They had him sitting in a chair, but he was slumped over, eyes closed. He looked smaller, burnished, and so intensely like himself that for a moment, standing in the hall, Joan didn’t recognize him. Next to him was Connie, one of his girlfriends, wearing a sweatshirt with a big plaid heart appliquéd on the front. Connie was looking at her shoes, turning them thoughtfully this way and that. She reached down into her bag of knitting, took out a long blue needle, poked at the sole of one sneaker, dislodging something that she then picked up with a Kleenex and deposited in the wastebasket. While up, she tidied a stack of newspapers and then opened the drawer of the nightstand.

“Boy, they give you everything you need,” she said. He roused himself to agree with her and shut his eyes again.

“Looky who’s here!” Connie cried.

Joan started to feel a little unhinged when she knelt to hug him; he was ectoplasm. He raised one hand slowly, ran it ruminatively over his face, and then set it gently in his lap again. His legs looked severely compromised without trousers, wavery and slightly see-through. A phone rang loudly and everyone flinched.

“It’s turned way up,” Connie said. Her ride was calling from the lobby.

They walked to the elevator while a stout, uncheerful nurse tended to her father. Joan and her sister liked Connie the best out of all their dad’s girlfriends because she was the most like their long-dead mother—she enjoyed partying but kept her wits about her. She was going to bingo that night but would come back and sit with him the next afternoon. The elevator doors opened and Connie gave her a quick, hard hug before stepping in. They were both crying.

The nurse had helped him back into bed; the covers were pulled formally up to his shoulders and then folded back. He was staring out the window to his left. From where Joan stood, the window looked out over a field of Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, the doctors’ parking lot, but from the perspective of the patient, it was just blue sky and gorgeous pillowy midwestern clouds.

“Look at that sky, Dad,” Joan said. He continued to gaze, his jaw moving imperceptibly, as though he were chewing something very small. She pulled up a chair and watched with him. The blue, the clouds, the occasional gliding bird. At some point she took his hand. He nodded as though she’d said something and continued gazing.

Her best friend from childhood drove over from Chicago for the funeral. They spent the night before making popcorn and drinking from the parents’ liquor cabinet, just like in high school, and then later slept in the twin beds in Joan’s old bedroom, whispering in the dark the way they always had even though there was no one to hear them now.