“It will, Dee. You’re home now. Stay here with us. We’ll make it good together. You can come out to Fairfields and spend the weekend and we’ll listen to music. I have all the Mahler symphonies now. They sound wonderful in those long halls. Oh, you haven’t even seen the house.”

“Keep on hugging me. Don’t let go of me for a while.” I leaned into the comfort of his chest. His big soft body was so endearing, so comforting. My friend, my true and beloved friend. “Am I bad?” I asked. “Am I terrible? Am I an evil person?”

“Of course not, Dee. You’re just in the wrong place somehow. You’re not supposed to be where you are. I worry all the time about having introduced you to Malcolm. I keep thinking it’s my fault.”

“Where is Davie? Does he still come to see you?”

“He’s here. He’s in business with me. My partner. You didn’t know?”

“She doesn’t care?”

“She doesn’t know, Dee. Or if she knows, she pretends it isn’t true. I think she’s happy. I take care of her. I give her everything she needs.”

“I love you, Charles William. I don’t care anymore what you do.”

“That’s what love might be. I keep dreaming it could be that.”

“What?”

“Just being happy with someone as they are. Not wanting them to change for you.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever have it.”

“What?”

“Love, anything to depend on. Of course, there’s Momma and Daddy and I have the boys and my brothers. That’s a lot, don’t you think? I mean, I’m really lucky to have them, don’t you agree?”

“If that’s what you want.” He stood back from me, holding my hands, his feet splayed out in that ridiculous flat-footed position which made him look like a tree, a great wide-leafed oak tree, so solid and real and planted, here, in this world that he had inhabited every day of his early life and had come back to. He had been bom in the Dunleith General Hospital on the first day of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, and he would die there fifty-five years later almost to the day. “I’m working on a third of a heart,” he told me when he called. “But don’t worry, Dee. They’re going to do some more tests this afternoon. I’m sure I’ll get a better report tomorrow.”

“Call me,” I had said. “Call me the minute you find out.”

“I will,” he answered, but of course he never did. Davie called instead and woke me with the news. “He died trying to bum a cigarette from a nursing student,” Davie said. “Isn’t that divine?”

“Did she give it to him?” I asked. “Was she going to? Was she even tempted?”

* * *