I walked out through the main lobby, the way I had left, in a gray wool coat, with no duffel bag.
The sliding doors opened onto the plaza, and the morning was bright and cold, and about forty people stood waiting.
Scrubs, white coats, and Dr. Prescott in the front row with her silver hair blowing in the wind.
Denise stood beside her with a bouquet of white roses and blue hydrangeas, the same ones.
She put them in my arms and she did not say anything.
Then they began to applaud.
It was not polite applause.
It rolled, and it kept rolling, and somewhere in it I heard a man’s voice call out, “Thank you, Clara.”
It was Walter, on his cane, in the third row.
I stood there holding the flowers I had once walked past.
Afterward, I did what I do every week.
I took the elevator to the seventeenth floor.
There is a room at the end of the corridor, 1714, where the patients who have no visitors tend to end up.
I knock, I pull up the chair, and I ask whether they would like some company.
Last week, the woman in 1714 was a retired seamstress with a cast on her wrist.
She looked at me for a long moment.
“Aren’t you busy?” she asked. “A woman like you must have a lot to do.”
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