Uncle Greg’s eyes were closed. Annie stared at him a long time. There was no subtle change here, but, rather, one of coarseness; from the middle of his wasted face rose the barely fleshed ridge of his nose; his lips hung loosely, caked with gray froth. It was as though his face were being punched and beaten by an invisible fist.

He opened his eyes a few times during the hour she spent by his bed. He smiled vaguely at the ceiling, murmured something she couldn’t make out, went back into that strange vacuum that looked so much like sleep.

Before she left for the city, Mrs. Fletcher explained that she had called Vernon in Providence to bring the money for the bed and that he would be leaving to join her here as soon as he could manage to get things in proper shape at the animal hospital. The word hospital reminded her of something. “Well, when you’ve seen as many dying and dead animals as I’ve had to, well, we’re all animals in the end, not that I don’t believe in a supreme power, you understand, but life ends in a mess, it’s all a mess if you ask me, still you’re young yet and that’s the best time. When you’re young.”

Vernon arrived several days later and handed Annie an envelope containing a hundred and fifty dollars. He was a short dumpy man with a dead white face that looked as if it were waiting for one permanent expression to be painted on it. He had a tendency to clutch his wife’s arm.

Annie went to Macy’s and bought herself a heavy beige coat that reminded her vaguely of some other coat she had once had. She had enough left over to buy some wool gloves and underwear and a black wool skirt. She couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to, but she felt a kind of joy as she watched the wrapping up of her new clothes.

On March first, she spent the afternoon at the nursing home. The Fletchers wandered in and out, Mrs. Fletcher pursing her lips and shaking her head as she stared down at Uncle Greg, Dr. Fletcher as expressionless as flour, an unidentified presence of some sort near the bed.

The old man moved restlessly that day, plucking and picking at the thin hospital cover, and he muttered ceaselessly, his words drowned in phlegm, yet carrying the persistent tone of one who tells a story with desperate insistence lest he be interrupted. Twice, a nurse came to plunge a needle into his withered arm. A glass straw was inserted between his swollen lips but the liquid never rose through it. Ambulatory patients peered in now and then and passed on down the corridor; trays rattled at early supper time; the geranium petals glowed against the window, beyond which the flakes of a snow flurry struck the glass, then melted. It grew dark. Time lost its measures. Annie discovered that the loud breathing she had been listening to for some time was her own. Once he spoke: “I’ve lost that key again,” he said quite clearly, then lapsed back into incoherency. Helen Sears came and tapped her shoulder. “You might as well go,” she whispered. “This may go on all night. Just come early tomorrow.”