ONE MORNING, I WAS ON MY WAY DOWNSTAIRS TO work when Tony saw me in the hallway. The door to his room was open, but the room still looked dark. Tony’s face was red, and he looked scared.

“Julius” is what he said. “Julius, Sal Gal. Take a look.”

I went into the room Tony shared with Julius, Darnell, and Ray. Darnell was awake and sat inside, but still in his pajamas. It looked like little ducks crawled over his arms. Tony was dressed in his blue sweater and tan pants, but no socks and shoes. He stood over Julius’s bed. Tony’s hands and shoulders trembled, as if he was cold.

“Look, Sal.”

“Julius?” I called from across the room. “Julius?”

Julius didn’t answer. He didn’t move. Then I noticed I couldn’t hear him breathing.

“Don’t look at his face,” said Tony. But I had to. I touched Julius’s hand, just on top of his covers. It felt cold and hard. His fingers looked stuck together and didn’t move.

“Julius,” I said again softly, and then took a look at his face.

I had to turn away.

But before I did, I saw an eye, half-open and milky. His mouth was open just a little, and small white bubbles shined and popped in the corner of his lips.

“I think he’s dead, like they call it,” said Darnell.

“Did you… shake him? Try to wake him up?” I asked.

Darnell shouted from the edge of his bed: “Julius! Julius! Wake up now!”

I moved my hand to Julius’s shoulder. It felt as hard and cold as the counter in the kitchen where I chopped.

“Maybe we should get Mrs. Byrne,” I said.

“I’m still in my pajamas,” said Darnell. “I can’t go there in my pajamas.”

“I don’t think she’ll mind,” I said, and Tony and Darnell ran out the doorway, their bare feet slapping on the floor. A few seconds later, I heard them shout, “Mrs. Byrne! Mrs. Byrne! It’s Julius! Julius!”

I didn’t want Julius to be alone. So I stayed, and put my hand on top of his cold fingers, and looked into his cloudy eyes. I saw a crumpled towel on the end of his bed and put it over his eyes.

“Just sleep now, Julius. Have a good sleep.”

Jimmy came out of his room, rubbing his eyes, his robe open, and the belt dragging over his toes. He cleared his throat to say “birdie.”

I stood with Julius for a while and heard lots of voices and doors groaning open and snapping shut. Then I heard steps on our floor and a light knock and a deep voice.

“Ms. Miyake?”

It was Detective Bridges.

“I heard you were up here,” he said softly. “You’re a good friend.” He moved behind me and put a soft hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you say good-bye to your friend for now and join Detective Rivas downstairs? I’ve got a little work to do up here with Julius. And I think you can help Esther.”

I walked downstairs slowly toward the voices I heard. I smelled coffee bubbling and rose cologne, and turned the corner around from the kitchen and saw Esther Rivas. She stood up from the chair where she sat at the table with Mrs. Byrne.

“Ms. Miyake. Sal Gal,” she said. “Our children had a great time with you. My husband, too. I’m sorry this brings me back here so soon.”

I began to cry. My shoulders began to shake. My nose began to run. I heard Mrs. Byrne’s chair scratch the floor as she got up to put a hand on my arm and a napkin to my nose. Esther put an arm around my shoulder.

“I’ve never. Seen that. Before,” I said between sobs. “Someone. Like. Julius. Is.”

“It upsets me, too,” Esther told me. “And I usually see strangers. Like that. You knew Julius. He was your friend.”

“He lived a good life, Sal,” Mrs. Byrne told me. “A happy life, with friends like you. Remember his smile? Like an elf. Like an imp. He got to be seventy-three. Let’s be happy today that he was around for so long and we knew him,” she said. “I think the coffee might be ready now, dear. Do you think you could be kind enough to get a couple of cups for us? And maybe for Detective Bridges, too.”

I wiped my nose, crumpled the napkin in my hand, and turned into the kitchen in time to hear Esther Rivas say to Mrs. Byrne, “Mr. Mills was seventy-three?”

“Yes.”

“Well, God bless.”

“Yes.”

“No family you know about, I imagine?” Esther asked.

“Just those who knew him here,” said Mrs. Byrne. “Julius was in one home or another since he was a teenager.”

