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limped out to his rusty Oldsmobile convertible, put down the canvas top, and drove through the morning heat toward Sunhaven Retirement Home.
    He thought about Edwina kissing him good-morning. And about Uncle Sam, dying among hired help in a place that had made him uneasy.
    It felt great to be alive and too young for Medicare.

3
    T HERE WAS A LINE of palm trees along the perimeter of the parking lot at Sunhaven, but they provided little shade. Carver nevertheless found a space in the dappled light beneath one of them and turned off the Olds’s ancient and powerful V-8 engine. In the sudden silence, palm fronds rattled in the warm breeze, speaking an old and indecipherable language.
    He got out of the car, set the tip of his cane in the lot’s bleached gravel, and limped toward the nearest of the tinted cubes.
    A transparent door was barely discernible as the entrance. Its copper tint gave back Carver’s reflection as he approached: a slightly crooked, featureless man with a cane, struggling in glaring two dimension. The heat from the gently inclined pale concrete ramp to the door radiated through the thin leather soles of his moccasins. The temperature might hit a thousand today.
    But not inside Sunhaven. As Carver stepped in and the door swished closed behind him, the chill almost stopped his heart. All that tinted glass must make the air conditioning more efficient.
    The lobby was done in pastels, mostly the pale blues and pinks seen in nurseries, as if to suggest the full circle of nothing to life to nothing. There were several residents seated in wicker chairs. The nearest, an old woman secured with a knotted yellow sheet so she wouldn’t topple from her rocking chair, lolled her head toward Carver and smiled as if she recognized him as a long-lost family member. It was quiet in the lobby and the runners on her rocker made soft, rhythmic creaking sounds. Hypnotic sounds. Two old men, one of them with a missing right arm, halted their game of checkers and glanced over at Carver. The nearer of them, hatchet-faced and obviously without his dentures, smiled in the same way as the woman in the rocker. The one-armed man, unnoticed for a moment, darted out his hand and furtively scooted a red checker forward on the board. Carver wondered if it had been his move.
    In the center of the blue and pink and mauve lobby was a long, curved reception desk, the lower half of which was covered with what looked like pink industrial velvet. Beyond it were half a dozen tall, pastel dividers, partitioning off what probably were private areas where residents and visitors could talk uninterrupted.
    Carver nodded to the checker players and limped toward the tiny, redheaded girl behind the reception desk.
    She got younger as he got closer. He figured her for about fifteen, but she had the kind of looks that could confound the guy who guessed ages at carnivals. Her hair was carrot-colored and she had a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of a miniature, perfect nose. Her eyes were blue and widely spaced, with a dreamy quality and with that pink-rimmed look so often seen on redheads. She had a trim figure beneath her white-and-gray uniform: lean waist and high, small, protruding breasts—a teenage figure. Her hair was medium-length and combed back, arranged in a sort of bun on top of her head and held there with a blue ribbon tied in a large bow. The flared bow resembled an exotic butterfly that had found a suitable flower. There were errant, fiery wisps of hair curling in front of her ears. She looked to Carver as if she ought to be wearing pigtails and orthodontic braces and marching in the junior high school band. The plastic name plaque on the desk read “Birdie Reeves.”
    She glanced up from the magazine she’d been reading and noticed Carver. She blinked once, slowly, as if there were sand beneath her eyelids and they hurt. Then she smiled. Her teeth were even but protruded; that only added to her Becky Thatcher look. She was so