“You must take it, Mr. Myles, or you’ll go back to the hospital. I can’t watch you every second.”

“Ah, what’s the point? What is the point?”

Maria opened one of the bottles and filled a glass from the pitcher, the point so obvious to her that Myles’s question wasn’t worth answering.

“My father was seventy-six years old and lathering up to shave, and dead when he hit the floor,” he said after gulping the pill down. “Nowadays, EMS would be over in minutes and put those awful clappers on his chest and get his old ticker running again. Then tubes up his backside, in his nose, his mouth and there we are, a miracle of modern medicine, a living corpse, until someone has the decency to pull all that stuff out of him.”

“Cooking lady wants to know, two for supper or one?”

With a look, Myles asked Sybil if she would like to stay, but he wasn’t asking really, he was imploring. She hesitated, thinking, Maybe he has nothing to tell me, only wants company at the dinner table. Almost eighty now and alone, except for Maria and Corinne … She nodded.

“Two,” he told Maria. “Don’t see the point of my eating, either. Used to worry about my weight, and now, ha! Got a golf ball for a belly.”

Maria slipped the stethoscope over her neck, then opened Myles’s flannel shirt, exposing a sternum ribbed and ridged and cobwebbed with dry gray hairs.

“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.”