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.”

“Sitting around with a lot of other shriveled-up people, waiting for the grim reaper express to pull into the station, is not my idea of company. It’s my wish—should say my hope—that I’ll die in this house before it sells. Speaking of your mother, she told me that you’ll be leaving soon, now that the divorce is—”

“Next week,” Sybil interrupted.

“Arizona, she said.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t think of people your age going to Arizona, although I suppose they do. Think of people closer to my age, coots and codgers hitting drives over the bones of dead Apaches.”

“It’s not golf-course Arizona.”

“What Arizona is it?”

“Cowboy Arizona, I guess. The San Rafael Valley. I bought a piece of a ranch. I’m going to raise horses. Quarter horses, reining horses, maybe show horses. I’m not real sure, but horses.”

“Yeah. Think Catherine mentioned that. Well, you always were a fine rider, always seemed more at home in the saddle than on a boat, like most of the rest of us.”