Bonner Wenzel had his helmet in both hands and one boot on the peg when he heard the running.
It was the kind of running you hear before you see, sneakers slapping hard on asphalt that had been cooking since noon, and something about the rhythm of it made him lower the helmet instead of putting it on.
Seventy-one years old, and his body still knew the difference between someone running for fun and someone running because they were afraid of being too late. He had heard that second kind of running in a prison yard, and in a hospital corridor in Reno, and once on the shoulder of U.S. 93 in the dark, which was the one he tried hardest never to hear again.
He was in the visitor lot of William Bee Ririe Hospital in Ely, Nevada, at twenty minutes past four on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, and he had just been told, politely and through a nurse, that the woman he had ridden three hundred and twenty miles to see had changed her mind.
He did not hold it against her. He had told himself, the whole way from Winnemucca, across Highway 50 and its long gray miles, past Austin and Eureka and the sagebrush that looked the same for an hour at a time, that she would almost certainly change her mind. He had told himself it would be all right if she did. He had told himself so many times that by the time he came down the grade into Ely and saw the copper-colored hills and the old smokestack at McGill off to the north, he had nearly believed it.
Then the nurse, a broad, gentle woman with a name tag that read GAUDET, RN, had come out to the little waiting area by the second-floor elevators and crouched beside his chair the way people crouch beside children and very old men, and she had said, "Mr. Wenzel, I'm so sorry. Mrs. Ketterman isn't up to visitors after all. She asked me to tell you thank you for coming."
"Is she worse?" he had asked.
The nurse had hesitated just long enough to tell him the answer was complicated. "She's tired," she said. "She's had a hard day."
"All right," he said. "You'll tell her I said it was fine. That I understand. You'll tell her that."
"I'll tell her."
"Not that I understand. That's presumptuous." He had turned his hat over in his hands. "Tell her I said thank you for letting me get this close."
Nurse Gaudet had looked at him then with an expression he did not know how to hold, so he had stood up, put his hat on, nodded to her, and walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, because the elevator would have meant standing still in a box with his own face reflected in the steel doors.