24.

In the past, hearing Eka upstairs on her cell phone, I’ve inwardly compared her voice to a blue jay’s squawk and an electric knife. Many times, I’ve wished she would shut up.

Transcribing our interview, though, I find her accent almost charming. She speaks slowly in English, without that chattering bird quality. She struggles to find the right word, or something close. It’s touching.

I used to fall hard for women with accents. The Irish girl at the dry cleaner’s, she of the profuse freckles and sky-blue irises, would murmur, “Wednesday,” and I’d be transported to a misty, verdant realm of fairy magic. And Marcella from Rotterdam, who sometimes tagged along to photograph my profilees—every time she told me the next turn to take, I wished I could kiss her delicate shoulder. And then there was Lena. American English is dull and familiar, but add the rhythm and melody of a distant land, and the music intoxicates.

Or, it used to. Thankfully, I’ve aged out of that particular folly.

No reply from Lena. I can calm down now.

I typed obesity into the Google box just now, for no rational reason, and tumbled down a rabbit hole, the cries of tormented strangers echoing around me. There was the guy who can’t go anywhere without an oxygen mask and motorized scooter . . . the woman who can’t laugh or sneeze without letting loose a gusher of pee, because of the weight pressing on her bladder . . . the mother who gets yeast infections between her layers of excess skin . . . the man who had to go to the grain co-op to get weighed on the truck scales . . . the wife whose husband won’t appear with her in public, who has lost her joy, who can no longer look other people in the eye, who avoids the mirrors in her own home.

In the face of such anguish, I can only say, Shut up! Don’t whimper and plead for understanding—tell the world to go fuck itself! Or, if you don’t have the courage, at least preserve the last crumbs of dignity with silence.

Since Eka seemed to have forgotten our appointment, I climbed upstairs to ring Mrs. N’s bell, and found the lights of a silent ambulance blinking out front.

First thought: She didn’t realize how little time she had left.

I had it wrong again, though. The lights were flashing for Mrs. N, not Eka. Two EMTs wheeled her out on a gurney; her sons and Eka followed. Holding a tissue to her bloody nose, Mrs. N seemed irritated by all the fuss. She’d blacked out and fallen on the way from the kitchen to the bedroom, Kai or Ahvo explained. They were taking her to the hospital to see why she passed out, and to x-ray her wrist, which had already turned green and purple.

“So much trouble for nothing,” the patient said, adjusting her hair curlers.

Was it Eka’s fault that her employer had fallen?

“I was in bathroom,” she told me. “I told her please you don’t move.”

The twitching of her cheek said, I’m sicker than she is— but I don’t think her boss’s sons have any idea. Here she is, wrestling with the angel of death, and she has to put their mother’s hair in curlers until she drops.

“Angus, come here,” Mrs. N said.

Her voice had more scratch in it than usual. When I came close enough for her to poke my wrist, she whispered, “She’s too young for you!”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking or delirious. Either way, some region of her brain must have bled, numbing her normal reserve.

I tried to fire back a blithe retort, but found the chamber empty. Click!

(Her moles and blotches, her magenta ankle veins, her soft wrinkles—all of it reminded me of how horrifying old people looked to me when I was small. Now that I’m nearly there myself, the signs of age seem more familiar and forgivable. But I assume I look just as hideous to the young as my grandparents looked to me.)

I asked Eka if she would come see me once the ambulance left. She said she had to go to the hospital with Kai and Ahvo, but promised to visit tomorrow.

Cindy from upstairs appeared at the curb, wearing a black satin Mets jacket over pajama pants. Don from next door wandered over, too. When she heard what had happened, Cindy scrunched her brow in sympathetic concern and said, “Ohhhhh,” high then low then rising again, as if some local puppy had hurt its paw.

This becomes significant, Bob. Trust me.

One of the twins followed the ambulance with Eka, the other stayed behind to lock up the house. I couldn’t tell which one had left and which one stayed; they have no distinguishing marks and they both sport blond mustaches. (Always a mistake.) When speaking to either of them, I float in an odd state of uncertainty.

The bland twin came over to shoot the breeze with his mother’s tenants and neighbor. “She may need to go into assisted living at some point soon,” he informed us.

Don tsked. “She won’t like that.”

“You’re right. She’d rather stay where she is. But she’s fallen twice. I think the time is coming.”

