And now, thinned by illness, it slid off into my palm, weightless, done, and the ease of it told me the truth that the vow behind it had already become the same kind of ease — not a bond anymore but an empty circle, a shape where a marriage used to be.

I held it in my hand behind that green curtain and I understood that the ring had been telling me for a while, in the only language a ring has, which is fit.

It had been getting looser for a year.

I had told myself it was the weight.

It was the weight.

It was also everything else.

And there is a particular clarity that comes when your body and your life agree, at last, on the same fact — when the thing on your finger and the thing in your chest both let go at the very same moment, and you feel the whole architecture of a marriage come away smooth and final as a ring off a thin cold hand.

Chapter 2 — The Ring on the Watch

At ten the next morning I asked the floor nurse for my street clothes, a pen, a sheet of paper, and a word with my surgeon, and when Dr.

Dvorak came I told him I wanted to sign myself out.

He was kind about it, which made it harder.

He sat on the edge of the bed and explained, in the patient voice of a man who has talked many frightened people out of many bad decisions, that it had been only three days since a nephrectomy, that they needed to watch my blood pressure and my creatinine and the incision, that leaving now was a risk.

I let him finish, because he had earned that, and because I had been a teacher for thirty-four years and I know how it feels to be talked over.

Then I asked him one question.