Bubba was released from the hospital ten days before I was. Vanessa picked him up, and even before they went back to his warehouse, they drove over to the animal shelter and got themselves a dog.

Those last ten days in the hospital were the worst. Summer died and autumn encroached outside my window, and all I could do was lie there and listen to the sounds of seasons trading places in the voices of people ten stories below. And I’d be left to wonder how Karen Nichols would have sounded in the newly minted briskness if she’d held on long enough for the heat to end and a leaf to fall.

I took the stairs to my apartment slowly, one arm around Angie, the other squeezing a racquetball in my hand, working the muscles in my ever-so-gradually healing arm.

The entire left side of my body still felt weak, depleted, as if somehow the blood on that side wasn’t as thick, and nights sometimes, it felt cold over there.

“We’re home,” Angie said when we reached the landing.

“Home?” I said. “You mean my home or our home?”

“Ours,” she said.

She opened the door before us, and I stared down my hallway, which fairly reeked of recently applied oil soap. I felt the warmth of Angie’s flesh on my good palm. I saw my ratty old La-Z-Boy waiting for me in the living room. And I knew that unless Angie had drunk them, there would be two cold Beck’s waiting in the fridge.

Living is not bad, I decided. The good lies in the small details. The furniture you’ve molded to your shape. A cold beer on a hot day. A perfect strawberry. Her lips.

“Home,” I said.

It was midautumn before I could reach both hands above my head and stretch, and one afternoon, I went looking for my torn, frayed, had-it-since-high-school, favorite sweatshirt, which I’d tossed with my good hand up onto the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where it hid in the darkness of a shadow thrown by the top of the door frame. I hid it because Angie hated it, said it made me look like a bum, and I was sure she had homicidal designs on it. I’ve learned with women never to take their threats against your clothing too lightly.

My hand sank into the faded cotton, and I sighed happily as I pulled it out and several objects fell onto my head along with it.