He gave Danny an arched eyebrow, an exhausted grin.

“Remember those girls I courted this summer?”

Danny nodded. “Did more than court some of them.”

He coughed. A small one, into his fist. “I wrote a song. In my head. ‘Summer Girls.’”

Danny could suddenly feel the heat coming off him. If he leaned within a foot of him, the waves found his face.

“‘Summer Girls,’ eh?”

“‘Summer Girls.’” Steve’s eyes closed. “Sing it for you someday.”

Danny found a bucket of water on the bedside table. He reached in and pulled out a cloth and squeezed it. He placed the cloth on Steve’s forehead. Steve’s eyes snapped up to him, wild and grateful. Danny moved down his forehead and wiped his cheeks. He dropped the hot cloth back into the cooler water and squeezed again. He wiped his partner’s ears, the sides of his neck, his throat and chin.

“Dan.”

“Yeah?”

Steve grimaced. “Like a horse is sitting on my chest.”

Danny kept his eyes clear. He didn’t remove them from Steve’s face when he dropped the cloth back in the bucket. “Sharp?”

“Yeah. Sharp.”

“Can you breathe?”

“Not too good.”

“Probably I should get a doctor, then.”

Steve flicked his eyes at the suggestion.

Danny patted his hand and called for the doctor.

“Stay here,” Steve said. His lips were white.

Danny smiled and nodded. He swiveled on the small stool they’d wheeled over to the bed when he arrived. Called for a doctor again.

A very Wallace, seventeen years the houseman for the Coughlin family, succumbed to the grippe and was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in a plot Thomas Coughlin had bought for him a decade ago. Only Thomas, Danny, and Nora attended the short funeral. No one else.

Thomas said, “His wife died twenty years ago. Children scattered, most to Chicago, one to Canada. They never wrote. He lost track. He was a good man. Hard to know, but a good man, nonetheless.”

Danny was surprised to hear a soft, subdued grief in his father’s voice.

His father picked up a handful of dirt as Avery Wallace’s coffin was lowered into the grave. He tossed the dirt on the wood. “Lord have mercy on your soul.”

Nora kept her head down, but the tears fell from her chin. Danny was stunned. How was it that he’d known this man most of his life and yet somehow had never really seen him?

He tossed his own handful of dirt on the coffin.

Because he was colored. That’s why.

Steve walked out of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital ten days after he’d walked in. Like thousands of others infected in the city, he’d survived, even as the grippe made its steady way across the rest of the country, crossing into California and New Mexico the same weekend he walked with Danny to a taxi.

He walked with a cane. Always would, the doctors promised. The influenza had weakened his heart, damaged his brain. The headaches would never leave him. Simple speech would sometimes be a problem, strenuous activity of any kind would probably kill him. A week ago he’d joked about that, but today he was quiet.