“We’re doing fine,” she said. “I’m figuring out her prescriptions right now.”

“I know the long red ones help with the pain. But they make her confused.”

“I should go,” she said. “I’m on the other line with the doctor.”

When I hung up the phone, I saw Louis looking at me as if I were a child. There was a tenderness in his eyes I’d never seen before. He and his wife didn’t have any kids. Weren’t planning to, he said.

We stopped in a drugstore for supplies. I wanted to pretend the end of the world was approaching and we were shopping for our hideout bunker. He said we could always come back tomorrow.

He disappeared down an aisle and returned with a package of condoms and a tube of the kind of pain cream that heats your body until it doesn’t hurt anymore. “The only thing better than getting head,” he said, “is getting head with heat cream.” He was trying to lighten the mood, a favorite phrase of Grandma Lucy’s. I was happy he was thinking about oral sex, but I also wondered what that cream would taste like. Probably not good.

We took a dirt road into the woods. “My woods,” he called them. He was a man who owned an apartment on Varick Street and a whole forest somewhere else. It got dark early, and we drank nicer wine than I’d tasted in months. It felt strange to drink with another person. I’d grown used to the feeling of drinking until I dissolved into delirium, its perfect silence, until I could feel absolutely unobserved.

Louis said he was curious about my love life. But he was my love life. He wanted to know: Was I seeing anyone else? I told him about trying to masturbate on Lucy’s couch. He was interested in this. But I couldn’t?

I was surprised by how quickly it could leave, all that hurt—how I could feel worse about Louis, closer at hand, than the memory of her face seizing up with pain, features twisted as if a big invisible palm had clamped her face and squeezed it.

I gave him head while he sat on the ratty plaid couch. I could see the cover of an old porn video stuck into the cushions. He forgot about the special cream and I didn’t. I didn’t remind him.

Afterward he said, “I want to do something for you,” and we had sex on a shaggy rug the color of butter. He came, I think, and I didn’t, I’m sure.

“Did you orgasm?” he said.

I said, “That felt nice.”

I lay with my face to the empty fireplace. He wrapped his arms around me, and I could feel his chest hair against my shoulders. It made me giddy. It was the strong grip of a healthy body, nothing like Grandma Lucy’s hunched back, her skin peeling onto the carpet.

“You really are beautiful,” he said.