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trying to do to you? I’ll kill ’em, no kidding.”
    She laughed. “Oh, Dad—” Then she threw herself on him and wept.
Suburban Washington.
    The corridors of the hospice smelled of potpourri and soap, with the scents of the dying only vagrant hints, an occasional whiff of antiseptic or bleach. The bowels loosen before death, but the system that transported air through the building was brilliant and powerful, and the grosser reminders were sucked away. It was an expensive place.
    Heartbreak Hotel , he thought. He was even humming it to himself, not the Elvis version but Willie Nelson’s: I get so lonely, baby/ I get so lonely I could die.
    Heartbreak Hotel with a dedicated staff. George Shreed was a tough man, utterly unsentimental, but he knew when he had fallen among saints. If what they gave her was not love, it was such a counterfeit of love that it was, he thought, worth any price.
    Shreed used two metal canes to walk. He heaved himself along on powerful shoulders and arms so ropywith muscles he might have been an iron-pumper. Thirty years before, he had crashed a jet in Vietnam, and he would have died there if his wingman hadn’t stayed overhead, calling in the medevacs and taking AA fire and keeping the Cong off him. Now, planting his canes and pushing himself up on them and dragging his legs along, he thought grimly of that day when he thought he was going to die, and of that wingman of long ago—Alan Craik’s father. Now Mick Craik was dead and he was still alive, and his wife, who was ten years younger than he and whom he loved to distraction, was almost dead.
    â€œOh, Janey,” he muttered with a sigh. There he went, saying it aloud again.
    â€œHi, Mister Shreed!” The night nurse smiled, truly smiled, not a plastic smile but a real one. The smile slowly cooled, and she said, “You may want to stay with her tonight.”
    â€œIs it—? Is she—?” Is she going to die tonight? he meant. These people knew when death was waiting.
    â€œYou maybe just want to be there with her.”
    Janey lay on sheets from her own house, wearing a nightgown she had bought at the old Woodie’s. The room had a real chair and a decent imitation of a Georgian chest of drawers, and one of her own paintings hung on a wall. Der Rosenkavalier was playing on her portable CD—the music she said she wanted to die to. It was on a lot.
    No tubes and no heroics, she had said. She had a morphine drip in one arm and a Heparin lock in the other; she was dying of hunger now as much as of cancer.
    She looked like a baby bird. Janey Gorman, who had been the prettiest girl at Radford College, had a beak fora nose and a scrawny neck and curled hands like claws. Shreed rested his canes against the chest of drawers and pushed the armchair over to the bedside, leaning on it for support, and he took one of her hands, and her eyelids fluttered and for a moment there was a sliver of reflection between the still-long lashes.
    â€œJaney, it’s George.” He kissed her, feeling the waxy, faintly warm skin, then squeezed her tiny, bony hand. “Here again.” The unsentimental man felt constriction in his throat, heat in his eyes. “Janey?” Der Rosenkavalier swelled up, that incredible final duet. Once, she had played it as they had made love, whispering Wait and Wait , and then as it rose toward its final too-sweet fulfillment, she had laughed aloud as they all reached it together. He listened now, let the music die, let silence come.
    â€œJaney, I have to tell you something.” He could see a pulse beating in the skinny neck, nothing more. “Before—you know.” He stroked her hand. “I want to tell you something about myself. You never knew all about me. You didn’t want to; we agreed on that right at the beginning. But it’s not—not what I did for a living.” The word living stuck a little in his throat, in that place. And,