Annie uttered a broken sob at the description. She had never met her grandfather, but her heart ached for him. "Your father was a master carpenter whose life was shattered by the war. His parents asked him to look for family members when he got to Germany. He did. And he found some." Oh, Lord, help her hear this and walk in her father's shoes long enough to understand. "They were working for one of the concentration camps. They were supplying the soldiers who were exterminating Jews. Your father was a translator in his unit. When his relatives begged for mercy, he and another in his unit shot them down. Grandma Leota said he talked about it only once to her and never discussed the war again."

Her mother's face was white. "I remember Grandma Helene asking him questions in German, and he said he found nothing."

"Did he ever speak German again, Mom?"

Her mother closed her eyes tightly. "No. Grandma asked him once why he wouldn't, and he said he wanted to forget he was German."

"He was ashamed. He didn't understand that Germans were not the only race capable of atrocities. It's mankind. Beneath the veneer of civilization, the flesh is weak and given to all manner of sin. There, but for the grace of God, go we all."

"I never knew any of this!" her mother cried out.

"Grandma Leota said they weren't her secrets to tell. Great-Grandma Helene must've found out because Grandma Leota said she changed shortly after your grandfather died. He must've finally told her before he died. If not all, at least the part about Grandma Leota paying for the house. I don't think anyone but Grandma Leota knew about what happened in Germany. Whatever your grandfather told Grandma Helene, after he was buried, she never spoke another unkind word to Grandma Leota. They made their peace. Grandma said they loved one another in the end."

Her mother cried bitterly. "I feel as though Grandma Helene poisoned me."

"Maybe she did. Just as you've tried to poison me, Mother."

"Don't say that. Please don't say that."

"It's time you faced it. Show some compassion! All the things Grandma Helene told you out of ignorance about Grandma Leota, you've repeated to me. Not once, Mom, but over and over, year after year. This is your opportunity to change things between you and Grandma Leota. You won't have her around forever."

Grief flooded her mother's eyes, shame as well. "Why didn't my mother tell me all this years ago?"

Annie was filled with sorrow. "Oh, Mom, all you had to do was ask."

The medical technician delivered the vials of blood he had taken from several patients to the downstairs laboratory. Another technician was looking through a microscope. She straightened, rubbing the back of her neck, and glanced up at him with a smile. "How's it going, Hiram?"

"Busy day." He would go off duty in another two hours. "I'm taking my dinner break. I think I need a good jolt of caffeine."

She went back to looking through the microscope. "Bring me a cup, if you think about it. And a brownie if they have any."

The cafeteria was almost empty, which suited Hiram just fine. He needed to be alone to think. Walking along the glass-fronted counter, he picked meat loaf, mashed potatoes, corn, a piece of apple pie, and coffee. Finding a table in a back corner, he made himself comfortable. From where he sat he could see a full view of the room. He liked to be able to see who was coming in and going out.

He'd found the time and opportunity to read over Leota Reinhardt's chart. Having a premed major in college, he'd always dreamed of being a doctor. Unfortunately, his grades hadn't been high enough to get him into medical school. Furthermore, he'd had to drop out of college the last year and help his mother take care of his father, who had developed Alzheimer's. They'd finally put him in a convalescent hospital.

Every time he took his mother to visit, she came home in tears because his father's mind was so far gone that he didn't even remember who she was. It broke his mother's heart. Maybe if he'd gotten along better with his father, he would have felt the same.

Twice his father had gotten pneumonia. Both times, he tried to convince his mother to tell the hospital not to go to heroic measures to save the old man. "I can't do that. He's my husband. He's your father." Not anymore, he'd wanted to say. Whatever part of the man that had been his father was long gone. Hiram had begun to hate going to that convalescent hospital. He'd begun to hate the sight of that sick old man who was just the shell of a human being.

He felt sorry for Leota Reinhardt's family. She was half-paralyzed from a stroke. Add cancer to that, along with congestive heart failure, arthritis, and a few other minor problems like borderline anemia, and her life wasn't worth living. If she did live, her granddaughter, a real beauty, would spend the next year or two or more working night and day to take care of an old woman who wouldn't even be able to carry on an intelligible conversation with her. Considering how the rest of the family was reacting, it seemed the old woman hadn't been all that nice anyway. No one but the granddaughter would miss her.