“Sixty years,” said Esther.

“A ward of the state for all of that time, too,” said Mrs. Byrne.

“Think of all the history he saw,” said Esther.

“History doesn’t really happen here,” Mrs. Byrne told her. “News, weather, traffic. Who is president or mayor, what’s the new music, basketball shoes, or hairstyles. Every now and then, somebody doesn’t show up at breakfast. They notice. But our folks just keep going,” she said. “Sadness doesn’t weigh them down.”

I came around the corner with 3 paper cups of coffee on a plate in time to see Detective Bridges walk through the door and stand near the table.

“Everything seems in order upstairs,” he told them. “Looks like his time just came. Probably his heart. Nothing looks out of place. I closed his eyes and closed the door.”

“The EMS team should be here soon,” said Esther. “They’ll take Julius. I’m sorry we had to come back so soon, Mrs. Byrne. On another sad call. How often does… well… this happen here?”

“‘This’? You mean ‘death’? You’re being delicate, Detective. Not much. As our folks get sick, or begin to fail, they go to other places that take better care of them. We had a woman here for years, Juleanna. Bright, lively. Almost overnight, it seemed, she couldn’t take care of herself. She was moved to a place that could. Then, I heard, she was gone. A few months ago, we had Miss Teller—Stevie, she was called, about sixty—who had sudden trouble walking. Took her to the hospital. Turned out she had a small stroke. Two, three days later…”

Mrs. Byrne didn’t finish the words.

“We didn’t tell folks here. They knew she was sick, saw she was gone, and just went on. It’s the cycle of life, Detective,” Mrs. Byrne told Esther. “Someday, you may come here for me.”

“Well, not so soon, we hope,” said Esther Rivas.

Tony, Darnell, Mary, and I counted out spoons and put out bowls just before people came down for breakfast. Detective London had brought down Tony’s shoes. Darnell was still in his pajamas, but Mrs. Byrne had found a pair of white socks for him to wear so his feet wouldn’t be cold on the kitchen floor.

“They’re my socks,” she told him. “From the gym.”

“I can’t wear girl socks!” said Darnell.

Mrs. Byrne laughed and asked with a smile, “There something wrong with being a girl, Darnell? I’m a girl, you know. So are Mary and Sal. Sal Gal,” she reminded him.

“You be girls, I’ll be a guy,” said Darnell as he held out the socks. “Nice and soft, though.”

“For my dainty size tens,” Mrs. Byrne told him. “Boys wear them, too. Socks are socks.”

“Julius wears his socks to bed,” said Darnell.

“Well, people get cold feet,” said Mrs. Byrne.

“They’re gonna take him away with his socks, aren’t they?” asked Tony. “So his feet don’t get cold.”

“I’m sure,” she told us.

After Mrs. Byrne had left to help Esther Rivas and London Bridges with the crew from the truck that had come for Julius, Conrad told us to take down the bread while he opened the refrigerator for the mayonnaise and the plastic packs of sliced turkey.

Tony asked him, “So, Laurence and Julius are up there together?”

“Oh, no doubt,” Conrad told him. “Having their cornflakes together right now.”

“Laurence liked the flakes with raisins,” Tony reminded him.

“Well, maybe Laurence is branching out a little,” said Conrad with a wink. “Up in Heaven, they’re bound to have the best cornflakes. Best of everything.”

He slapped down packs of the sliced turkey.

“Will they ever come by to say hello?” asked Mary.

“Well, maybe not in the way you’re thinking, Mary Berry,” he told her. “Not by walking in here and saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’ But in ways we’ll feel, all the same. A memory. A laugh. Tell some old story, and they’ll be right back with us in our thoughts.”

Conrad held the huge jar of mayonnaise in his elbow and twisted the top.

“It’s that easy?” she asked.

“That easy,” said Conrad. “They’re up there with my mom and my dad, and my old hound, Felix, and my old bird, Tweetie. And George Washington, Winston Churchill, Harriet Tubman, and Holy Mary, Mother of God.”

“I was named after her,” said Mary. “By my mother.”

“She sure loves you, then, Mary Berry,” said Conrad.

Tony began to shake slices of bread onto the counter and asked, “So Laurence and Julius are with their mothers?”

Conrad paused for a moment.

