AWOUND IN THE GROIN!” Tessa said. “That’s classic. That’s mythic. Like Joseph Campbell on PBS. Remember that show?”
I did not. For years, I hadn’t watched any TV other than basketball. “So what’s the wound supposed to lead to?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Wisdom? Transformation? Something good. Oh, and I finally remembered to ask Herbie: there are some syndromes with small teeth, but they have other abnormalities, and probably someone with a syndrome wouldn’t look completely normal. Does Toby look normal?”
I nodded.
“Then Herbie says don’t worry. Some people just have smaller teeth. Like noses. Respect the human variety, he said.”
There’s always Viagra, I thought as I drove toward Mick in late July, thinking of our previous few Thursdays. He didn’t want to hurt me, he said, and each time as he tried to angle into me he’d gone soft. Before last month, this had happened maybe two or three times in all our years together, not enough to worry about or mention. But when I reached our room—our old comfortable room, not the site of my injury—I knew it would be an insult to mention Viagra to Mickey. He was in the middle of his basketball camps for kids, mired in eager kids, ambitious parents, and the needs of what the Turkman athletic director referred to as “fan development.” Respect the human variety, I thought. I told Mick about the wound in the groin, how it resulted, invariably, in greater happiness and wisdom.
“But the wound was in your groin,” Mick said. “You’re not saying it’s infectious, are you?”
“In a way. Because you’re worried about me. But you don’t need to be. See?” I leapt out of the bed and danced on the carpet. I felt like an idiot.
“Stop that!” Mick snapped. “You’ll hurt yourself.” I did stop. I sat down on the edge of the bed, stroked Mick’s cheek, and told him I was healed.
“You never know how you’ll react to something,” Mick said later as we lay in our usual position, skin to skin, his heart throbbing in my right ear. “When I saw that blood running down your leg, oh my gosh. I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about you these last few weeks. I got up at four a couple mornings last week and just walked around our back yard.” I wished he hadn’t told me this; the image was almost piercingly forlorn.
“It must have worried your wife,” I said, picturing a woman reaching toward an absence in the bed.
“Karn? She sleeps like a dead man.” She must, I thought, thinking of Mick’s and my years together. I hoped Karn kept sleeping. “I would have called you but I didn’t want to get you up.”
“You could have called me. I get woken up all the time. If it’s serious, sometimes I have to go in. Who knows? I could have been in the cath lab while you were out pacing.”
There was a hitch in his breathing, as if the reality of my life had just hit him. “You do get woken up, don’t you?” he said. “I guess you do.” I wished I hadn’t mentioned my cath lab nights, because the image of the both of us awake in the dark and apart made me feel terribly alone. The night we’d spent together had changed things: it showed us what we were missing.
YOU KNOW HE KILLS THEM,” my neighbor with the blond hair and three grade-school sons said when we met one evening at our mailboxes. “Poison. My husband found the big gray one stiff in our kitchen window well. I think she was a mother too. I was always seeing her with that yellow striped kitten. Have you seen that kitten? Oh my God, she looks like something on a calendar. I haven’t seen her for a couple days, though.” She gave me a worried look. “I hope he didn’t . . .”
“What’s his story, anyway?” I asked. “I didn’t recognize him.”
“Oh, he never comes out. The wife doesn’t either. They have bird feeders out back, by the seventh fairway, and they sit inside and watch them. My oldest sold them popcorn for Cub Scouts, but when he went back to deliver they wouldn’t pay.”
The neighbor and I looked at each other. I didn’t tell her that I’d been putting out milk and tuna on my deck for the last month, ever since the gnome man told me not to. I didn’t tell her that I’d been concerned about the disappearance of the big gray cat, that the black cat and the calico and the tabby were also missing, that I’d seen the yellow striped kitten before I left for the hospital at six that morning. I could have told her all these things, she would have liked me for them, but my neighbor was a cheerful, robust woman, implacable in the face of boys slingshotting each other with walnuts or riding their bikes down the slide in her back yard, and I didn’t want to sound like a solitary woman who worries about cats. I didn’t want her, I suppose, to see the ache in me.
