On their first night together, in their new house and inventive bed, Jacob poured out his words, each one a measured passion. With those bright promises coasting in the dark comfort of the cabin like finches, with the delicate punctuation of his thumbprints on her skin, she finally knew what a bed was made for. That bed, anyway, lashed down and ready to move.

After Lester died and the girls slept with her while Simon slept with his grief waiting trial, that was just a bed. Nothing special, nothing different. The frame was iron and the box spring and mattress like all the others across the city, torn and slanted, bought cheap at the Salvation Army. Without Jacob, lacking the various poses of her terrified daughters to hold it to the floor, to warm its winter-chilled reaches, Betty felt it yawn open, the kitchen shrink back and the living room floor cough uncomfortably when Simon walked in the door.

It is a relief to close that door and walk the anonymous sidewalk to the hospital lit savagely with fluorescent lights that brighten the clear linoleum and spotless steel of the kitchen. She sits down heavily to change out of her boots and begin again the long day’s work.

Much of the kitchen machinery isn’t functional anymore. The great Hobart mixer squats dusty and unused in the corner, the curved steel arms protecting a mixing bowl large enough to hold a bouquet of small children. Now, instead of baking at the premises, they contract for the starchy white bread and brown dinner rolls that no matter how sick or hungry the patients are, remain uneaten, steeped in the curdled gravy. Turkey and roast beef come wrapped in plastic and are considered safe only after they have been blasted by the steamer at four hundred degrees. The vegetables they used to uncrate and spend hours chopping by hand, over which Betty and the other cooks would chatter and gossip, arrive now in great plastic sacks, like body bags.

The peas are as hard as deer pellets, the carrots as bleached and tasteless as blocks of wood. Over the years the kitchen staff has been diminished from a squad of twelve to a patrol of two. Betty managed to stay, out of charity and design. As the arrival of packaged goods sent the staff packing, Betty said less and less until she became part of the process, just another machine that transfers the frozen food to warm places and the dry to the wet. Even at its best, the food the hospital provides makes no difference to the patients there. Perhaps it is fitting. The hospital sees no extravagant diseases or conditions. It does not merit food of that order.