“It ain’t permanent,” he said. “I’m working on it. I guess it’s about time! In the meantime, you know what I just put up? Curtain rods! I didn’t know there even was such a thing!”

He showed me the rods he’d put up, and the curtains he’d hung from them. They were obviously used, but they were lovely, a burgundy-and-cream pattern made more beautiful by their fading, I thought, and I told him so.

Three weeks later, he was sleeping all night in his bed. “It never was the bed’s fault,” he said. “Bed’s just great. But I’ll tell you something. Every night, I sit on the edge and think, ‘Now, do I want to sleep on the bed or on the floor?’ I guess that’s just the way it’s going to be with me.”

“Maybe so,” I said. And then I leaned closer to him to say, “But that’s all right.”

EPILOGUE

It’s late October, a beautiful warm Friday afternoon. I’m out in the woods walking Frank, letting him get some exercise before I leave him alone for several hours. I’ve got a date. Third one with the same guy. Fred, his name is. A teacher I met when I took care of his mother after her heart surgery. He’s kind, and rather nice looking, too. We like a lot of the same things; we have a good time together.

I walk slowly, thinking about a fall day just like this one so many years ago, when Chip had organized a senior skip day. It was almost 100 percent successful—only Thomas Osterhout went to school, saying it would be immoral not to. But the rest of us took a chartered bus we’d all chipped in for and went out to breakfast at McDonald’s. Then we went to Dana-Farber Hospital, in Boston. One of our classmates, Danny Christianson, had been admitted there. None of us knew his diagnosis, but we did know he was never coming back to school.

Chip went to the floor and talked to the nurses and they ended up letting all eighty-seven of us come up. Around fifteen at a time went into Danny’s room, while the rest waited quietly in the lounge. We all had something for him: books, homemade cookies, stuffed animals, girlie magazines. I brought him a couple of 45’s by the Beatles, and Mandy Clark, who sat next to me on the bus, brought him a tin can full of photographs that the yearbook staff had collected. Chip gave Danny—who had tried out spectacularly unsuccessfully for the football team—one of his own jerseys, so that he would have something to wear besides hospital gowns. Danny was wearing it when it was my turn to come in, and I remember being so grateful, because it helped take away from his bald head, his thin wrists, the alien equipment surrounding him.