“Well, if not now, then soon. Blink of an eye. Really, it all flashes in front of us. A morning like this reminds you. Each minute goes by, can’t be taken back. No time to waste.”

“So stop talking and make sandwiches?” I asked Conrad, who told me, “Oh, Sal Gal, talking with your friends is never a waste of time.”

“I can’t wait to be dead,” said Mary. “I can see my mother. I can have the best of everything.”

“Oh, you don’t want to say that, Mary Berry,” said Conrad. “Being alive—it’s a gift. We should hold on to it as long as we can, and pass it along to others. Heaven—that’s a reward. We don’t get to choose it. We have to earn our way there.”

Conrad knew lots of things. He knew how to make hamburgers, fry potatoes, mix chocolate milk, scrape pans, and chop coleslaw. He could change the huge light bulbs in the kitchen, when they blinked out, and knew how to make all kinds of cookies, with raisins and nuts and chocolate and mint chips. So Mary asked him, “How?”

Conrad held up the plastic spatula he used to spread mayonnaise and told us, “Do good things. Make people happy. Take care of others.”

Darnell had been scratching the bottoms of his feet, then stood up.

“What if I just want to stay here?” he asked. “I know I’m okay here. I get by here. I eat, I color, I help you, I play around. I get up there—who knows?”

Conrad sank the spatula into the mayonnaise and smiled.

“Well, as I say, Darney Chili con Carne, we don’t get to choose. There’s a power in life bigger than us.”

“Bigger than Mrs. Byrne?” he asked.

“She’s mighty big. But yes, bigger even than her.”

“Wow” was all Darnell could say.

Esther Rivas spent some time with Mrs. Byrne in her office, and when she came out she found me in the kitchen.

“I wanted to ask you something before we left, Sal.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Well, you never know,” said Esther. “But what I wanted to ask was this. Have you ever been to a Seder dinner?”

“No. I don’t know. I guess not.”

“For Passover. It’s a holiday,” she explained. “Like Christmas is a holiday. Well, not quite like Christmas, I guess. It’s when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt.”

I didn’t know any of that, really, but could tell Esther, “I’ve heard of Moses. And Egypt.”

“Well, everything gets explained at dinner anyway,” she said. “We have a family dinner. Family and friends. Special foods. We’d like you to come. Rob, Javvy, Miriam, me—all of us. Mrs. Byrne says it’s fine. Would you like to bring a friend? Lon will be there, too. Detective Bridges. And his girlfriend.”

I felt my face get a little red.

“Ferne is her name,” said Esther. “She’s very nice. You can tell her that they should get married.”

My face felt more red and I smiled.

“Maybe Mary can come.”

“The nice young woman with wavy brown hair? Of course,” said Esther. “It’s this Saturday. Mrs. Byrne says she’ll make sure you’re ready, and Rob will pick you up in a cab.”

“Rob Bartlestein?”

Esther Rivas laughed.

“The same. The Rivas-Bartlestein household will see you in a couple of days, Sal Gal.”

I got so excited thinking about dinner that I didn’t think again about Julius for a while. It wasn’t until Bob had made sure we’d brushed our teeth and splashed water on our faces, and Mary, Pilar, Trish, Shaaran, and I were on top of our beds and Bob had snapped off the lights and called out, “Good night, ladies! Sweet dreams!”

“I don’t want to dream,” said Trish. Our room was dark, but we saw lights from the streets and buses and stores outside, zipping and slipping across the window and our wall.

“Julius might be in my dream,” Trish went on. “Trying to get out of being dead.”

“You can’t get out of being dead,” said Shaaran. “You don’t go back and forth.”

“Julius’s green sweater smells like barf,” Pilar remembered. “Do they have to give it to someone?”

“It died before Julius,” said Shaaran.

We laughed.

“Julius had that funny walk, didn’t he?” said Pilar. “Picked up his foot.”

“Like he was going to step on a bug,” said Trish. “Cute little guy.”

“I don’t like all these people around here dying,” I told everyone. “You get to know somebody, and they just die.”

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Mary told all of us. “Make it stop right now.”

I watched a red bus light slide down the wall, like a glowing worm, and before it reached the end of my bed with my feet, I fell asleep.