in his lap in favor of his phone.
“You ready?” I said.
He tossed the magazine onto the neighboring seat. “Yessiree. How’d it go?”
“Swell.” I rolled forward. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Shawn trotted around and pushed me out the door. While we waited for the elevator, I stared at the geometric patterns in the hallway carpet. A loud ding startled me out of the trance.
“Now to pet puppies,” Shawn sang, pushing me in and pressing the lobby button. “Depending on traffic, we might even make it back for lunch. That way, you can sit across from your pals instead of my ugly mug.”
“Shawn, don’t sell yourself short. You’re much hairier, but you’re almost as pretty as—” I paused because Alice’s smile flashed like a vision, but, more importantly, so did her ring.
It had completely slipped my mind and still sat on the bathroom floor, where I’d dropped it before the brawl. Or so I hoped. Good Lord, when did Dahlia come to vacuum and mop? Mondays, was it? No, that wasn’t right. Tuesdays? No, no. Maybe it was the same day Jorge cut the grass, but what day was that?
I’d all-out forgotten.
The elevator stopped at the ground floor.
Shawn put a hand on my shoulder before exiting. “Were you going to say something?”
“Pretty as . . .” It had to be all the distractions. All the pressure. The disorder. This absentmindedness wasn’t me at all. I was still normal. It was everything around me that wasn’t.
He patted me reassuringly, and pushed me into the lobby and outside into the daylight. “Don’t worry, Duffy. You’re probably tired. You’ve had a rough couple days.”
He didn’t know the half of it. We hadn’t even come close to the summit. Maybe we hadn’t even started the climb.
Whistling, he parked me near the door for the bus’s ramp and went to fire up the vehicle. Meanwhile, I closed my eyes to the sun and whispered, “San Francisco, clouds, orange,” because, at the moment, there was simply nothing else to be done.
36
Shawn left me at the threshold of my room and ran off to tend to his business. I wheeled inside, right through a wall of bleach fumes. The beds were made, the dresser dusted, the mirror shone. Dahlia had come and gone. Her vacuum ran a few doors down—a muffled, revving hum interspersed with clacks whenever it sucked up something worth the noise. The sound reminded me of a mortar round—that’s how much dread it produced in my sternum—so my first inclination was to avoid looking at the fallout. I pressed on past the bathroom, toward my bed, where a brand-new walker waited.
It had a gift bow and a note taped to the center brace bar. It wasn’t as nice as Carl’s. No tennis balls, no seat. I rose from the wheelchair, tested my stiff legs, and stood between the handlebars to see how it felt. The note, from Nora, said Remember to count your blessings.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, though not in a manner she would approve of.
Nevertheless, it was hard not to admit that the walker lent a certain amount of security. With it, I walked to the bathroom, counted to ten to steel myself, and then looked down.
The ring wasn’t there.
I moved the walker toward the toilet and managed to get on bended knee, groping blindly underneath the cabinet, near the toe kick. Nothing. Now I was on all fours, patting the ground wildly. Tiny cobwebs, a layer of cleaning chemicals, a pubic hair.
No ring. God almighty, there was no ring.
“Mr. Duffy!” came Nora’s voice directly behind my ass. “What in the Lord’s name?”
My startle turned into a clumsy ascent from all fours to my knees. By the time I managed to get an elbow on the counter, the surprise of her company had run its course.
“Have you fallen again?”
“No,” I said to the commode. There was no room for me to turn around in this position. “I’m looking for a ring.”
Her hand came under my armpit, and she grunted out the next words as she