Chapter 24: One Week

They opened the Corsetti Pediatric Wing at noon the next day, with a blue ribbon across the glass doors.

A seven-year-old boy in a hospital gown held the scissors.

He had been told to cut slowly. He cut the ribbon in one furious snip, and the lobby clapped.

I stood at the front with my hand on Rocco's arm.

The plaque on the wall said the wing was a gift of the Corsetti family.

The pledges beneath it ran to the bottom of the bronze.

Every one of them had been paid.

The man with the silver mustache was there, and the man who had bid five hundred dollars.

They both looked at their shoes when I walked by, and that was all I needed from them.

Margot stood at the back in her blue smock, with the boy's mother.

She lifted two fingers to me. I nodded.

Thurston was nowhere. Somebody said he had gone to his sister's in Ohio.

I found I didn't ask which.

"A million dollars," Rocco said in my ear, while the director made a speech. "I'd do it again."

"For a week of housekeeping."

"For you."

"You still haven't had your week."

"I've had nine days at Rock Hall in a bed, with a soup spoon."

"That doesn't count," I said.

I gave him the week properly.

I gave it to him in his own kitchen, the way I should have been giving it to myself for years.

On Monday I made breakfast, and he ate it standing at the counter.

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