“Can we lift him? Between us?” she asked me, and we were tugging at his shoulders when he came to and began to cry. We helped him through the public serving area. Thankfully only a few tables and two stools at the counter were occupied.

“Idiot,” Mr. Chesbrough said, nodding at me. “She did it. Miss Gunnar did it.” It occurred to me he didn’t know my first name.

“Call me Sally,” I said.

It was slow that day at the emergency ward and they took him right away. I sat down in the green waiting room.

“Are you being helped?” asked a nurse.

“I’m waiting for someone else,” I said.

“But it looks like you have a broken nose. You’d better have it treated,” she said.

A little later, a doctor asked me to count backward from one hundred while he administered anesthetic. I relaxed on the paper-covered table and smiled at the white cone a nurse had slipped over my mouth and nose.

Sometime later I awoke and felt acutely nauseous. I managed to turn my head just in time so the gush of half-digested donuts arched out onto the tile floor rather than over me. Some reassuring activity began on that side of the table almost immediately, so I lay back and relaxed, calmly confident that I would never have to face that particular mess, no matter how much I deserved to. At first I was pleased that it had not been odiferous vomit, but then I remembered that my nose was not operating at full capacity, so it might well have been a very odorous puke, very disgusting for the aide or nurse or whoever did the cleaning to deal with. By the time I turned my head to look, he or she, and the vomit, were gone.

They were able to save Mr. Chesbrough’s fingers. “Just a few stitches,” a nurse told me when I was released the next day, and sent home with orders to rest. I wanted bed and a murder mystery. Doctor’s orders.

The old woman downstairs was shelling peas into a bowl as I went by. The stairs and the door, the key itself, were such incomprehensible obstacles that I sat quietly for a moment on the bottom step. A final, enormous effort carried me up and into my room. My cheeks were beginning to itch from the bandage. I leaned toward the mirror and smiled at my face and the big, white A-shaped bandage spread over my nose and cheeks.