for what had happened to him. If she had noticed sooner, he might have gotten tested sooner. She had friends who confessed that they fantasized about what they would do if their husbands died. Saphora had not wished death on Bender. She had just imagined him far away, as if she could erase the place between the day she had met him and now.
    The way he was acting was so not like him. Bender lived life happily on the perimeters of danger. Twice each summer he and other surgeons met in the gulf to tarpon fish. His last fishing excursion, he was the only man on the expedition to reel in a marlin. Then he started raft fishing, a sport that some of the twenty-something fishermen had sold him on. He caught a swordfish that might have pulled him under if his buddies had not rescued him.
    Years ago he booked a wild game hunt, insisting that Ramsey and Turner accompany him. But Turner, loudly demonstrative, had gotten so afraid of the unfamiliar sights and sounds of the Serengeti that the guide had ordered them back to the compound. Before dawn, Turner had said, the sound of the Jeep’s engine gunning woke them up. Turner worried all day when Bender had stayed long past the allotted time. But in he came at sundown, the cicadas screaming and Turner pacing. Ramsey cried so hard Bender yelled at him to act like a man. Bender and the guides hauled a dead lion out of the Jeep. Bender sent it off to his friend who did taxidermy as a hobby. Then he hung the head in his office at home. Saphora never liked going in there after that.
    Bender slept until Saphora drove into the afternoon crawl of Raleigh’s traffic.
    “I was dreaming about you and the kids,” he said.
    The last time he had said that was when Turner and Gwennie were still in diapers. “What were we doing?” she asked.
    “We were all out in a boat. But not Lake Norman. It was a different lake. People were loud along the shoreline, like in Mexico. Even louder. There was rock music, not our kind, but like the kids play nowadays. I kept trying to get us farther from the noise. But you kept saying how you liked the music. You didn’t seem to mind it.”
    “I do like music.”
    “I just wanted things quiet.”
    “Maybe you shouldn’t allow me in your dreams.”
    “Why do you have to say that?”
    “Good grief, Bender! I annoy you as much in your dreams as when you’re awake.”
    He frowned, then continued. “There was this old woman on theshore. She was staring at me. I kept steering the boat away from the shore. But then I would look up and there she would be again. She was following me. She had on this, I don’t know what you call it, this white serape thing wrapped around her. She was all white—white hair, white serape, white shoes.”
    “Like an angel?”
    “Not beautiful like you’d think. Very old and penetrating eyes. At least I don’t think she