"All right then. I'll let you get to it."

Ruby began singing what sounded like an old folk tune as he stepped out and closed the door most of the way. "The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground." Her voice was surprisingly musical, despite its frailty.

Returning to the stairs, he slipped in a small puddle on the hardwood floor. He bent down and spotted another small puddle at the top of the stairs. On the carpeted risers it was easy to see the wet spots for what they were.

Footprints.

He followed them halfway down the steps, until they were no longer visible. The carpet was dampest here, spattered with multiple drops. As if someone had been there, not sitting on the stair lift—he would have heard its motorized buzz from the kitchen, anyhow—but standing on the stairs dripping wet.

"For they're hanging men and women for the wearing of the green," came his mother's voice from above.

He caught a glimpse of Ruby just as she left the bathroom and in the brief glimpse it looked like she was doing the Charleston down the hall.

When he rose two steps to get a better look, she was already in her bedroom. Her door slammed, and he was suddenly stricken by an inexplicable panic.

He ran all the way down the stairs before the embarrassment of running away from a little old lady who wouldn't harm a hair on his head settled in, and he laughed at himself.

"What's so funny?" Sheila asked, stepping in from the living room.

"Nothing. I just, uh, it's weird to be back here is all."

"Weird is one way to put it. Norma said to get you for dinner," she added, heading toward the delicious smell in the kitchen.

Dinner tasted as delicious as it smelled.

They had roast beef and mashed potatoes in a thick gravy and onions and cooked baby carrots, the four of them sitting around the dining room table. Norma had buzzed Ruby's meal a few times in the food processor to make it easier for the old woman to chew without her dentures. Martin tried not to spend the entire time watching in horrified fascination as she gummed the brown, pureed food paste to death.

Ruby abstained from drinking the bottle of white wine Sheila picked up at Sinjin's grocery store, choosing prune juice instead. The two guests and Norma enjoyed it—although it wasn't exactly up to par with what Martin usually drank, when he did drink wine—and got caught up in amiable conversation about their lives in New York and on the island.

Norma and Ruby had returned to Barrows Bay ten years prior. They didn't go into detail about their return, but he remembered in a long-ago letter from Norma that patients had been released from the institution into other hospitals due to cuts in funding, and it was just around the time she was starting to tire of her own job, wanting something a little more stable in hours, with more of a personal touch than the old folks' home where she'd worked part time for over a decade.