MICK’S NEW CONTRACT, signed in April, brought him a little more than half a million a year. In August, the head of Turkman State’s English Department was offered a dean’s position in Iowa, and he made it known that without a salary boost commensurate with his experience, he had no choice but to leave. Turkman State’s president said—not publicly, but in a luncheon comment overheard by a reporter for the student paper—that, to bottom-line it, English was worth two cents to every basketball dollar. That a college president who wore bowties and professed to love both baseball and Yeats with equal fervor should speak so crassly about their department added salt to the English Department’s wounds. Soon word leaked from somewhere that Coach Crabbe had no respect for his athletes’ education, that he had in fact tried to have the English Department’s most effective tutor, who happened to be the one who had started something up with Tom Kennilworth, fired. The student paper, in its late-August edition, reported this allegation. By the time the fall semester started, members of the English and Romance Languages Departments were circulating petitions outside the humanities building, and a Rally for the Humanities was planned for the Saturday after Labor Day.
Mick’s salary was complicated, a base salary topped by various bonuses and annuities, but the English Department chair’s salary was quite simple. “That’s it?” I said. We weren’t even undressed yet. The only thing Mick had removed was his shoes.
“I’m not blaming him for being unhappy,” Mick said. “But his salary is completely independent from mine.”
“But your president linked them,” I pointed out. “And the contrast is stunning. And compare and contrast is a good rhetorical device, and all those English professors probably were on their debate teams in high school, and . . .” I trailed off at Mick’s comically horrified face.
“Whose side are you on? If the English Department gets some of our money, they get some of our power, and power’s something you don’t just want to hand over. It’s a turnover. We may be up by forty points, but I’m going to be out there yelling if the other guys steal our ball.”
I looked at him, and suddenly the air between us seemed to thicken with a viscous substance that might be greed. “Well . . .” I shrugged. “Forty points . . .” This is what impotence does, I thought. It makes money matter. I thought of the thick gold chain Howard wore around his right wrist. God knows what he did on Tuesdays. I glanced at Mickey’s profile, then looked guiltily away.
“We just stole nuclear cardiology from the doctor who’d been doing it for years,” I heard myself say, as if this confession would even some score. “We’ve been doing the scans in our office the last couple months.”
“Who’d you steal it from? Were they happy?”
Was Lenny Moss happy? Of course he wasn’t, but I hadn’t asked him. In fact, I’d gone to some pains to avoid him. I tried to explain the situation to Mick, realizing as I spoke that Howard and Jeremy and I were the strong robbing the weak, that I would never have a friendly chat with Lenny Moss again. I had planned to have him check over Howard’s difficult scans; in truth, I’d been so busy I hadn’t glanced at Howard’s scans myself. I hoped Howard was reliable. He was probably reliable.
“I didn’t steal anything from English!” Mick said. “I only wanted Kennilworth’s tutor reassigned, not fired! God, I hate the press,” he muttered. “Why does the press have to stick its big runny nose into everything?”
He had started out coaching because Coach Kean had cared, because Coach Kean had said he was a leader. He saved me / I’ll save them. It almost made me cry to think of the purity of that starting impulse, and how it had brought Mick to this.
AFTERA VIRTUOUS DINNER, Tessa ordered a piece of cheesecake. “Thank God for nightgowns,” Tessa said when her plate arrived. “Oh, come on,” she said, noticing my puzzled face. “Aren’t you thanking God for nightgowns at our age?” She popped a bite of cheesecake into her mouth and leaned forward confidingly. “Herbie hasn’t seen me naked in ten years.”
Mick sees me naked all the time, I thought, but that thought led to me seeing him naked, his consternated look and flaccid penis. Naked and impotent, you couldn’t get more naked than that. “That’s a shame, Tessa,” I said. “You’d look like Lady Godiva.”
Her face changed. “Do you really think so?”
“With your hair? Of course you would. You’d look gorgeous. You should surprise Herb one night and walk out of the bathroom naked. You know, present yourself to him.”
Tessa frowned and leaned forward, tapped her bent index finger on the table. She sat up straight and smiled, gave a little flick to her hair. “I’ll have a couple drinks first,” she said.
SEPTEMBER CAME . The rally proceeded as planned. I watched the West Virginia news via satellite dish and video recording.
TWO CENTS, FOUR CENTS, WE DESERVE A DOLLAR!
SET OUR TUTORS FREE
CRABBE’S CASH MAKES US CRABBY
A thin man with a beard and a knitted vest, almost a cartoon version of an English professor, said, “We’re faintly ridiculous, but we have a point.”
