Chapter 4: Third Drawer

Morris's house was a narrow brick colonial on a street of identical porches.

Jo found the spare key under a flowerpot she had been telling him to move for ten years.

The door stuck, then gave.

Inside, it smelled of tea and library books.

"He never locked the back," she said. "He said burglars wouldn't get past the stairs."

"The stairs are terrible."

"They are the worst stairs in Maryland."

We stood in the hallway in our funeral clothes, two strangers in a dead man's house.

His reading glasses were folded on the radio.

A mug of cold tea still sat on the kitchen table with a spoon in it.

Jo picked up the mug, and her face broke.

She put it down very carefully.

"I haven't been in here since Sunday dinner," she said.

"He asked me to come for a late supper last week and I had a double shift."

"You couldn't have known."

"I could have come on Monday."

"You'd have found him tired and happy and a day closer to the end."

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

"You're annoyingly kind for a man who got thrown out of a church."

"I've had practice."

"At being thrown out?"

"At swallowing it."

She almost laughed, and then she took my wrist, the way she probably took patients' wrists, and looked at my knuckles.

They were scraped raw from the gravel.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on a kitchen chair and she cleaned my hand with a paper towel and tap water.

Her fingers were quick and warm.

I watched the top of her head, the red hair coming out of the ponytail, a freckle on her ear.

"Why did he hide you?" she said.

"Because I asked him to."

"You asked."

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