What happened in September 2019? I'd like the whole month back, in order.

Labor Day at the cabin, the two of us and the dog. The last swim of the year: 66 degrees by R.'s thermometer, and I was in and out in four minutes. Birdie was in for an hour.

R. hauled the kayaks up to the boathouse this afternoon and stopped halfway up the path with his hand on a birch. I asked. He said it was the humidity. It was 71 degrees and dry.

Both loon chicks have made it and are nearly the size of the parents, gray and plain. They practice taking off, running along the water for fifty yards, and give it up.

Home since Thursday. Church; I had altar guild and set out the green. Pastor Kristin preached on counting the cost, and R. counted the house instead: 142.

R. fell asleep in his chair this afternoon with the ball game on the radio, which he does not do before the seventh inning. I had to tell him the score.

Sunday calls: Ellen, yes. David, yes, from an airport. Kate sent a photograph of Theo wearing a colander.

R. is in the hospital. Arbor Bluff, the cardiac floor, room 4117. He is asleep, or pretending, and I have come home for the night because the nurse told me to and because of the dog.

About half past two this afternoon he was raking under the honey locust. I was in the kitchen with the list for Thursday's sorting. I looked out, and the rake was lying on the grass and he was sitting on the back step with his forearms on his knees, looking at the ground between his feet. I thought he was looking at the dog. I went on with the list.

Ten minutes. He sat there ten minutes before he came in and said, in the voice he uses to report a leak, that there was a pressure in his chest and that his left arm felt heavy, and that it was probably nothing, and that perhaps I should drive.

I drove. I did not call an ambulance, and I have been told twice since, kindly, that I should have. It is eleven minutes to Arbor Bluff and I did it in nine. He held the handle over the door the whole way and said, "You ran that one," at Odana.

They had him on a table with wires on him before I had finished spelling Ostrander. There are changes on the tracing, and something in the blood that should not be there, a little of it. The word they are using is "event." A young doctor explained that it is a kind of heart attack, a small kind, and that the cardiologist will look at the arteries on Thursday, from the inside, through the wrist. He was admitted at six.

I telephoned Ellen from the corridor at 4:30. She asked five questions I could not answer and one I could, and said she is coming tomorrow as soon as her last patient is seen. David and Kate after that. David went quiet and then asked for the room number. Kate said, "Is he scared?" I said he was annoyed.

What he said to me, at about nine, when they had dimmed the lights: "I didn't finish the back." The raking. I said the leaves would wait. He said, "They won't, though," and shut his eyes.

Marlene had fed Birdie and left the porch light on. The rake is still on the lawn.

A day of waiting. He is on a monitor that draws his heart in green across a screen over his head. I have watched that line for eleven hours. It does the same thing every time, and I cannot stop checking that it has.

He is bored, which the day nurse says is the best sign there is. He has asked for the crossword, his own pillow and the lake association minutes.

Dr. Valdivia came by at four to introduce herself: small, gray-haired, very direct. She drew the heart for him on the back of the menu, arteries and all, and he corrected nothing.

Ellen walked in at 6:40 this evening still in her clinic clothes, kissed her father, picked up the chart from the end of the bed and read it standing, all of it, while he watched her. Then she said, "Okay, Dad," and sat down.

The night nurse came on at seven. Her name is Tamsin, which she says is Cornish, like half of Mineral Point, where she grew up on a dairy farm. She calls him Mr. O, and she brought me a blanket out of the warmer and a recliner from another room without my asking for either. At nine she stood in the doorway and told me, as a fact and not a kindness, that he would sleep better if I went home. I believed her, and went.

The procedure is tomorrow at ten.

It is done, and he is all right.

They took him down at 9:50. Ellen and I sat in a waiting room on the second floor with a fish tank and a television nobody was watching. I had brought a book and held it. Ellen did not pretend; she sat with her forearms on her knees.

At 11:25 Dr. Valdivia came out in her blue cap. She sat down beside us before she said anything, and I have learned in two days that the sitting down is not a bad sign; she does it for everyone. There was one blockage, in the artery that runs down the front of the heart. Ninety percent closed. She has opened it and put in a stent, a little tube of mesh. The other arteries have some wear, "like anyone's at sixty-six," and need nothing. The muscle itself is pumping normally. She said that twice, for my benefit.

Ellen asked which artery, by its initials, and nodded, and I saw her face do something and come back. In the elevator she told me what the nurses call that artery, and that I was not to look it up.

We saw him at half past twelve, flat on his back with a tight band on his right wrist where they went in, pale and extremely awake. Dr. Valdivia showed him the two pictures on a screen: before, a river pinched down to a thread; after, a river. He studied them for some time. Then he asked her, "What's the design life on that?"

