Chapter 14: Last Night

Corrine recovered first.

She always did.

She finished the last button, walked to the round table and laid her hand on Paulie's shoulder.

"Ri," she said. "You smell like a barbecue."

"That's his watch."

"It's a gift."

"Does Mom know where you spend your lunch?"

"Mom knows what I tell her." She smiled down at Paulie. "That's the difference between us. I know how to talk to her."

Paulie patted her hand without looking at it.

I looked at the two of them for one more second.

Then I walked back out to where Angelo was waiting by the door.

"Did you call him a murderer?" he asked on the sidewalk.

"I called him a florist."

He looked at me sideways.

"That's worse," he said.

Domenic came home from Lankenau that Wednesday.

He signed the do-not-resuscitate order himself this time, in his own shaking hand, with me and the hospice nurse as witnesses.

"My idea," he told the room. "Write that down somewhere."

They put a hospital bed by his window so he could see the garden.

The doctors had said days.

He lasted almost four weeks.

I gave him his doses from my scrub pocket.

Angelo slept in the leather chair by the bed with his boots on.

Paulie came on Sundays with flowers and stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

My mother came in the mornings and talked about the weather and left before she had to touch him.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, his knees went mottled and purple.

I knew what that meant.

I sat down beside him and didn't get up again.

At midnight he woke up clear.

That happens sometimes, near the end.

"Riley."

"I'm here."

"Where's my brother?"

"In the chair. Asleep."

"Let him sleep." His fingers moved on the blanket. "The nightstand. The drawer."

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