Every year there were more elderly. People were living longer and longer. All well and good if they were healthy, but, unfortunately, most weren't. Every year he saw more old people coming into the hospital, filling up the beds, and using up tax dollars he and his generation paid. He'd read that almost 30 percent of the Medicare dollars were going to the care of people during their last year of life. Thirty percent! He'd read that by the year 2040, 45 percent of the expenditures would be paid out to let these people cling to life for a few more months.

It didn't make sense.

In fact, it seemed cruel to him. Cruel to make the old live longer. Cruel to make the young pay for it. You only had to look at the relatives' faces after a visit to see that it was agony watching a loved one slowly break down and die. Didn't he know it from personal experience? Some of his patients reminded him of moldering corpses that, by some accident of nature, still drew breath. They smelled of decay.

They put animals to sleep. Why not human beings?

He hated to see people suffer.

People ought to be able to die with dignity.

If the government could fund abortions for drudges and welfare recipients, why not extend death with dignity to the old? It made perfect sense to him. The arguments were the same. He carried the thought further, rolling it around some more. If people didn't want to shell out money to support crack babies or babies born into poverty or babies born with handicaps, why would they want to finance long-term care for people who couldn't pull their share of the workload anymore?

It ticked him off how much money he had to pay in taxes every year. The more he made, the more the government took. And where was it all going? To drones. How long had it been since Leota Reinhardt had held a job and paid taxes into the system? Two decades? Besides that, how many thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money were going to be spent keeping her alive for a few months longer?

Benefits and burdens should be measured.

It wasn't right to prolong life. He'd seen people suffer agonies untold with cancer and emphysema and diabetes, where bit by bit the body died off. And family members suffered right along with them. Like he had. Like his mother had. All the talk about dying being a part of living . . . If that was the truth, then what was the big deal in helping the process along?

He'd overheard enough of the shouting in that waiting room to know Leota Reinhardt didn't want to end up in a convalescent hospital. The family didn't want to be responsible for in-home nursing care, except the girl who didn't know what she was getting into. And the guy shouting didn't want to see the entire estate siphoned away by private in-home nursing care that might last as long as the old lady did.

That beautiful girl ought to be out dancing and having a good time instead of saddling herself with a sick old woman who wasn't ever going to get any better.

One injection. That's all it'd take. And all Leota Reinhardt's suffering would be over.

No one even had to know.

He looked up and around the room, vaguely uncomfortable, defensive. Sometimes he felt as though someone was watching him . . . as though someone could read his thoughts. A pity he couldn't say what he thought without risking his job. He was more compassionate than most; he cared about patients, and he hated watching people suffer. Why should he feel apologetic for wanting to help a patient die with dignity?

It had been hard the first time. He'd felt sick for days afterward. Sick with guilt, sick with fear, sick with feelings he couldn't even identify. But he'd gotten over it. He thought about it all the time and the reasons why he'd done it. It was right; he knew he was right to do it. He had made the decision after overhearing the patient's twenty-year-old daughter, hysterical and screaming at the doctor, "Can't you do something? Why does she have to suffer like this?"

The doctor hadn't had the guts to do what should've been done weeks earlier. But he had. During the quiet hours of the night shift, when all the visitors were gone and the nurses were working on charts and counting meds, he'd gone into the room and given the patient an injection. She hadn't even opened her eyes. She had died with dignity.

The second time had been a little easier, and with each one after that he'd spent less and less time feeling anything but relief. He'd helped ten patients in a hospital in Southern California, most of them with cancer or emphysema. Then he worked in San Francisco and, over a period of three years, helped twenty more with AIDS. Seeing all those dying patients had gotten to him. All that suffering, not to mention the cost. Thousands and thousands of dollars a month, just to keep one patient in medicine. How insane was that?

He had several vials of morphine and succinylcholine chloride in his locker, given to him by one of the nurses he'd gone out with in San Francisco. He wasn't alone in the way he felt. There were others, and the numbers were growing.

There were so many who needed help. After all, where was the dignity in being incontinent, slobbering, and half-paralyzed?

If he were in Leota Reinhardt's place, he'd want someone to show a little mercy.

Nora stopped trying to defend herself and listened. Annie stopped lashing out and accusing and began to relate everything Leota had told her about those early years. For the first time in her life, Nora began to see things through her mother's eyes, and it hurt.

Oh, how it hurt.