I heard the implication. They’ll be selling the house, and I’ll have to leave. Or—cheering thought!—their plans won’t affect me whatsoever, because I’ll be gone by then.

Cindy and Garrett, though . . .

“Looks like we’ll need to go apartment-hunting,” I told her.

“That wouldn’t happen for a while,” the pudgy Finn said, “not with this housing market. But, eventually, yes.”

“You have to do whatever’s best for your mom,” Cindy told him. “We understand.”

Chubby-cheeked, inscrutable, he nodded like a lightly tapped bobblehead, and left.

“Do you know which one that was?” I asked as he waved to us solemnly from behind his windshield.

She waved back until she was waving at his taillights. “I can never tell except by their cars. That’s Kai’s.”

“That’s a shame, about having to move,” Don said.

“It really is. I hate to disturb Garrett’s routine. He’s not great with change.”

Having little interest in neighborly chitchat, I wished them both a good night. Don ignored my farewell, however.

“If either of you can’t find a new place in time, we’ve got a couple of empty bedrooms. My girls are both gone now. Officially out of the nest.”

Cindy, almost tearful in appreciation of his goodness, couldn’t find words.

In the grand tradition of shy and honorable cowpokes, Don evaded her gratitude. “I’ve got to mail out some bills. Good night, Cindy. Good night, Angus.”

My thoughts had already moved on—to indignation on Eka’s behalf, They’d dump her without thinking twice, those Finnish fucks—so Cindy’s next words caught me by surprise.

“He is just so . . .”

Don vanished behind his chest-high cube of yew and then reappeared briefly, entering his side door. Cindy hugged herself against the chill; pink bunnies capered on her pajama pants. I’m not the shrewdest observer of other people’s secret longings, Brother Bob, but this was on the order of a floodlit billboard, with red letters twice her height: SHE LOVES HIM.

What do I know about Cindy Olekas? A hygienist for a periodontist in Nutley, crowned with finer blond hair than I’ve seen on any other adult. A non-complainer. The good girl, frozen in childhood innocence, though her son just turned twenty-one. Still beautiful, still sweet as pie, despite the hardest of knocks.

(The range of human attractiveness is remarkably broad. You don’t see gorgeous and repulsive horses, or flounders. It can’t be just a matter of perspective, If you were a flounder, you’d see things differently. I believe this is quantifiable. Measure facial proportions and you can demonstrate that some upper lips are just wide enough to produce the duck-bill effect, while others approach a Platonic ideal. Which raises the question: what is the evolutionary purpose of ugliness? But I digress.)

For all my rudeness, I have never spoken obnoxiously in Cindy’s presence. Her beauty and sweetness constrain me. Knowing I’d never have another chance to utter these words, however, I mumbled like a fedora’ed newshound in grainy black-and-white, “You’ve got it pretty bad, huh, kid?”

The carriage light on Mrs. N’s patch of lawn revealed the arrival of the color red on Cindy’s cheeks and ears.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“He’s so good with Garrett. He reminds me of my dad.”

I’d never given Don much thought before. Now I saw (the straight-up brush of hair emblematic of the Straight-Up Guy) that someone like Cindy would think him everything a man should be. And maybe he is.

“You’d make a good couple.”

She let herself live in that impossible dream for a moment, then shook it off. I could have pointed out that people get unmarried all the time—especially when their wives are sour and demanding, and there’s a lovely lass next door—but my code of ethics forbids raising unlikely hopes.

Another bolt of insight: his offer of temporary shelter wasn’t aimed at me. The feeling may be mutual. If so, she doesn’t know it. She wouldn’t allow herself to know it.

“I’d better go up and see what Garrett’s doing. You wouldn’t . . .”

“Say anything about this? Of course not.”

With a nervous smile, she zipped her jacket higher and slunk away, around the house, to the back door.

Here’s what I think, Bob: the two of them have barely been living. For as long as I’ve known them, they’ve plodded along like cart horses, side by side but separated by a sturdy yoke. No frolicking in the meadow for them. No joyous sprints. No copulation.

If I could get them together before I go, that would be as grand an accomplishment as telling Eka’s life story. Conjuring bliss from ashes!

Imagine them together. After a long day at their respective jobs, they converge on their happy cottage. (Let’s ignore, for now, the eventual disillusionment.) Imagine her angelic, appreciative smile. My Donny.

Who’d have guessed that beneath my flab beat the heart of a Jane Austen heroine?