Away from Her

way that gave not the least satisfaction.
    Kristy was the only nurse he could talk to. Some of the others treated the whole thing as a joke. One tough old stick laughed in his face. “That Aubrey and that Fiona? They’ve really got it bad, haven’t they?”
    Kristy told him that Aubrey had been the local representative of a company that sold weed killer— “and all that kind of stuff ”—to farmers.
    “He was a fine person,” she said, and Grant did not know whether this meant that Aubrey was honest and openhanded and kind to people, or that he was well spoken and well dressed and drove a good car. Probably both.
    And then when he was not very old or even retired—she said—he had suffered some unusual kind of damage.
    “His wife is the one takes care of him usually. She takes care of him at home. She just put him in here on temporary care so she could get a break. Her sister wanted her to go to Florida. See, she’s had a hard time, you wouldn’t ever have expected a man like him—They just went on a holiday somewhere and he got something, like some bug, that gave him a terrible high fever? And it put him in a coma and left him like he is now.”
    He asked her about these affections between residents. Did they ever go too far? He was able now to take a tone of indulgence that he hoped would save him from any lectures.
    “Depends what you mean,” she said. She kept writing in her record book while deciding how to answer him. When she finished what she was writing she looked up at him with a frank smile.
    “The trouble we have in here, it’s funny, it’s often with some of the ones that haven’t been friendly with each other at all. They maybe won’t even know each other, beyond knowing, like, is it a man or a woman? You’d think it’d be the old guys trying to crawl in bed with the old women, but you know half the time it’s the other way round. Old women goingafter the old men. Could be they’re not so wore out, I guess.”
    Then she stopped smiling, as if she was afraid she had said too much, or spoken callously.
    “Don’t take me wrong,” she said. “I don’t mean Fiona. Fiona is a lady.”
    Well, what about Aubrey? Grant felt like saying. But he remembered that Aubrey was in a wheelchair.
    “She’s a real lady,” Kristy said, in a tone so decisive and reassuring that Grant was not reassured. He had in his mind a picture of Fiona, in one of her long eyelet-trimmed blue-ribboned night-gowns, teasingly lifting the covers of an old man’s bed.
    “Well, I sometimes wonder—” he said.
    Kristy said sharply, “You wonder what?”
    “I wonder whether she isn’t putting on some kind of a charade.”
    “A what?” said Kristy.
    Most afternoons the pair could be found at the card table. Aubrey had large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult for him to manage his cards. Fiona shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes moved quickly to straighten a card that seemed to be slipping from his grasp. Grant would watch from across the room her darting move and quick, laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s husbandly frown as a wisp of her hairtouched his cheek. Aubrey preferred to ignore her as long as she stayed close.
    But let her smile her greeting at Grant, let her push back her chair and get up to offer him tea—showing that she had accepted his right to be there and possibly felt a slight responsibility for him—and Aubrey’s face took on its look of somber consternation. He would let the cards slide from his fingers and fall on the floor, to spoil the game.
    So that Fiona had to get busy and put things right.
    If they weren’t at the bridge table they might be walking along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to the railing with one hand and clutching Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other. The nurses thought that it was a marvel, the way she had got him out of his wheelchair. Though for longer trips—to the conservatory at one end of the building or the television room at the other—the wheelchair was called for.
    The television seemed to be always turned to the sports channel and Aubrey would watch any sport, but his favorite appeared to be golf. Grant didn’t mind watching that with them. He sat down a few chairs away. On the large screen a small group of spectators and commentators followed the players around the peaceful green, and at appropriate moments broke into a formal sort of applause. Butthere was silence everywhere as the player made his swing and the ball took its