She kept seeing that dream image of her mother on her knees in the garden looking toward the house with such longing in her eyes. Had it been a dream? Or had she seen her mother like that time and again while she was in the kitchen doing her grandmother's bidding, soaking up the bitter words and letting them take root in her soul?

"She loves you, Mom."

"She never said so."

"She showed you by working."

"I would've liked to have heard the words."

"Maybe you did, but you weren't listening."

Nora started to cry. How many tears had she shed in her lifetime? Gallons for herself. And now she was weeping for her mother, feeling the pain as though it were her own. And wasn't it? "I don't know what to do!"

Annie was crying, too. "Help me, Mom. I want to bring her home."

"The doctor said she needs to be in the hospital. She's so sick."

"The doctor said she needs extensive care," Annie said, determined.

"But you're giving up your whole life!"

Annie leaned forward, her hands open, pleading. "Mom, she doesn't have a lot of time, and I want to spend every day I can with her. Don't you want that now? Don't you want the chance to get to know her? You never did before. You never saw her or who she really was."

Nora was afraid, so afraid, of making the wrong decision. How many times in her life had she been wrong? So many times she couldn't count. And this time it mattered. It mattered so much. "I could spend time with her in a hospital. There are excellent ones, you know. There's one not far from us, isn't that so, Fred? You could come home, Anne-Lynn. We could go together and visit her."

"It wouldn't be the same and you know it, Mom. If Grandma had a choice, when the Lord calls her home, she'd want to be on a chaise longue in her garden."

Nora felt torn. Fred put his hand over hers and squeezed gently. He was looking at her, the tenderness of his expression encouraging her. You know what's right, Nora. You know in your heart what your mother would want. Wouldn't you want the same thing? To have your family around you . . . to be in your own home?

"All right, Annie," she said in a broken voice. "I don't fully agree that this is best, but I'll help you."

"We'll bring her home tomorrow." Relief filled Annie's eyes, eyes so warm and thankful. Nora had never seen that look in her daughter's eyes before-at least, not for her.

"Tomorrow might be too soon, Annie," Fred said. "The doctor said she's very weak. Maybe it'd be better to wait a few days."

"Mom, please."

Nora let her breath out slowly. All the wasted years of bitterness. Maybe this one act might pave the way to a new relationship with her mother, however brief it might turn out to be. "I'll help you bring her home tomorrow morning."

Leota dozed. It was difficult to sleep with all the noise and activities of the hospital-nurses coming and going, a patient in the next bed moaning until she was given another shot that eased her pain and made her sleep so soundly she snored like a man. Then there was that medical technician who seemed to hang around. He'd just a minute ago stood in the doorway, then moved on when a nurse had said something to him.

Her mind drifted back to the years just before the war, when Bernard had been whole. She could see him in that dance hall, watching her. She could remember the wind in her face as they sat in the rumble seat riding home.

The tune of "Don't Sit under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me" ran in her head. She could see Mama Reinhardt knitting socks for Bernard. She remembered the air-raid sirens going off and the block warden in her hard hat knocking on the door and telling them they had to black out the windows better because light still showed through. They'd saved everything for the war effort. Bacon grease for making ammunition, toothpaste tubes, tin cans, glass jars, newspapers and magazines when she'd finished reading and rereading them a dozen times. Nothing was wasted.

How her victory garden had flourished! She'd grown enough rhubarb, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, peas, corn, beets, carrots, and potatoes to keep the neighborhood fed. Mama Reinhardt had canned hundreds of jars of cherries, plums, apricots, and applesauce.

She could still see that Jewel Tea truck come around the corner, selling everything from hairpins to crackers. And the Borden's milk truck and the Swedish bakery truck. She used to sell some of her vegetables to old Toby, who came around with his pickup. He always ran out of produce long before he ran out of customers.

She thought of Cosma, her dear friend. She'd never forget the permanent Cosma gave her. She said I looked like Rita Hayworth with all my red-blonde hair in wild curls. We went shopping in San Francisco, and the sailors whistled, and all I could do was cry because I kept wishing Bernard were home to see how nice I looked. Cosma took a picture of me in that one-piece sunsuit I wore all summer long in the garden. I struck a Betty Grable pose. Bernard wrote back and said the guys in his unit told him he'd married a "dish." I wonder what I did with that sequined beret? I used to have a straw hat with giant roses and a chapeau with a barnyard of feathers. How funny I must have looked!

