Then three weeks where he was not dying but wished he might. The fevers now just a chill and ache in his bones without the diversion of nightmare frescoes. Time returned. Lengthened and stretched; days of bedsores and racking coughs, nights of the same cough and spitting wrenches of sleep. Now also he was able to fear for his wife, children. He’d read the accounts out of the Boston papers of the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands dying. Most in days it seemed, if you could believe what you read. He lay recovering in the downstairs bedroom listening to the children playing games upstairs as December shut down around them, lay with the windows no longer shrouded so some days it was bright and others dull. Lay those dull days thinking he could not only see but hear the snow falling outside. He’d not been sick like this before. Some afternoons he would rise and wrapped in a robe go to the kitchen and sit by the stove while the children whirled hectic indoor games about him. Joey tending him with hot tea. Fresh bread. Trying to hush the children. He’d flap his hand at her to let them be. He wanted to hear them.

Then, finally, out again. Christmas Eve day all bundled into the car for the trip through falling snow, fine blowing flakes dancing as if each pellet were unsprung upon its own single course of air. To Littleton where Joey shopped with the children and Jamie wrapped in a greatcoat and muffler, still coughing, his legs still spindly—a strawman— went to the Thayer Hotel and spoke with the desk clerk and made half a dozen calls from the public telephone and then down the street to the barbershop for a haircut and to collect some money held there for him, making arrangements as best he could. A month out of it and his trade was falling off by half. He made promises he wasn’t sure he could keep but had no choice but to make. Then small shopping of his own: matching mother-and-daughter lockets on fine gold chains and a twin-bladed pocketknife for the boy. Back to the car where he ran the engine for heat and sat sipping from the leather-covered flask out of the glove box. Watching the figures moving up and down the street in the dim gray of falling snow. Waiting for those three. Smoked a cigarette and killed his coughing with a taste from the flask. Saw them then, Joey carrying Claire against the piling snow, packages in her other arm. Foster beside his mother, both arms around wrapped boxes. The red paper and green ribbons framing the boy’s cold-red face. Then all of them in the car, Joey’s breath warm against him as she leaned to touch her cold lips to his face.