“No, actually this job is a very uncool thing to do.”

Leora blushed, feeling like she had just made a joke about Mother’s Day to someone whose mother had died. Jason was the closest thing she had had to a friend in years, but he still made her feel awkward sometimes, as if she were a stranger who barely knew him. She tried to defend herself. “But I know lots of people who get involved in public service stuff. They all love it.”

“Sure, they all love it,” Jason parroted, putting down the paper napkin he had begun shredding. “That’s because all they do is play with kids all day.” He picked up the second glass of Gatorade again and drained it.

Leora watched the Gatorade flow out of the glass, wondering if it retained its bilious color once it was inside Jason’s stomach. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Think about it. Practically every public service program around here is made for kids.”

She considered for a moment. It was true. There certainly were a lot of tutoring programs. And after-school activities. And don’t-do-drugs projects. And big-brother, big-sister pairings. And play groups. And reading classes. Even safe-sex dramas. She tried hard to think of a public service activity people on campus did that didn’t involve children. Other than the soup kitchen, nothing came to mind.

Jason watched her, then smiled in triumph. “See, everything they have is for kids. Or if it’s not for kids, then it’s something like a homeless shelter, where they’re not really helping people as much as just giving them relief. But what about, say, old people?”

“Old people?” Bill Landsmann’s living room floated through Leora’s mind.

But Bill Landsmann’s living room wasn’t what Jason had in mind at all. “I mean old people in nursing homes,” Jason continued. “See, nobody wants to work at a nursing home, because they feel like it’s hopeless. With kids, at least they can feel like they’ll somehow turn those kids into adults who don’t need their help anymore. But with old people, no one is interested. Actually, it’s not even that no one is interested. It’s that they’re afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Leora asked.

“Have you ever been to a nursing home?”

“Sure.”

“Well, how did you feel about it?”

Leora thought of her great-great-aunt Rose, who had been languishing in a nursing home for at least twenty years. Rose harassed Leora’s parents by telephone every day, always reminding them that she had big plans to die any minute—a threat she still hadn’t made good on, despite the deaths in the interim of three other relatives who had inherited her before Leora’s parents did. When Leora and her family went to visit her, Rose would more often than not take whatever food or magazines or gifts they had brought her and theatrically dump them all over the floor, raving that everyone—the staff, the doctors, the woman across the hall, Leora’s family, the latest TV talk show host—was plotting to kill her. (It occurred to Leora on one of these visits that this claim was in fact Rose’s way of flattering herself, trying to convince herself that she was worthy of being killed.) The halls in the nursing home, reeking of urine, were lined with wheelchairs occupied by pale, bony, drool-covered men and women, waiting to die. Leora glanced at the glowing green glasses of Gatorade and felt vaguely nauseous. “It’s not somewhere I’d want to be for any longer than I absolutely had to be there,” she admitted.