In a basket on the windowsill beside him were several glass bottles. One was full of little red beads. He turned it around and the label said WHOLE RED PEPPERS. The others were liquid: SEAWATER, GRENADINE, VINEGAR.

“How are you all doing?”

A nurse was in the doorway. He tried to think if there was anything he needed, then remembered he wasn’t the patient.

She glanced down at the basket in his lap. “Were you thinking of giving her a little aromatherapy?”

“No.”

“Well,” she said in the way nurses did, thoroughly inured to resistance. “Her therapist doesn’t come on Sundays so it might be a good idea. All you do is remove the cap and let her take in a few whiffs. Smells are amazing. They trigger memory quicker and deeper than any other kind of stimulant to the senses.”

He chose a bottle whose label had been peeled off. He unscrewed the cap and the smell of lemons flooded the room. He breathed it in eagerly. It was a beautiful smell. He thought of his three granddaughters in the summer, placing rusty lawn chairs in the yard and squeezing lemons into their brown hair. After the divorce, they often slept over, though his son’s apartment was only a few blocks away. They said the beds were more comfy. He put the bottle beneath her nose. There was no reaction.

“Do you remember Dennis Wight, Charlotte? He was asking about you the other day.”

Once he had found Dennis on one of the lawn chairs in the middle of the night, snoring loud enough to bring down the house a story. The boy had been waiting for a glimpse of Charlie through a crack in the guest bedroom’s curtain.

“You girls used to get so tan. And your hair had streaks of gold.” Without looking, he could feel the bleakness of February through the window, the half-frozen mud puddles in the parking lot below. “Summer is a beautiful season, Charlie.”

“It sure is.”

He had forgotten about the nurse. He wasn’t sure what he’d said and what he’d just thought about. He put the cap back on the lemon and brought out the peppers. No smell was released. He brought them to his nose. Still nothing. He shook the bottle and smelled and his head exploded. He coughed and wheezed and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. During all this the nurse laughed. He wished she would go to hell.