What was the name of the night nurse I liked so much when Ray was in the hospital?

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.

Benign. Renata, the nurse at the Breast Center, telephoned at 2:15 and used that word first, almost before my name. A fibroadenoma, with calcification in it. Nothing to be done. Back to a mammogram once a year, like anyone.

I was at school. It is Halloween, and the costume parade had just gone through the library: forty-one superheroes, a great many princesses, and one child dressed as a library book. I took the call in the workroom again, beside the laminator again, and afterward I stood there with my hand flat on top of the machine because it was warm. Then I went out and taught the two o'clock class. I do not remember it.

I telephoned R. from the car. He said, "Say it again," so I said it again. He was quiet, and then he said he was going to go and rake, and I could hear that he had to get off the telephone.

Four days, Thursday afternoon to Monday afternoon. I did not pray, particularly. I made lists. On Saturday night I made one of what R. would need to be shown: where the tax folder is, how the washing machine likes to be loaded, which of the children to call first. I am going to throw it away. No; I am going to file it.

What I have not told anyone: on Friday I took Mom's ring out of its box and thought about who should have it.

I called Ellen tonight and told her the whole thing, beginning with the end. She was angry with me for about a minute for not telling her on the 21st, as a daughter, and for another minute as a nurse, and then she cried, and then she asked intelligent questions. David and Kate will hear it on Sunday.

Trick-or-treaters until eight. R. gave out full-size bars, two to a child.