When he opened his eyes again he saw that she had taken a cigarette from her purse and was feeling around for a match. He struck one, secure in the knowledge that his surgeon’s hands would not tremble, and then, as her fingertips brushed his hand to guide the flame to the end of the cigarette, trembling. The moment gave him a chance to look at her. Her blonde hair was not her own shade, an expensive rinse but nonetheless discernible. Her skin was good: the nose slightly prominent, curved, passionate; the mouth a trifle wide but full.

They both realized at the same time that he was staring. She smiled and he felt like an adventurer.

“Are you here with a patient?”

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s a very good hospital.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m a doctor, an intern at Suffolk County General.”

She cocked her head. “What department?”

“Surgery.” He held out his hand. “My name’s Rafe Meomartino.”

“Elizabeth Bookstein.” For some reason she was laughing, a fact he found annoying. He hadn’t thought of her as a silly woman. “Dr. Longwood is my uncle,” she said as she shook his hand.

Cristos.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” she said. She had stopped laughing but she was watching his face and smiling. “Oh, dear. You don’t like my uncle. Not at all.”

“No,” he said, smiling back. He was still holding her hand.

To her credit, she didn’t ask for reasons. “They tell me he’s a good teacher,” she said.

“He is that,” Rafe said. The answer appeared to satisfy her. “Your name. Where did you get the Bookstein?”

“I’m a divorced lady.”

“Are you anybody’s divorced lady in particular?”

She took her hand back but the smile stayed. “Not in particular.”

He saw his mother coming through the door, looking much smaller than he remembered her looking only yesterday, moving much slower than she once had moved.

“Mama,” he said, standing. When she came over he introduced them. Then, politely, he said goodbye to the girl and walked slowly out of the coffee shop, matching his pace to his mother’s.

When they made subsequent visits to the hospital he looked for her but she was not in the coffee shop; the volunteers worked erratic schedules, coming in more or less as they pleased. He could have found her telephone number—he did not bother even to consult the book—but he was working very hard at the hospital, and his mother’s illness, increasing in intensity, weighed heavier on his shoulders with each passing day. Her flesh seemed to become thinner and transparent, to stretch tighter across the delicate framework of her bones. Her skin developed a kind of luminosity that he was to recognize instantly in cancer patients whenever he saw it for the rest of his life.