She said, "Longer than the warranty on the rest of you, if you take the pills."

He laughed, and it hurt his wrist, and I have never been so glad of anything.

I telephoned everyone, oldest first. Then I went down to the chapel on the first floor and sat in it for a quarter of an hour. I did not pray in sentences.

Tamsin is on tonight. I told her what he said about the design life, and she wrote it on the whiteboard in his room, under "Goals for today."

He comes home tomorrow if the night is quiet. There are four new pills, a card to carry in his wallet with the stent's particulars, twelve weeks of supervised exercise beginning in October, and a list of what he may not lift, drive or shovel.

Home at 2:15. He walked from the car to the back door by himself, stopped on the step where he sat on Tuesday, looked at it, and went in.

Birdie lost her mind. She is five months old and forty pounds and may not jump on him.

He is in his chair with the dog across his feet, and has asked twice whether I brought in the rake. Ellen set up the pills in a box with fourteen doors before she would sit down. She is staying until Sunday.

We did not go to church. Pastor Kristin came to us instead, at two, in jeans, with communion in a little leather case, and gave it to the three of us at the kitchen table among the pill bottles. Then she stayed for coffee and asked R. to explain the stent, and he drew it for her on a napkin.

Ellen left at four. She stood in the drive with her hand on the car door and told me what to watch for, in the order in which I should worry about it, and that I was to call her at any hour and not decide by myself that something was nothing. I said I would. She said, "You say that."

Sunday calls: I made them all.

His first walk as far as the corner and back, eight minutes, with me beside him pretending to be walking the dog. He is to add a minute or two a day. He has made a chart.

R. reads every label now. He stood in front of the open refrigerator at noon holding the summer sausage, turned it over, read it, and put it back.

I skipped the sorting at the library. Connie came by with a hotdish and stayed to tell me that her husband had the same thing done in 2011 and was back on the golf course in a month. People have been coming up to me all week with their husbands' arteries.

R. drove today for the first time, to Odana Hollow Hardware and back, for a box of screws he did not need. I rode along. He adjusted the mirrors as if someone else had had the truck.

I baked. Sigrid had been sulking in the refrigerator for two weeks and came back in one feeding. He had one slice, weighed; he is doing this the way he did the diabetes, as a specification to be met. Two loaves, one of them for Marlene.

David came for the weekend, Friday night to this afternoon, by himself. He did not say he was coming until he was at the gate in Denver.

He and R. spent most of Saturday afternoon in the shop, not building anything. R. is not to lift more than ten pounds until Friday, so David lifted, and R. told him where to put things.

In the kitchen this morning David asked me, "Is he going to be okay?" He is thirty-seven and has two children and designs buildings that stand up, and he looked about ten. I told him what Dr. Valdivia told me: the muscle is sound. He nodded, and went and took out the garbage.

Kate has telephoned every day at five, our time.

Two weeks. Dr. Valdivia saw him this afternoon in the clinic and is satisfied: the wrist has healed, the pressure is good, and the tracing is "boring," her word, and a compliment. He may lift again as of tomorrow and may go up north, with the pills, the card and me.

I asked her the question I have been carrying around, which is whether the ten minutes on the step did any harm. She did not tell me not to think about it. She said that most men wait longer, that some wait until the next morning, and that the heart muscle came through whole, so the answer in his case is no. Then she looked at R. and said, "Next time you don't wait ten seconds. You tell her." He said, "Yes, ma'am," and meant it.

In the car he said, "I didn't want to scare you." I said that he had, and that the sitting there was the part that did it. We drove the rest of the way home without talking.

Up north. I drove. In fifteen years he has driven every mile of US-51 in both directions, and today he rode with the seat back and the dog's head on his shoulder and criticized nothing until Tomahawk.

I know to the minute how far we are from Arbor Bluff. Three hours and forty. The emergency room in Woodruff is fourteen. I looked both up before we left and was ashamed of myself, and then looked up the helicopter.

But the lake was like glass at five, and the maples are half turned, and he walked to the end of the dock and stood there. Bev and Arnie came over with a pot of soup. Arnie did not say a word about hearts. He said the walleye are on the rock bar in twelve feet of water and that he has been saving them.

The loons have gone. One of the young ones was still here last weekend, Bev says, alone, and left on Wednesday.

Home again. He fished yesterday morning with Arnie for two hours, sitting down, and came in with three walleye and color in his face.

It is three weeks tomorrow. I have stopped listening to him breathe, most nights. I still look at the back step every time I pass the window.

Tomorrow at eight he starts the cardiac rehabilitation: three mornings a week until Christmas, on a treadmill, wired up, with a nurse watching. He has laid his clothes out on the chair like a boy before the first day of school. New shoes, white, enormous.