Given her destination, a grim place, she might easily have ignored the imperfection. But that wasn’t Harriet’s way. There was a right approach and a wrong, a lazy, a misguided approach. She unzipped and sloughed off the skirt, which slid easily over the beige slip.

She deftly ratcheted open the cheap ironing board with one hand (oh, Harriet knew her laundry implements) and plugged in the inadequate iron, which was secured to the board with a wire; were handheld appliance thefts such a terrible problem in New York? And didn’t the hotel have the guests’ credit cards anyway?

Oh, well. It was a different world here, so different from home.

As she waited for the heat to gather she kept replaying her husband’s words from yesterday as they’d walked through the chill streets of New York.

‘Hey, Harriet, hey.’ He’d stopped on the street, halfway between FAO Schwarz and Madison Avenue, hand on a lamppost.

‘Honey?’ she’d asked, circling.

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ The man, ten years older than his wife, had seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m not feeling so good. Something.’ He’d touched his chest. ‘Something here, you know.’

Cab or call? she’d wondered, debating furiously.

Nine one one, of course. Don’t fool around.

In twenty minutes they were at a nearby hospital emergency room.

And the diagnosis: a mild myocardial infarction.

‘A what?’ she’d asked.

Oh, it seemed: heart attack.

This was curious. Outfitted with low cholesterol, the man had never smoked cigarettes in his life, only occasional cigars, and his six-foot-two frame was as narrow and strong as the pole he’d gripped to steady himself when the heart attack had struck. He trekked through the woods after deer and boar every weekend during hunting season when he could find the time. He helped friends frame rec rooms and garages. Every weekend he muscled onto his shoulder forty-pounders of mulch and potting soil and carried them from pickup truck to shed.

‘Unfair,’ Matthew had muttered, upon hearing the diagnosis. ‘Our dream trip to the city, and look what happens. Damn unfair.’

As a precaution, the doctors had transferred him to a hospital about a half hour north of their hotel, which was apparently the best cardiac facility in the city. His prognosis was excellent and he’d be released tomorrow. No surgery was called for. There would be some medication to lower his blood pressure and he’d carry around nitroglycerine tablets. And he should take an aspirin a day. But the doctors seemed to treat the attack as minor.

To test the iron she flicked a dot of spit onto the Teflon plate. It sizzled and leapt off. She spritzed a bit of water onto the skirt from the Dannon bottle and ironed the wrinkles into oblivion.