Chapter 11: Forty-Two

"Doc, you're humming," said the tech.

Magnus stopped.

He stood at the surgical sink in his cap and mask, scrubbing to the elbow, and the tune stopped in the middle of a bar.

"I am not."

"You've been humming since seven. It sounds like a church."

"It is a standard tune."

"It's Landslide," said the tech, and looked at him over the top of her mask with enormous satisfaction. "It's a little flat."

Magnus finished scrubbing in dignified silence.

Three days had passed since the greenhouse.

They had kissed in the hallway outside his apartment and against the refrigerator and once, with the cat watching, on the dryer.

Teddy kissed, all at once and without a map.

Magnus had never in his life been talked into anything he enjoyed so much.

And in all that time he had not said the sentence.

He had said Teddy's name.

He had said please.

He had said a number of other things in the dark of the hall that he intended to remember until his death.

He had not said four small words about a basket, and he knew exactly why.

If he said them, the game ended.

He didn't know that Teddy had a game, or a chalkboard, or a rule.

He only knew that the basket was the last secret between them.

He had been guarding it.

At noon the tech leaned in the door of the scrub room.

"Poppy from the plant place posted the sale," she said. "Everybody in the neighborhood is going. You should go."

"I have a hip dysplasia at two."

"You have a hip dysplasia at two thirty. Go."

He went.

He did not decide to take the basket.

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