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salon for seventeen years. There’s people fussing over those boys left and right. You don’t have to worry about any of that.”
    “So what do you need?”
    “I want you to talk to me. When you get sick, people stop talking to you. I mean, really talking. They just keep telling you to try and get some rest now.” She folds her arms across her chest. “I want to be entertained.”
    “I can do that,” I say. I’m not really surprised by her bluntness. Death’s just one more foreign country and people begin to speak a different language the closer they get to the border. Sweet old ladies start to curse. Cynics start to pray. And people like this woman, who I bet never asked anybody for anything her whole life long, suddenly come up with a whole list of demands.
    “We can talk about whatever you want,” I tell her. “And I can bring movies, if you like them, and whatever food you crave. The stuff that comes out of the kitchen here is nutritious but it isn’t very tasty.”
    “I want sugar and salt and fat,” she says. “I don’t know why they’d bother trying to be nutritious now. That just seems mean.”
    “Their intentions are good,” I say, although privately I agree with her. Some people don’t have the stomach for working with the actual clients. Soft volunteers, Teresa calls them, and they have odd little ideas about what dying people need. They paint clouds on blue ceilings and show up with grandma gifts like hand-knit afghans and saltwater taffy. And they insist on paying twenty percent of the whole annual budget for a dietician to plan meals full of calcium and roughage and antioxidants, even though at this stage in the game you could probably make a better argument for spending the money on tequila.
    “I’ll bring you whatever you want,” I say. “I’ve got plenty of experience sneaking ice cream and barbecue past the guards.”
    “What kind of movies do you watch?”
    “Old ones,” I say.
    “Like Pretty Woman ?”
    “No, really old ones, from the thirties and forties and fifties. Have you ever heard of Bette Davis?” She shakes her head. “Joan Crawford? Katharine Hepburn? I know you know Marilyn Monroe.”
    She brightens. “I want Marilyn Monroe and a Meat Lover’s Supreme. Thin crust. Can we do that?”
    “Sure.”
    “And you still have to tell me something about yourself. You’ve probably got a whole file on me and I don’t know anything about you. Like . . . are you married?”
    “My husband died a year ago.”
    “Did you love him?”
    I force myself to an upright position and look back at her. “Of course I loved him. What kind of question is that?”
    She folds her arms behind her head. “Okay, we’ll start with something easier. What are you going to do this afternoon when you leave here?”
    “I’m going to let a Russian man teach me how to dance.”
    “You’re jerking me.”
    “Am not. Just this very morning I spent a hundred and ten dollars on a pair of high-heel dance shoes.”
    She looks at me and we both burst out laughing. Her bangs fall forward and she pushes them back again and I think that yeah, you can tell she worked in a beauty salon because although her hair is thin, she’s trying hard to keep it neat. This woman cares what she looks like. The chemo probably broke what was left of her heart.
    “See?” I say. “You think you have me pegged but I’m full of surprises.”
    “I never said I had you pegged,” she says, and when she grins I see that she’s chewing gum, the kind they give you to help with the nausea. She’s slumped farther down in the bed and her breathing is a little labored. Our conversation has both revved her up and worn her out and I make a mental note to remember this, that she’s sicker than she seems. Without thinking, I reach toward her and she grabs my hand. It’s an awkward sideways grip, but we do a little shake thing with it, like we’re agreeing on something. Working out some sort of deal, the details of which