The girl seems to read her mind. “Yes, my mother described it,” she says, “the, whatever you could call it, affair. She and my—she and your husband, Mr. Angstrom, lived together I guess on Summer Street for three months. He never knew if she had gone ahead and had me or not. I knew him, you know. I met him a few times, without knowing who he was. I mean, his relation to me. He was once a patient when I was still at St. Joe’s. An angioplasty, I think it was. He was a charmer. Full of jokes.”

“He died in Florida,” Janice says accusingly, “not six months later. Of a heart attack. He was only fifty-six.” As if these hard facts, so hard to her at the time, might force Harry and this girl apart.

“He should have had a bypass, it sounds like. They weren’t quite as standard then.”

“He didn’t want it. He didn’t want to have his body meddled with. He was afraid of it.” Janice’s voice startles her by cracking, and her eyes by burning near tears, as if accusing herself of not making Harry’s life worth living. She hadn’t called him down in Florida, when he had wanted her to. He had been begging for her forgiveness, and she hadn’t given it.

“And then before that,” this girl insensitively is going on, “when I was still an aide at Sunnyside, a boy I knew back in Galilee called Jamie and I—we were living together, actually, in a little apartment on Youngquist Boulevard, the building went condo and that broke us up, but that’s I guess another story—went to look at Toyotas over on Route 111. We bought one, eventually, though not that day, when Mr. Angstrom was there. He seemed so nice, I was struck. He paid attention to me, he didn’t just talk to the man, or try to pressure us the way car salesmen like to.”

“It wasn’t exactly his calling, selling,” Janice volunteers. “He didn’t really have a calling, after high school.”