“Coach Crabbe refuses to comment,” the reporter said, and there was Mick, striding toward a building, shoulders hunched, square-jawed, looking almost like a football coach, looking—my heart sank to see this—faintly ridiculous himself.
“You do something all-American like make a lot of money and what happens?” he said to me over the phone.
I opened a mail subscription to the Turkman city paper. I thought in reading it I might glean something useful in protecting Mick.
“I’m just tired of it, you know?” he said that Thursday. “I spoke at a Rotary Club yesterday, and the guys there seemed to think I was all right.”
“How’re the players taking it?” He couldn’t get them together as a team until the middle of October, an NCAA rule, but he could meet with them individually. Mick sighed. “Eluard can’t write. Two of my incomings can’t read. You think the people in English are going to cut them any slack? And that tutor’s back with Kennilworth. If his marriage splits up, so be it. I wash my hands of it.”
For the first time I saw the irony of Mick’s being upset over Kennilworth’s affair. I wondered if he recognized it. “Mick . . .” I started, then stopped myself. But he’d caught my point.
“We’re different,” he said, giving me a sideways glance. “Don’t ask me how, but we are.”
“We’re grown-ups,” I said.
“That’s right. We know what we’re doing.”
“We’re friends.”
Mickey nodded. “Of course we’re friends. Platonic.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this. I pretended to laugh and started talking about my patient M.L., off decorating a hotel complex in Costa Rica.
YOUR LEORA GRIFFITHS came in Saturday,” Howard said, pulling up a chair beside me at the nurses’ station. I glanced up from the progress note I was writing. “Big anterior wall MI.” Myocardial infarction: the anterior wall ones were usually the biggest ones. “She was already in heart failure,” Howard went on. “I took her to the cath lab but she died on me. Bad, bad scene. V-tach, flash pulmonary edema, hypotension . . .” Howard shook his head. “Not much I could cure there.”
“Leora Griffiths? My Leora Griffiths? The one you said looked like me?”
He nodded. “I mean, far be it from me to criticize, but that lady’d been having chest pain forever. I’m surprised you didn’t cath her months ago.”
My God, I was thinking, why didn’t I? But then the memory rebuilt itself, like squares of patchwork filling in a quilt. Leora Griffiths’s chest pain was worrisome but atypical, her heart scan had been normal, and Leora herself had wanted a trial of meds before agreeing to a cath. Still, the thought of missing that much pathology in someone was unbearable. And I had liked Leora—her wry little mouth, her peculiar bursts of speech. I concentrated now on slowing down my own breathing. “I ordered a scan on her,” I said. “You did it. You read it as normal.”
“I reviewed that scan this weekend.” Howard nodded in a serious way. “I reviewed it.” Something in those words made me leery. “Someone could argue with my reading, I admit,” Howard went on,
“but it’s just as likely they’d call it breast artifact like I did.” Sometimes, on a heart scan, the shadow of a large breast could obscure the image of the heart.
“She’s five feet tall and weighs ninety pounds,” I said. “She has no breasts.”
“Had.”
I stared. In all my years of practice at this hospital, there had been a death in the cath lab only once: an elderly male whose cardiologist soon quit and moved to Canada. “You supervised her stress test!” I said to Howard. “You said she looked like me. Look at me: do I have breasts?”
His eyes darted to my chest.
“Excuse me.” It was the ward clerk, holding out a chart for Howard. “Is this supposed to say ‘Chemistry profile’?”
“You got my report,” Howard said to me. “It was your responsibility to read it.” And to the nurse, “Yes, that’s what it says. Doesn’t anybody read anymore? Excuse me”—he straightened his white coat on this shoulders—“I have rounds to make.”
TESSA LEFT A MESSAGE on my answering machine, and her voice was almost musical. “I just wanted to tell you: L.G. was a hit, a huge hit. I think L.G.’s going to be visiting again soon.”
I thought at first that Tessa was making a joke about Leora Griffiths. How could she? How could Tessa of all people be so cruel? Then I remembered Lady Godiva.
MY PARTNER IS AN ASSHOLE,” I told Mick when I walked into the room.
“Howard? That’s no surprise.” He was lying on the bed on his back with his eyes closed, fully dressed down to his shoes.
