By noon we’d covered as much ground as we could. Now that a modicum of order had been restored, I could see how depressing the house was. We could have worked another two full days and the result would have been the same-dinginess, neglect, a pall of old dreams hovering midair. We closed up the house, and Henry rolled two big garbage cans out to the curb in front. He said he’d get cleaned up and then hit the supermarket to restock Gus’s shelves. After that he’d call the hospital and find out when he was being released. I went home, took a shower, and got dressed for work in my usual jeans.

I decided I’d make a second try at delivering the Order to Show Cause to my pal Bob Vest. This time when I parked and crossed the street to knock on his door, I noticed two newspapers lying on the porch. This was not a good sign. I waited, on the off chance that I’d caught him on the john with his knickers down around his knees. While I stood there, I spotted a scratching post on one side of the porch. The carpeted surface was untouched as the cat apparently preferred to sharpen its claws by shredding the welcome mat. A sooty-looking cat bed was matted with hair, dander, and flea eggs, but no visible cat.

I went out to the mailbox and checked the contents: junk mail, catalogs, a few bills, and a handful of magazines. I tucked the pile under my arm and crossed the lawn to his neighbor’s house. I rang the bell. The door was answered by a woman in her sixties, cigarette in hand. The air around her smelled of fried bacon and maple syrup. She wore a tank top and pedal pushers. Her arms were scrawny and her pants rested loosely on her hips.

I said, “Hi. Do you know when Bob’s getting back? He asked me to bring in his mail. I thought he was getting home last night, but I see his newspapers haven’t been taken in.”

She opened the screen door and peered past me at his drive. “How’d he manage to rope you in? He asked me to mind his cat, but he never said a word about the mail.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to bother you with that.”

“I don’t know why not. He’s happy to bother me about everything else. That cat thinks he lives here as often as I look after him. Scruffy old thing. I feel sorry for him.”

I wasn’t crazy about Bob’s neglect of the cat. Shame on him. “Did he mention when he’d be home?”

“He said this afternoon, if you put any stock in that. Sometimes he claims he’ll be gone two days when he knows it’ll be a week. He thinks I’m more likely to agree to shorter absences.”

“Oh, you know Bob,” I said, and then held up the mail. “Anyway, I’ll just leave this on his doorstep.”

“I can take it if you like.”

“Thanks. That’s nice of you.”

She studied me. “None of my business, but you’re not the new gal he keeps talking about.”

“Absolutely not. I’ve got problems enough without taking him on.”

“Good. I’m glad. You don’t look like his type.”

“What type is that?”

“The type I see leaving his house most mornings at six A.M.”

When I got to the office, I put a call through to Henry, who brought me up to date. As it turned out, the doctor had decided to keep Gus an extra day because his blood pressure was high and his red blood cell count was low. Since Gus was spaced out on pain medication, Henry was the one who dealt with the discharge planner in the hospital social services department, trying to find a way to accommodate Gus’s medical needs once he got the boot. Henry offered to explain to me the intricacies of Medicare coverage, but it was really too boring to take in. Beyond Part A and Part B, everything seemed to have three initials: CMN, SNF, PPS, PROs, DRGs. On and on it went in that vein. Since I wouldn’t have to navigate those rapids for another thirty years, the information was simply tedious. The guidelines were diabolically cunning, designed to confuse the very patients they were meant to educate.

There was apparently a formula that determined how much money the hospital could make by keeping him for a specified number of days and how much the same hospital could lose by keeping him one day longer. Gus’s dislocated shoulder, while painful, swollen, and temporarily debilitating, wasn’t considered serious enough to warrant more than a two-night stay. He was nowhere close to using up the days allotted him, but the hospital was taking no chances. On Wednesday, Gus was discharged from St. Terry’s to a skilled nursing facility, otherwise known as an SNF.

7

Rolling Hills Senior Retreat was a rambling one-story brick structure on a tenth of an acre without a hill of any sort, rolling or otherwise. Some attempt had been made to tart up the exterior by adding an ornamental birdbath and two iron benches of the sort that leave marks on the seat of your pants. The parking lot was a stern black and smelled as though the asphalt had just been redone. In the narrow front yard, ivy formed a dense carpet of green that had swarmed up the sides of the building, across the windows, and over the edge of the roof. In a year, the place would be covered by a jungle of green, a low amorphous mound like a lost Mayan pyramid.