The way that they either wait until the very end to go into hospice or they take hospice as the very end, and they go.

She wouldn’t do that.

Well, if I wanted to be with her, I needed to come now.

The warm bright kitchen with the dogs on their cushions and the food on the table and the man sitting on the edge of his chair, watching my face.

But how do you know?

A long pause while the nurse is doing something else. Either thinking or shuffling papers or both. She resets the phone close to her mouth and sighs.

“There are signs,” she says. “The lips have turned dusky.”

And a picture comes into my mind immediately, of Kathy’s face, the stately shape of her head, the radiance of her skin the past couple of weeks. Luminescent. Poreless, like the woman on the roof in India. Dusky to me means bluish, the crepuscular light at that moment of the day when everything becomes unbearably beautiful, just for a brief, hovering handful of minutes, before it tips into darkness. The lips are dusky, I mouthed to M., who squinted. What?

“Her lips are dusky,” I said out loud in a flat voice.

The nurse was talking to someone else too. She was in a taxi, it seemed like, headed to her next miserable destination. She only wanted to remind me, before we hung up, about the morphine in the refrigerator. That I could be generous.

Emma was heading for the subway a minute after picking up the phone.

“Maybe better to get a cab,” I suggested.

M. was still at the table, the dogs were still on their cushions, the fire was still hypnotically warm, and I was back in my coat, making a cup of tea in the mug I had just brought in, the one that said LANDSMAN KILL TRAIL ASSOCIATION, with a drawing of a horse moving through a glade, a rider on its back.

You might think a kill is a bullet that lands where it was intended to, but where I live, it somehow is a stream, and the gurgles aren’t death throes but the innocent sound of water moving over rocks. Only not always innocent because once I had to wade out into our portion of Landsman Kill and use all my puny strength to pull a poacher’s beaver traps out of the mud. I threw them into my trunk, each one still biting a stick. I was driving to western New York the next day to go camping with a friend and somewhere along the way I pulled over and dropped them off a bridge into moving water.