————————————————

Rain threatens, with snow by the weekend. Last night's heavy fog hangs on stubbornly until late morning when it gives way to a low overcast with quick-moving, dirty gray clouds and damp cold. He's relieved to be off the street and inside with the remnants of the Thursday lunch crowd, some of whom have moved to the bar. Inside, it's warm, bright, subdued, and comfortably elegant with red accents, linen tablecloths, and Ambria lamps.

He hadn't expected her to move away. Her best days, she'd said, were meeting here for lunch and afterwards walking in Grant Park, her arm in his.

Before calling he sits at the bar for twenty minutes and has a whiskey and water, and then another. Outdoors, he'd felt this was the day he'd die; inside at the bar, he feels securely alive and untouchable by the gods, if only for today.

“How are you?” he asks when she answers.

“Why ask me that? You haven't called for months. Not since Winston-Salem.”

“I know, and I'm sorry.”

“And you wouldn't take my calls at work,” she says.

“That too. I should have.”

“Of course you had reasons, but don't tell me. I gave up on you.”

“I'm not calling with excuses.”

“That shows judgment.”

“I want to talk. Let's have lunch,” he says.

“I'm flying 900 miles for lunch?”

“No. I'll fly, or walk if you say so.”

“Don't.”

“It's damp and gray here. Dismal. About to rain,” he says.

“Thank you. Very helpful. But if I need the Chicago weather, we do get the Weather Channel. Even here in Rapid City.”

“Remember the rainy day last April? Lunch at Red Light, afterwards the Hyatt?”

“On April Fools' Day. What do I remember? The looks I got at work wobbling back in after five, all undone. `You're the April Fool,' my friend Rachel said.”

“You didn't tell me that,” he says.

“It didn't matter. Not then.”

“I want you to go away with me. Ireland for a month.”

“Ireland, with me? Why?”

“I've never been. I've always wanted to. Three days away is the most I've ever had with you.”

“You humiliated me.”

“Not true,” he says. “Listen to me: You've heard of the last minute. It's here, right now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm dying.”

“You're dying? You mean, like all the rest of us?”

“I have pancreatic cancer. The one-year survival's twenty percent. Mine's worse.”

“I'm sorry you're ill. I am, but I'm not a traveling nurse.”

“I've treated you badly. I know that.”

“Badly's not what I'd say. I'd say like some cheap trick. I was a great lay. That's what I was.”

“You were, but there was lots more.”

“Right, lots more. That's right. I made you laugh, got you out of that closet you were suffocating in, your little lawyer world. You'd worked thirty-four years, seven blocks from the Art Institute. Only went there once before we met. You told me that.”

“I know. I owe you. I'd never heard of Caillebotte, Degas,” he says.

“Or Mary Cassatt, Pissarro, Sisley. You loved them all. And Edward Hopper. But mostly I was a little something you had going on the side, right?”

“No, not little. Let me fly out and see you.”

“You'll find somebody else, I know that. Anyway, what about Helen?”

“I left three months ago.”

“That was a mistake.”

“I didn't need a case manager. My dying, she would have made it one of her award-winning projects.”

“You didn't call when you left her. That's been three months.”

“I've been in free-fall.”

“And you finally landed next to a pay phone, so you called me?”

“Something like that. Yes, at a pay phone. I just finished another CT scan. I'm at Red Light.”

“It's always all about you. And you, and you. You turned my life upside down, then went into hiding,” she says.

“I won't argue with that. Let me fly out and see you.”

Now, if only she were close by, sitting with him having lunch where he could reach over and touch her sleeve, or her hand, or her hair. Before, almost always, he'd been able to redeem anything and everything that way.

“I've been seeing somebody else,” she says.

“Let's just sit down and talk.”

“I'm seeing someone else. And not drinking.”

She hadn't been drinking today, he could tell. He couldn't imagine how she looked. Probably not, from how she sounded, sitting around after noon in one of her old-lady nightgowns.

“I finally waked up about you,” he says.

“Look, probably I won't ever pass Go and collect $200, but I'm not going back three spaces. I'm not doing that.”

“We're not on the same page, are we?”

“We're not in the same library. I'm sorry you're ill. I was in ICU five days in August. Blood clots in my leg.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't have any idea.”

“Of course not, you weren't talking to me then,” she says, her voice flat. “Some days I'm still walking with a cane.”

“I never humiliated you. At least let me call again, all right? Tomorrow, OK?”

Then, “Amy? Are you there, Amy?”

No, she isn't.

It's raining. As he looks out, condensation streaking the tall, wide windows obscures the few pedestrians hurrying by on Randolph Street. And, yes, tomorrow or Saturday, certainly snow. Falling on the sidewalks and faded grass in Grant Park, maybe in Rapid City, maybe along the Olentangy River Road and drifting against the headstones in Union Cemetery.