He did not ask me to stay again.

He had asked once, and got five minutes, and got twelve, and that was the last transaction of a twenty-eight-month acquaintance.

He died on the second of January at about ten past four in the morning.

I was not there.

The hospice called me at twenty past and I got there at five and I sat with him for an hour in a room with the light off, which is the longest I ever sat beside that man without standing up, and he had been dead for fifty minutes.

Part Eleven: Nine People