"Yeah," I said. "It's cold. It's eleven degrees."
"Cold," he said again, and looked at me as if that was important, as if I had missed something. Then he shook his head the way he did when the words wouldn't come, a little angry shake, and went back to the window.
I gave him his four o'clock pills at five minutes to four, with water, and he took them without fighting, which he didn't always do. I took him to the bathroom. I turned the furnace up two degrees because it was cold and because my mother wasn't there to see me do it. I put the afghan back over his knees and turned the television to Channel 5, where a woman was crying in a hospital on General Hospital, and turned it down low, and I sat on the arm of the couch and waited for him to fall asleep. It took longer than usual. He kept opening his eyes and looking at me. Once he reached out with his good hand and took hold of my wrist, not hard, and held it, and looked at me, and said, "Mijo," which he could still say, which was one of the words that hadn't got lost. Then his eyes closed. At sixteen minutes past four his breathing went long and slow and ragged, and his hand let go of my wrist and slid down onto the afghan, and he was asleep.
I turned on the transmitter and set it on the table next to him, beside the box of Kleenex and the glass of water and his reading glasses that he couldn't use anymore. The little green power light came on. I went into the kitchen and put the nine-volt in the receiver and turned it on and checked it, and I heard him breathing in it, and the television, and the clock. I put it in the front pocket of my red backpack with the antenna sticking out through the zipper and the volume on two. I stood in the kitchen for a minute. I remember that. I stood there with my coat half on and I thought, I shouldn't, not today, he grabbed my wrist. And I thought about the station kitchen, which was warm and bright and smelled like coffee and the chili Bert made on Mondays, and Hank's nineteen-inch Zenith under its towel, and Chuy's Walkman, and the dog. And I went.
It was four-twenty when I came in the side door. I know because I looked at the Coca-Cola clock, the way I always did, to start counting my hour.
Ingot was waiting for me.
She was not on her bed. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, facing the door, and when I came through it she didn't lean on me. She didn't come to me at all. She went straight past me to the backpack, which was still on my back, and stood up on her hind legs and put her front paws on my shoulder blades from behind, and I staggered, and she barked right into the pocket. Not three and a stop. She barked and kept barking, high and sharp, faster than I'd ever heard her bark at anything, and between barks she whined, and she pawed at the pocket so hard I felt her claws through the nylon and through my coat.