She let her mind fill with memories of Eleanor and George when they were little. She loved the tiny curls on the back of George's neck, the smell of soft skin in the curve of Eleanor's baby neck. And those chubby legs.

"Mama."

Let me dream about those far-off days as though they were near again. Lord, let me remember what it was like to have a whole man looking forward to a bright future and two babies, healthy and happy. Don't let my mind drift to the dark years.

And yet, they too were sweet in their own way.

Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death and I dwelt in darkness, You were light to me. My Lord and my Redeemer. All those years, when Bernard sank into his depression and used to call out for help, I looked up to You. How many times did I go out into the sunlight and walk with You in the garden and talk with You in my heart? How many times did I go out there at night and look up at the moon and stars? And You were there with me. You, the lover of my soul.

The medical technician was back at the door again. What did he want? Why was he back again? He was behaving oddly, looking down the hall one way and then the other. Was he back to take more blood? Surely the two test tubes he took this afternoon had been enough! He'd had a carrier with tubes in it when he came into her room before. His hands were empty now.

He came into the room, pausing to watch Leota's roommate sleeping. His presence distressed Leota. Something about his manner filled her with dread.

Lord, what's going on here? Why is he behaving so oddly? I'm afraid. What am I afraid of? I'm in a hospital! They help people get well here, don't they? Why this feeling of danger?

Eleanor is coming back tomorrow. Fred said he was bringing her. I could feel her heart softening. Oh, God, the years I've prayed for this to happen. Maybe tomorrow morning will be a new beginning. Maybe tomorrow morning, I can touch her hand without her pulling away. Maybe tomorrow morning, I can tell her I love her and have her finally believe me.

The man moved away from the other bed and approached hers. He didn't look her in the eyes but glanced toward the door one more time. How odd. "Just a little something to help you sleep, Leota." Why would he carry a syringe in the pocket of his coat? Any half-wit would know it could become contaminated.

For just a second, he looked into her eyes.

That was all the time Leota needed to know what the man had come to do.

Troubled, Nora stared out the front window of the car. It was raining, and the windshield wipers swished back and forth. She had no cause to worry. Fred was an excellent driver and the traffic was light this time of night. So why this strange sensation of restlessness?

"What's wrong, honey?" Fred said, flicking the headlights to bright again after a car passed by them.

"I don't know. Just a funny feeling." She felt the strong urge to go to her mother. Now. Not tomorrow morning. Now-turn around. Go back to the hospital. It was foolishness.

"About what?"

"I was just thinking about seeing my mother tomorrow morning and wishing I didn't have to wait that long."

"Do you want to go back to the hospital?"

Nora looked at him. "It's after midnight, Fred. She'll have gone to sleep long ago."

"And if she were awake? What would you want to say to her?"

Her throat felt so hot and tight. She looked out the windshield again.

I'd say I'm sorry. I'd say I do love you, Mother, even though it's never seemed as though I did. It was because I loved you so much that I've been so angry. I'd say please forgive me for all the cruel things I've said and done. I'd say so many things I've kept bottled up for decades. She sobbed. "Mama, I've missed you. That's what I'd say."

Fred reached over and brushed his knuckles lightly against her cheek. "We can go back if you want. Say the word and I'll take the next off-ramp."

She almost said yes, then mentally shook herself. What was she thinking? It was well past midnight. She was letting her emotions run away with her again. She had spent a lifetime letting her emotions control her. Besides, she could imagine what the nurses would have to say if she showed up at this time of night and insisted on seeing her mother. What was she supposed to say? I want to make amends? I want to wake up my mother so I can say I'm sorry?

"It's all right, Fred," she said, putting her hand on his thigh. "I can wait a few more hours."

What did one more night matter?

Oh, God, don't let him do this. Oh, please, Lord. Annie said to hang on. Fred said to keep the faith. Eleanor is so close to becoming herself again. Lord, help me!

She could hardly move because of the medication already given her. She raised her hand, but the technician only smiled. "I understand," he said. "It'll all be over soon. You won't suffer anymore."

Oh, God, he doesn't understand me. He doesn't know what he's doing! I'm not alive for my benefit. I'm alive for the sake of my children. Oh, Jesus, open his eyes! Show him! Make him understand. Oh, Jesus, stop him from doing this terrible thing! I want to live. I want to see my daughter in the morning. I need time, just a little more time.

Her mind was in torment, her heart in terror.