“I guess not.” I bit the inside of my cheek. I had called Leora Griffiths’s sister, the closest relative she had. “It’s all right,” the sister said. “She loved you as a doctor. And she always wanted to go fast.”
“I think I’m going crazy,” I said to Mick.
That did make his eyes open. “You?” he said. “You?” He patted the bed beside him. “Come here and let me calm you down.”
Things worked. I was glad I’d never popped out of the bathroom naked or mentioned the Viagra to Mick. He positioned me on top of him and held my hipbones as he entered. Tenderer, I thought, gentler. As if our formerly hectic lovemaking had slipped gratefully into middle age.
“When you walked in and said you were going crazy, was that a panic attack?” Mick said later as we rested. “Like, you can’t breathe and your brain feels scrambled?”
I frowned, wondering why he’d ever associate panic attacks with me. “No, I just . . .”
“Karn has panic attacks,” Mick said. Karn, his wife.
CLAUDIASMILED COYLY across the table. We were in our usual burger place, and for the first time I noticed the wicked-looking scythe hanging on the wall behind her. What kind of decoration was that? There was nothing cheerful about it. “Are you ready for some news?”
“You’re getting married. You didn’t even talk to me about it and you and Toby . . .” I wanted, suddenly, for us to find a new restaurant for our burgers: I didn’t want to ever again see that horrid thing behind my daughter. “Tell me, have you ever wondered about his . . .”
Thank God, a familiar buzz stopped me:
M. L. HOPKINS: SWOLLEN ANKLES
because I had been precariously close to asking Claudia if she’d noticed Toby’s teeth.
“Shit,” I said, reading the message. “I bet she’s drinking again.” Claudia stared. “You do it every time. It’s amazing—you do it every, every time.”
“What?” I said, confused. Could Claudia be pregnant?
“You don’t listen to me! I try to tell you something important and all you pay attention to is your beeper.” A moment before, Claudia had looked normal—lovely, luminous, in that pink square-necked shirt that flattered her light brown hair and rosy face—and now she was almost in tears.
“Claudia,” I said. I felt like crying. “Honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound all worked up. I knew you and Toby were serious, I understand if you . . .”
“Just listen for once! Listen! No, I’m not getting married, no, you don’t have me off your hands. My news is I found a new job.”
WHATDO YOU THINK?” I asked Lenny Moss, using my hand to cover the date on the corner of Leora Griffiths’s films. “Could that be breast artifact?”
“No way.” Lenny chuckled. “Sorry, Genie, this is one you’ve got to cath.”
MICK WAS SPOOKILY CHEERFUL on the phone, despite the continuing fuss over his salary. “Now we’re getting phone calls. I changed our number at home to unlisted. It’s too hard on Karn.” What did it mean that Mick was mentioning her so often? “People love you a lot, they hate you a lot,” he said. “They still want me for that leadership seminar in Baltimore, though. And get this, guess who’s saying now I’m worth every penny? Art Quinlivan, of all people. Not that he likes me. He just wants Turkman looking big-time.” Mick laughed, and the sound went on and on, as if nothing in the world could ever bother him at all.
Now that the Turkman paper was appearing in my mailbox, I had read Art Quinlivan’s column. I thought he was more ambivalent about Mick than Mick took him to be, but Quinlivan was certainly optimistic about this season’s team.
What’s wrong with me? I thought. Why do I notice Art Quinlivan’s buts and somewhats? Why can’t I snap out of things like Mick does?
This isn’t a good time, I thought. Life’s like that, I reminded myself. There are always bad days.
Claudia’s new job was a secretarial one at her old college, in a building two buildings from Toby’s office. The benefits were minimal, her office was a cubicle, her coworkers were entrenched and unfriendly, and the only advantage of the job, so far as I could see, was its proximity to Toby.
We’d made a date, two Sundays away, on a weekend I was not wearing my beeper, for Claudia and Toby to come to my house for dinner. They were serious, clearly. Claudia wanted me to know him better. I wanted to know him better.
I ran through my tai chi tape every night, but my chi seemed to be ebbing. At the drugstore to buy lipstick I picked up a kickbox ing tape instead. Maybe I’m secretly angry, I thought, remembering Claudia’s red face. The manicurist on her weekly house call rued the state of my nails.
But Mick and I were having sex again. That helped. That helped us both.
