A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb Page B

abandoned clock, his eyes fixed at a distance. By the time they were getting in the car, Mitch was so pale, James asked, "You okay?"
       "I hate Third Sunday," was all Mitch would say.
       We drove for several minutes in silence, past the business dis trict and toward the suburbs. As we were entering the next town, Mitch pulled into a small shopping center.
       "Be right back," he said. The small grocery store Mitch en tered was the only shop open.
       "I have no idea where we're going," James said to me. But the next moment, Mitch was walking back toward the car with a bouquet of pink carnations.
       "We must be going to his mother's grave," James whispered.
       Mitch got in, looking taut, and tossed the flowers on the seat between them.
       "Nice color," said James.
       This made Mitch laugh again, for some reason. James watched him as we drove on. A few blocks later, we pulled into an apartment building lot, and a freckled, beaming woman of per haps fifty waved to them from where she sat on a cinder block wall. She had a rubber-tipped cane and a shopping bag.
       "Here's Aunt Verna," said James, fishing for information.
       "Aunt?" Mitch shot him an annoyed glance.
       James watched the woman limp toward them, leaning into her cane. "Wasn't she Mom's best friend?" he asked.
       "Do we have to talk about this?" Mitch reached behind him to open the back door.
       "Hey, boys." Verna got in, sitting forward to see James's face better. "You look okay," she smiled.
       The car pulled back out into traffic. The woman buckled her self into the seat beside me. She wore her auburn and gray hair back in a ponytail and dressed like a house painter.
       "How are you, Mitch?" she asked.
       "Getting by," he said.
       As we neared a huge lawn lined with headstones on the right, James stiffened, his eyes scanning each row of graves, but Mitch didn't pull into the gate of the cemetery. We passed it, and the county hospital, pulling into the parking lot of the third building. The sign read: St. Jude's. It was a cement slab, made no cheerier by the clown-colored flowers choking its entrance.
       James looked confused, Mitch looked ill, and the woman with them looked quite happy, as if she were going to a party. They parked in a space marked VISITOR, and I followed them toward the entrance. The boys politely slowed their pace for their friend.
       "Billy, could you take this?"
       James took the woman's bag, and she shifted to pushing with two hands on the cane. When they entered the glass doors, Mitch and the woman went immediately to the front desk and signed a sheet of paper on a clipboard.
       "Good morning, Karen," said Verna.
       The girl behind the counter smiled. "How's the knee, Verna?"
       "Could be worse," she said.
       I hovered behind James. "Maybe Billy's mother isn't dead," he said. These sounded like hopeful words, but I could feel a fore boding in his voice.
       Mitch started to follow Verna down the hall to the left, but he turned back to James.
       "Hurry up." He gestured not so gently with the flowers and a bit of petal flew off.
       James went to the counter, picked up the pen attached to the clipboard by a thin chain, and printed on the line below Mitch's name: William Blake.
       I saw that the girl, Karen, seated behind the desk, was hiding a book under a file folder. Not a hospital text but a dog-eared paperback with a creased corner to mark her place. For one discon certing moment, I saw my own hands tearing the brown paper off a small blue book as if having to wait one more second for a new novel would drive me mad. As quickly as the vision came, it was gone.
       We followed his brother down the hall, and now it was James who was looking ill. We came through a white door into a sani tized room where a woman in a nightgown printed with tiny Eiffel towers sat motionless in a mechanical bed. Mitch dumped the flowers on the tray beside the patient and took refuge