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sparrow in the median when those hawks swooped down from both sides of the road at once.
     
    A T SUMMERBROOK , as always, the smell of sauerkraut and sausage hit me first, and then the antiseptics and bacterial soaps beneath it. Dad was in his chair when I stepped into his room, watching golf on television. Seeing me, he looked sheepish, like a child who was worried he might be in trouble for having had another little stroke. The tears welled up so fast in my eyes when I saw him there, I could barely make my way to his side through the blurred scrim of my love for him.
    I kissed his left cheek, and it felt, indeed, a little slacker than it had the last time I'd kissed him.
    But he looked the same. Ruddy-faced. Blue eyes a little bloodshot. Like the mailman he'd been, walking twenty miles a day through wind and rain and snow, he looked like something sturdy that had been weathered. He used to step into the back door after work, after I'd just gotten home from school (a mail carrier's day starts at 4:30 A.M . and ends at 2:30 P.M .), and he would smell, I thought, like the
world.
Sky in the stiff blue fabric of his uniform. Grass, car exhaust, breeze on his neck. Birds' nest. Snow. Sun. Leaves.
    I would press my face into his chest and breathe it in as he stood at the counter near the stove and poured himself a shot of Jim Beam in a glass, swallowed it in one gulp.
    We walked around the halls of Summerbrook for half an hour, and I wondered if I had just not noticed or had forgotten it from my last few visits, or if his shuffle had changed. Now, it was all on the balls of his feet—a kind of graceful tiptoe along the carpeted hallways, holding on to the rail along the wall as the nurses and aides called out to him in their nursery-school voices, "Look at
you,
Mr. Milofski. Going for a walk with your daughter!"
    Only ten years before, I know, this would have infuriated him. The tone. The overfriendliness of strangers. He'd have made faces, grumbled under his breath, or, at the very least, ignored them.
    But ten years ago he was not yet a child.
    Now, he seems flattered by their attention. He smiled back at them and nodded. It reminded me of Chad in his miniature seat behind a miniature table at preschool, having managed to raggedly cut out a construction-paper triangle with his blunt scissors, and the way his fat teacher had lit up, looking at it, praising the triangle—and Chad, clasping his pudgy hands together, looked up at her as if trying to be sure that this praise was really for him, and very much hoping that it was.
    We went back, after the walk, to my father's room and sat together with the television off.
    After a while, we ran out of small talk, and just sat.
    The room was pleasantly overwarm. The sound of a furnace deep under the nursing home somewhere hummed evenly, and eventually it began to feel as if that hum were a part of my body.
    We sat as if we were waiting for someone. (Chad?)
    Or something. (A bus?)
    And it crossed my mind to say to my father, "You know, Dad, now it's just us."
    But it isn't, of course. I still have a job, a husband, a home on the other side of the state. And he lives here, in this waiting room, having small strokes in his sleep, waking every day a little changed. I've begged him to let me move him closer to us, so I can see him every day. "You can move me anywhere you please when I'm dead," is all he'll say in response. It's the town he was born in. He'll die in this town. Now, that's perfectly clear. It's just a matter, now, of when.
    I watched him in his chair, the slow shutting down of him. The eyes blinking closed, his mouth falling open, and then the regular breathing that meant he was deeply asleep. I remembered being carried up the stairs, like that, in his arms, having completely let go of the world, my head on his shoulder. The swaying of that. The solidity. After an hour or so a nurse came in and said, "Will you be staying for dinner, Miss Milofski?"
    It surprised me.
    Had I