ZUCCHINIAND RED PEPPERS and portobello mushrooms on the grill. The sky was a beautiful autumn blue, the tips of the leaves yellow and red. I should notice the world more, I thought. Whole years circled around and I hardly saw them. I’d just run into one of my patients in the grocery. “You got old on me!” I felt like saying, shocked by his stooped posture and shuffling gait. Then I realized he’d been my patient for sixteen years, time enough to age us both. Funny I hadn’t noticed that in the confines of my exam rooms.
“Have you been a vegetarian long?” I asked Toby. I hadn’t known he was one until Claudia warned me as I planned this dinner.
Claudia, fork in the air, looked at Toby like an adoring mother in an advertisement for macaroni and cheese. Toby met my eyes warily, rubbed his hand over his burr of hair. Hard to imagine that body fueled by nothing but vegetables.
“I don’t like meat politics,” Toby said.
We had already talked about Toby’s graduate school days, his teaching schedule, his family, his hobbies (besides his vegetable garden, he coached coed soccer to elementary students), and I was desperate for any topic of conversation. “What do you mean?” I said.
Toby looked at me unblinkingly. “Everything’s political.”
“You mean . . . everything’s susceptible to the influence of position and power?” Ridiculous the sprightly way I said this, as if I were talking to a three-year-old. But I was pleased to have landed a definition so quickly.
Toby stopped chewing. “I personally would like to grow my own meat.”
“You mean have chickens?”
“Rabbits.”
I glanced toward Claudia. The thought of my daughter involved with the slaughter and cooking of rabbits was incomprehensible. Claudia never even used the word “rabbit.” She said “bunny.”
Claudia looked at me and smiled.
ANDSHE’S AN INTELLIGENT GIRL,” I told Mick. “She’s not a fuzzy thinker.”
“I wouldn’t think so. Not with you as a mom.” Mick lifted his arm from behind my head and shook it out.
An edge in his voice, as if he meant some criticism. Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe not. What stupid thing had I said when I arrived? How’s my half-million-dollar man? I should be more politic myself.
I sat up. “He’s older, she looks up to him. He’s feeding her all kinds of vegetable ideas.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is.” Mick scratched the back of his head. “But you have to be careful. Being mad at you could be the glue holding them together. Look on the nightstand. Page two.” I opened the Turkman Tattler—the Turkman State student newspaper—and saw a headline, “Athletics Blend Diverse Lives.” There were photos. Two tennis players, a gay male and a straight woman; a Serb and a Bos nian both on the soccer team; a black guy and a white guy, “best friends,” who played basketball together. The last pair was Eluard Dickens and Tom Kennilworth. The friends have been even closer since last season, when reported differences between the pair and Coach Mick Crabbe led to . . .
“I hear B.C. put the paper up to it,” Mick said, reading over my shoulder. B.C. was the Turkman athletic director. Mick couldn’t stand him. His initials were appropriate, Mick said. The guy was a cockroach; he came from a land before time.
I looked at Mick inquiringly.
“Jealousy,” Mick said. “B.C. makes a lot less than I do. But Karn says the trustees are on my side.”
“Karn? How does Karn know?”
“The president’s wife.”
I felt as if I’d walked into a spiderweb. I set down the paper and flicked at my face as if brushing something off.
“I hear Eluard is really looking hot in pickup games,” Mick said, propping himself up on his elbows. “I hear all he wants is the ball.” He smiled. “He stayed all summer with this guy who’d played in the NBA, and this guy took Eluard to his gym and ran him and played him one-on-one, and Flitt says this guy told Eluard he was too soft, no NBA team would ever want him, and if I was telling him different I was lying. Eluard’s bigger now—twenty-three pounds of muscle—and he’s mad. Flitt says he’s becoming a motherfucker.” I was startled at the word, then realized Mick was quoting.
“And that’s a good thing,” I said, half questioning. I knew what it meant: a fierce competitor, someone who’d be in there with his knees and elbows, intimidating, pushing, doing anything to win.
“You bet.”
“But he’s insulting you by saying you didn’t try to make him tough.”
“What do I care? He gets a couple more rebounds, a couple more shots each game—he can hate me all the way to Timbuktu. He looks at me now.” Mick gave a twisted sort of smile. “He glares. He looks at me like I’ve got your number, sucker. Listen, why should everybody like me? Some folks might be better off to hate me.”
