The nurse who that evening comes into his room (a private room, $160 more a day, but it's worth it to him; in Florida the guy in the bed next to him finally died, gurgling and moaning all day and then shitting all over himself as a last pronouncement) and takes Harry's temperature and blood pressure and brings his allotment of pills in a little paper cup has a round kind face. She is a bit overweight but it's packed on firm. She looks familiar. She has pale?blue eyes in sockets that make a dent above the cheekbones in the three?quarters view, and her upper lip has that kind of puffy look he likes, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Her hair shows under her nurse's cap as browny?red, many?colored, with even a little gray, though she is young enough to be his daughter.

She lifts the strange plastic rocket?shaped thermometer that gives its reading in red segmented numbers from his mouth and enwraps his left arm with the Velcro?fastened blood?pressure cuff. As she inflates it she asks, "How's the Toyota business?"

"Not bad. The weak dollar doesn't help. My son runs the place now, basically. How'd you know I sold Toyotas?"

"My boyfriend then and I bought a car from you about ten years ago." She lifts those bleached blue eyes mockingly. "Don't you remember?"

"It's you! Yes. Of course. Of course I remember. An orange Corolla." She is his daughter; or at least he imagines she is, though Ruth out of spite would never admit it to him. As the girl stands close to his bed, he reads her badge: ANNABELLE BYER; R.N. She still has her maiden name.

Annabelle frowns, and deflates the blood?pressure cuff, as tight around his arm as a policeman's grip. "Let's try that again in a minute. It shot up while we were talking."

He asks her, "How'd the Corolla work out? How'd the boyfriend work out, for that matter? What the hell was his name? Big red?eared country kid."

"Don't talk, please, until I've got my reading. I'll be quiet. Try to think of something soothing."

He thinks of Ruth's farm, the Byer place, the slope down through the orchard from the line of scrub trees he used to spy behind ? the little square stone house, the yellow shells of the abandoned school buses, the dark collie that tried to herd him down there, as though he knew Harry belonged there with the others. Fritzie, that was that dog's name. Sharp teeth, black gums. Oo boy, scary. Calm down. Think of the big sky of Texas, above the hot low barracks at Fort Larson, himself in fresh khaki, with a pass for the evening. Freedom, a soft breeze, a green sunset on the low horizon. Think of playing basketball against Oriole High, that little country gym, the backboards flush against the walls, before all the high schools merged into big colorless regionals and shopping malls began eating up the farmland. Think of sledding with Mim in her furry hood, in Mt. Judge behind the hat factory, on a winter's day so short the streetlights come on an hour before suppertime calls you home.

"That's better," the nurse says. "One forty over ninety?five. Not great, but not bad. In answer to your questions: the car lasted longer than the boyfriend. I traded in the car after eight years; it had a hundred twenty thousand miles on the speedometer. Jamie moved out about a year after we moved into town. He went back to Galilee. Brewer was too tough for him."

"And you? Is it too tough for you?"

"No, I like it. I like the action."

Action like her mother used to get? You were a real hooer? Dus............