“Everybody talks about how lucky we are today, but my father was the lucky one. People don’t really live longer now, they just take longer to die.”

“Stop talking. I can’t hear,” Maria instructed, stressing the prohibition with a wag of a finger.

Brows knit pensively, she placed the stethoscope on Myles’s chest and bent her head to listen. Then, after making a note on his chart, she rolled up one of his sleeves, and applied a blood pressure band. Sybil, assuming that his catheter was to be changed next and that he did not want her to watch that (she knew she didn’t want to), stood to leave until the exam was over.

“Where’re you going?”

“Thought you’d want some privacy.”

He snorted. “I have had a hundred enemas, been radiated, and invaded, prodded, and penetrated in every damned orifice for nearly two years. Privacy is a luxury the sick learn to live without. Stick around.”

She really did not want to see that artificial bladder pulled out from under his blanket, so she rose, and with her back to him, pretended to browse through the bookcases. His was the library of a man who had devoted his life to God and the sea (and who knew but that the two had become one to his mind). Alongside prep-school Shakespeares and Latin grammars from the 1920s, with their red and brown leather spines and look of no-nonsense scholarship, were Myles’s texts from Yale Divinity School, theological and philosophical works with weighty titles, various editions of the Bible. Books on maritime subjects crammed the other shelves, beginning with the volumes that composed his secular gospels: Piloting Seamanship and Small Boat Handling, Celestial Navigation, The American Coast Pilot, and the Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Book. Below that were the albums and scrapbooks and genealogies he had been using for his research, those stacked as bookends against a small grove of family trees and several memoirs and biographies that accomplished Braithwaites (a surgeon, a foreign service officer, the founder of a textile firm) or their children had privately published to provide future generations with testimonies of exemplary lives.

“Everything A-OK!” said Maria, pulling off her latex gloves, which she dropped into the vinyl bag with the used bladder, filled with a pink-tinged, golden fluid. “You be sure to ring me if you need me.” She went out with a bounce of her jet-black ponytail.

“Is she here twenty-four hours a day?”

“No. Another one comes on at five. Night shift. Gives me baths. Hefts me into and out of the tub like a baby in a bassinet. Black lady as big as Corinne, only taller and younger.”

“Mama thinks you ought to go into that home she found for you right away, not wait until the house sells. You’d have more company.”