For Mick, even before it started, this was already a better season than the last one. I wished I could be happy with him. I wondered what was wrong with me that I wasn’t. I thought about the yellow striped cat. Another night of frost and I might be able to lure her inside. She had lost her baby look but she was delicate, with slim paws and big blue eyes. Plenty of room on my big bed for her, if I could get her in.
THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT on my next Tuesday call night: the phone was ringing and someone was asking me questions. “You want the usual heparin? Five thousand units followed by an eight-hundred-unit drip?”
“What about Lovenox?” The newer, safer blood thinner.
“His chart says he’s allergic to it. But he says he took heparin okay.”
Dickie Dylan. Chest pain. So long since I’d ordered heparin. I had a glimpse of my mind like a disembodied hand groping for something on the night table.
“Fifteen-thousand-unit bolus,” I said. The hand—disturbingly—had turned into Toby’s hand. What did he and Claudia do, exactly, since he was so damn moral?
“Fifteen thousand?” the voice said sharply, making me doubt myself. Wasn’t it fifteen thousand? I used to order this all the time. The hand was moving between books and picture frames, threatening to knock things over. I remembered the gynecologist’s face when I said a pineapple.
“No, twenty-five thousand,” I said. “I’m sure. Twenty-five thousand, then keep him on the eight hundred.” I was asleep before I hung up the phone.
In the morning I walked into Mr. Dylan’s room and there was blood in his bag of urine, blood oozing around his IV site, streaks of blood where he’d spat out toothpaste in the sink.
I flung open his chart to the orders section, wondering if it was actually possible I’d ordered—as I suddenly remembered—a 25,000-unit bolus of heparin. Sweat erupted on my forehead. Mad. Insane. A mistake a competent doctor could not imagine making. Take two hundred aspirins and call me in the morning.
But Mr. Dylan was fine. He was sitting in his bed looking at me, saying, “And how are you today, Dr. Toledo?” A concerned look changed his face. He gagged, and bloody vomit splashed his gown.
HE’SALIVE,” I said to Mick over my cellphone. I was sitting in my parked car in my dark garage, too tired to open the car door and make my way inside. “I mean he’s fine, really. He’s in intensive care and his blood’s unthinned and his GI bleed seems to have stopped and he’s not having any more chest pain. His chest pain probably wasn’t even cardiac. His EKGs and enzymes are fine, and when the GI guy looked into his esophagus it was all tore up.”
“Did you tell him what you did?”
“Yeah. You know what he said? I don’t need this information! I don’t want this information! I tried to report myself, I went to the chief of staff, and he said it’s a systems problem and they should have had dosages already on the order sheets and the nurse might have written down my order incorrectly and basically I shouldn’t worry. But how can I not worry? I mean, there are things that I should know.”
“Oh, honey.”
“I should be . . . I should be . . . I should be able to do it in my sleep!”
“You work too hard, honey.”
It took a moment to realize the mewling sound I heard was coming from me; I thought at first that the yellow-striped cat was trapped under one of my tires, and this vision sent me into a panic because I usually spotted her when my car pulled into the drive. “I know I work hard, I always work hard, but then I think that this is a message to me, if I weren’t spending all my time running around with you and worried about Claudia, I . . .”
I kept a flashlight beside the door from the garage into the kitchen. I got out of my car and stumbled toward it.
“Listen, if you weren’t worried about Claudia, you’d be worried about your taxes. If you weren’t running around with me, you’d be running around with Tessa. It’s always going to be something. It’s life.”
I snorted gratefully, turned the flashlight on, headed outside through the garage door.
“You should take it easy, babe,” Mick said. A hesitation. “You want to skip tomorrow?”
“No. God no. But I won’t get there till late. I had to reschedule all my morning office patients for tomorrow. And I’m on this weekend.” I knelt on the ground and shone my flashlight under the deck. Where was my kitty? Her usual sleeping spot was empty. A little bowl of ground with nothing in it.
“They never let you rest, do they?” Mick said softly. “The games are on the schedule. The fans are in the stands.”
I jerked the flashlight beam around with increasing franticness, thinking of my gnome-like neighbor. There. Thank God. The cat was under a new corner of the deck, sound asleep. Ginger, I’d taken to calling her. “You know, Mick,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “You know.”
