Because of the head injury they wanted to keep her overnight; they wanted to keep an eye on her foot, too. She would stay in the ER till a bed was found on some distant floor.

“A bother,” she said.

“You’re not a bother.”

She said, “I need to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“Sadie was nine when her father died.”

“That’s a bad age,” said Jack, trying to sound sage and empathetic.

“They’re all bad ages,” said Linda. “Let’s not rank them. I have a friend who says, if you lose a parent early, there is part of you that stays that age forever. And of course it’s worse for Sadie. Because of the trauma. Of being there.”

“Oh,” said Jack.

“She saw her father die. You know that.”

He did not, but he couldn’t say so. “Yes,” he said. Then, “I will.”

“Will what?”

“Look after Sadie.”

“Not after Sadie,” said Linda. “Me. I don’t know that she could do it, worst comes to worst. Your parents have all those daughters, so I don’t feel too bad about asking. Will you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Don’t worry too much,” said Linda, though he was already worried and planned to worry for the foreseeable future. “I have every intention of dying in my sleep.”

Then there Sadie was, in a linen jumpsuit against the heat, billowing and flowered and wrong for her, beige and bright yellow—who would put an empire waist on a jumpsuit?—and they both loved her so dearly in it. She’d taken the afternoon to get a haircut, an old-fashioned bob when all the other hair of Greater Boston was pulled back into ponytails that day, or shorn into buzz cuts.

“Mom!” she said. “How are you?” She went to the opposite side of the bed.

“Furious, you want to know. I told Jack not to call you.”

“He didn’t. Arturo Vitale called me, that weirdo. What’s going on?”

“Tripped over a box and now they want to do surgery on my foot, if you can imagine such a stupid thing.”

“Well, I guess you should get surgery,” said Sadie. “Good grief.”

“They wanted to put some stitches in my scalp, but I said no.” Linda touched her hair. “Most things they offer in hospitals you don’t really have to do.”

The dog in Jack wanted to leap over the bed. He wanted to find somebody in the hospital to marry them—there must be a chaplain, people were always getting married this close to mortality, though Linda was fine: she would live through this and go back to her storybook apartment, or so they thought. Everything seemed fine then. Everything seemed absolutely ordinary, Sadie in her terrible jumpsuit with the empire waist, looking like an ottoman, Linda intact. He stayed where he was. He didn’t leap.