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Wainwright. We can do that for you.” I gave him my best you-betcha nod. “Why just the one?”
    Harry managed a crafty smile. “On a dry fly, Jordan.”
    Now, this was a taller order. I saw no chance that Harry could actually wade the river, his best chance to take a fish on top. As for the lake, the summer had been hot and practically rainless, and what trout there were had long since headed for the lake’s colder waters, resting above the thermocline like so much unexploded ordnance (or, come to think of it, one very old and barnacle-encrusted F-4 Phantom lying in the drink off Newport News). It was productive if dull fishing if you were willing to take your time and drift a nymph or pull a wooly bugger below the surface; but to take one on top, as Harry wanted to do, would take plenty of raw luck and a first-class presentation besides, to land the fly as light as a baby’s kiss right on the nose of some off-chance cruising lunker. All of which, not incidentally, Harry certainly knew.
    “On top?” I thought a gentle approach might nudge him around to the idea of a low-stakes outing on the lake with no hopes in particular. “I have to say we’d do better underneath. It’s not really the best time for dry fly.”
    Harry shook his head. “Time I haven’t got, Jordan. Hal’s given me just twenty-four hours for this.”
    Joe, who’d mostly kept silent until now, jingling the change in his pockets and shuffling his feet on the loose gravel of the parking area, slid me a look that said we’d talk later, that there was more to this than I knew.
    “I think what Jordan meant,” Joe said, “is that it’s entirely possible.”
    “Twenty-four hours, Jordan,” Harry said. “Then it’s back to the hospital, where they’ll hook me up to every machine they’ve got and shoot me full of so much morphine I won’t care that I’m dying.” Harry stopped, looking as if he were about to cough-a prospect I dreaded almost physically-pulled the mask back up to his face, and took a pair of long, whistling breaths. Frances moved to his other side, cupping his elbow and watching his face as he pulled the air in. I could tell it had been a long, hard haul for her. It’s easy to imagine the worst when a rich man like Harry marries a younger woman late in life, to see it as one more of the world’s cold-blooded calculations-in this case, some eleventh-hour deathbed care for a piece of Harry’s not inconsiderable drugstore pie. But to watch her watching Harry struggle with every breath to pull the sweet taste of oxygen over his ruined lungs was to know that she truly cared about him, loot or no, and had trucked to hell and back.
    “Harry? All right?” Frances looked deep into his face, and Harry gave a faint nod. We waited while, bit by bit, some color flowed back into his cheeks. The sun had dipped below the line of mountains across the lake, and suddenly it was full-on night in the North Woods, the temperature falling like a stone. A shiver uncoiled around my spine, and I wanted to get Harry inside.
    At last he drew the mask away, pulling with it a spaghetti strand of spittle. Frances produced a handkerchief to blot it away.
    “They mean well, Jordan, and I’ve got no problems with it. But it’s not how I’d do things.”
    I wasn’t sure if he meant the doctors, or Frances and Hal, or maybe all three. In any case, it was clear to me that he was hoping he’d die before he ever got home, and the thing he feared most was that this probably wouldn’t happen.
    “All right, then,” I said. “We’ll get the job done.”
    “Twenty-four hours,” Harry said, and began his long creep toward the dining hall, Hal and Frances each taking a side. Kate was still carrying January, who had fooled us all by falling asleep. “One fish, Jordan. My way. That’s the deal.”

TWO
    Joe
     
    When Hal telephoned to tell me his father was dying, I couldn’t help myself. My first thought was: Thank God.
    It is possible to hate somebody