“I thought I was the reason,” he said, still very nervous.

“You are. That’s the idea.”

He kissed her. “Your nose is cold.”

“So’s yours. Come on, let’s walk.”

He headed them toward State Street, as if the lights there could beat back the wind. Finally he told her that he was broke. She did not want to go back to the dormitory, she said, and opened her purse. He argued lamely and took the three dollars she could spare. They went to a movie and sat in the last row of the balcony and necked. He found out that she knew how to soul kiss. He became too excited and halfway through the second feature he had to move away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her smiling and she took his hand and squeezed it. She was happy, and for all that he did not understand about her, he was happy, too.

Three nights a week he was the admissions clerk in the emergency ward at the City Hospital on Division Street. On the night Karen came down without calling there were three people on the benches waiting to see the intern, two drunks who had scuffled and fallen, and a man who had walked over from his job after something in his dinner pail had disagreed with him. Leland was interviewing a middle-aged woman who said she had a foot on her chest. She would not give her correct age. As Karen came in Leland said to the woman, “Then I won’t let you see the doctor. The paper can’t read twenty-one plus when you have a pair of lungs in their forties. The X-rays will show that. Suppose some doctor upstairs thinks you’re only twenty-one? A look at the X-ray and he’ll send out an ambulance. Think about that.” He turned to Karen, standing behind her, smiling. “Are you losing blood?”

“No—no.”

“Have a seat, please.”

“You won’t let me see the doctor?” the woman asked.

“Definitely not.”

She leaned forward. “I’m fifty-three,” she whispered.

Leland pretended to write it small. “Now if you’ll have a seat over there, the doctor will call you.” He wrote, “Complains of difficulty breathing,” and put the sheet to the side, under the others. “Next, please.”

Karen came up and sat down. “I have heart trouble,” she said.

He wrote it down. “You’ll have to explain that.”

“There’s a young man I know—”

“Do you love him?”

“I don’t know. He’s the only real man I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the admissions clerks,” he said as he began to draw triangles around her name.

“I had nothing to do,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He leaned back and patted his stomach. “It’s fine, but what am I going to do Thursday night at this time, when you’re not here?”