Chapter 7: Four Stockings

The sun went down into the ocean at four forty that afternoon, and I watched it from a concrete wall with a paramedic.

Dylan had brought a blanket.

He had also brought a thermos, two mugs and a bag of the cart's cinnamon doughnuts, still warm.

"It's winter," I said. "It's seventy degrees."

"It gets cold on the wall."

It did, a little, once the light went.

A wind came in off the water, and I pulled my sleeves down over my hands.

Without a word, he took off his gray hooded sweatshirt and put it over my shoulders.

It smelled of laundry soap and the inside of an ambulance.

His hand stayed on my shoulder for a second after the sweatshirt was settled.

Then he lifted his hand off my shoulder and put it in his pocket, and he stepped back half a pace.

"Sorry," he said. "Habit."

"You put your habit on a lot of patients?"

"Only the ones who get cold at the beach."

I pulled the sweatshirt around me.

I told myself that I was only warm because of the sweatshirt.

"Why did you come to California?" he asked. "Really."

"My aunt asked."

"People ask all the time. You have to want to go."

I watched a surfer wait for a wave that never came.

"I thought they were saving the best things for me," I said. "I mean my family. I thought if I was sensible long enough, I'd be the one they chose."

"And?"

"Then I read the itinerary."

He didn't say he was sorry.

He didn't say it was their loss, or tell me what a good person I was.

He looked at the water for a long moment.

"That's a rotten thing to find out in a hospital bed," he said.

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