“Save that recording, Dahlia,” he said.

I have wondered, since, why I made that call at all — why I picked up the phone and dialed into a party I already knew the shape of, and let a dying man hear his wife choose a deck buffet over his last night on earth.

Part of it was that last stubborn ember of hope, the one that will not go out no matter how many times reality steps on it, the part of me that thought: surely, faced with his actual voice, his actual dying, they will come.

But part of it, I think, was for Walt.