Glenn lifts her glass to sip from it but puts it back down without drinking from it. “You’re at a moment when everything has stopped, right before it starts again. Like T. S. Eliot’s poem: At the still point of the turning world. / Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards. This will be like pushing the reset button. Gary will deal. He’s a brave bear.”

She is the only person who knows him well enough to say that, and for me to believe it—how sometimes if you push back against his anxiety and challenge it, he can rise to the occasion. Like the time at work all those years ago when we only had two hours to put up our booth at a major trade show because all the boxes had been shipped to the wrong place and how Gary, sputtering comically on the verge of panic, was somehow calmed and spurred on by Glenn’s pushy encouragement. Deep breaths, Gary. You can do it. You’re a brave bear. A mantra he repeated constantly as he worked tirelessly to get the job done.

Or when we dragged him with us and Teddy to Story Land in New Hampshire—a small adventure park for toddlers where he had initially refused to go because it was full of people in costume, but he didn’t want to miss out on it for Teddy’s sake. While I went on the tiny rides with Teddy—sitting in the rotating teacups and in the flying Dutch shoes and on the little pirate sailboat—Glenn took Gary by the hand to each area that had storybook characters physically built into them, her own version of tough-love exposure therapy. They sat on either side of a creepy clown on a white wooden bench and next to a giant Humpty Dumpty on a fake stone wall, even pressing the button to make it talk, though apparently Gary drew the line at allowing a traveling pack of Barney characters to hug him. I’d had to drive home that night—Gary was too drowsy from all the extra Klonopin he’d taken—but every time Glenn smacked him affectionately on the head from the backseat and called him a “brave bear” for what he had accomplished that day, he’d beamed. I’m a brave bear, he’d whispered. I’m a very brave bear.

Glenn reaches over and sticks her hand inside the sling to pet the dog. “Now, take me home.” Her face is pale, but there’s a spark in her eyes that wasn’t there a minute ago: the promise of future entertainment that she knows will come in the form of texted photos with descriptive captions of a farce about to unfold, fun—possibly disastrous—at our expense. “I’m exhausted and nauseated and I miss my Lucy.”

* * *

Later that night, much later, my phone will ring. It will be Glenn, and at first I’ll assume she’s checking in about my visit tomorrow—I always do a weekly grocery shop and Gary always helps with the heavy things—the water and ginger ale and dog food—but instead she’ll ask me if I ever think about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the way those Harvard types had been that afternoon at Shepherd when she’d chased them away.