Room 214 was at the end of the hall, past the nurses' station, where Nurse Gaudet looked up from a computer screen and saw them coming and took off her reading glasses and simply nodded, the way you nod at someone at a funeral.
"She's been watching the door," she said, low. "Twenty minutes, Daria. I mean it this time. Then I'm the bad guy."
"You're never the bad guy, Bev."
"Tonight I am." Nurse Gaudet looked at Bonner. "She's sharp right now, but it comes and goes. If she drifts, don't correct her. Just let her drift and wait. She usually comes back."
"Yes, ma'am."
The door was half open. Daria pushed it the rest of the way.
He had pictured her, of course. For thirty-one years he had pictured her, a young widow at a graveside, then a woman at a kitchen table opening an envelope, then a woman putting it in a drawer, and the woman in his mind had aged as he aged, but slowly, and always at a distance, the way you see someone through the windshield of a car going the other way. What he had not pictured was how small she would be.
Ondine Ketterman was sixty years old, nearly eleven years younger than he was, and she looked older than his mother had at eighty. The stroke had pulled the left side of her face down slightly, so that her smile, when it came, would come out crooked. Her hair, which Nurse Gaudet had curled twice that morning, had come mostly uncurled and lay soft and gray against the pillow. She was sitting up in the bed, propped by three pillows, wearing a lavender cardigan over the hospital gown, and she had a green spiral notebook in her lap with a pen clipped to the cover, and her hands were folded on top of it, and she was looking at the door.
She looked at him for a long time.
He stood just inside the doorway with his hat in his hands. Daria went past him and sat down in the chair beside the bed, on the far side, and took her mother's right hand in both of hers, without a word.
"You're old," Ondine said finally. Her voice was slightly slurred at the edges, but strong.
"Yes, ma'am."
"In my head you were thirty-eight. You stayed thirty-eight. Every letter, you were thirty-eight." She studied him. "I suppose you thought I was twenty-six."