I pour myself a mug of coffee, sit at the table with her. “You’re going?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“Well, I’m sorry you are. I’ve enjoyed having you here. I never thought I would.”

She smiles. “I know.”

“Was I that obvious?”

“Even in high school, you were never easy to be friends with, Myra.”

I sit back in my chair, open-mouthed. “I was dying to have friends in high school!”

“Well, who would ever have known? You seemed so self-contained. So … superior.”

“Superior!”

“You did! You didn’t seem to need anything.”

“Oh, my God.”

She looks down into her coffee cup, pushes her hair behind her ears. “In some ways, you still seem that way.”

“Well, it’s not true. I need a lot.” I realize, saying this, that it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud to anyone. It feels horrible, scalding. And yet it feels good.

Frank comes into the room, puts his head in my lap. “I know,” I tell him.

“I’ll take him out,” Diann says.

“It’s all right. I’ll do it.”

“No, I’d like to. I’ll take him for a walk and then I’ll head out.” She stands, hesitates. Then she says, “I want to tell you, Myra, that I’ve really enjoyed being here. Even though the circumstances …”

“Yes.”

“And I hope you’ll stay in touch. I hope you’ll come and see me.”

“Oh, uh-huh.” Here it is, my automatic pulling back. It’s as though I can feel myself flattening until the shadow passes. I can feel it and so can Diann, apparently, because she puts her hand over mine and stares directly into my eyes to say, “I mean it.”

“Okay.”

“Take good care of Chip. Call and let me know how he’s doing. And tell him to call me, too.”

“I will.”

We stare at each other for a long moment, and then she says, “I couldn’t have done it, even if he’d wanted me to. It takes something that I just don’t have.”

“It’s all right.”

“How do you have it, Myra? I mean, when people are dying, how can you stand it?”

How to explain this? How to tell her that to look into a dying person’s eyes can show you a view beyond that does not frighten, but comforts. The heart settles in the Hand.

“It’s … I’m not afraid of dying people,” I tell her. “I think there’s a richness to that time of life. In fact, sometimes I envy people who are dying a good death. Not that I want to die, just that I want to be that aware. And to have the opportunity to say things that will be heard, finally, in a way they never would have been otherwise. Do you understand what I mean?”