Ancil Sizemore wrote the time down before he did anything else. That was the rule, and he had kept it for eleven weeks without missing once, not in the middle of the night, not on the morning the well pump quit, not on the afternoon a heifer got through the fence on the Tolbert side and he had to go up the hollow after her in his house shoes. He wrote it in a pocket notebook with a green cardboard cover, the kind they sold at the feed store by the register three for two dollars, and he wrote it with a carpenter's pencil he sharpened with his knife, because a ballpoint skipped when the house was cold and the house was always cold by four in the morning.
4:10. Pain 8. Hydromorph 2 mg x2. Turned to left side. Sips water.
The hospice nurse said he kept the neatest log in three counties, and he had said she'd better not go showing it around, it had his grocery list in the back, and she had laughed, which was the thing he liked best about her. Vonnie Huff was a big, freckled woman who drove a white Buick with a magnetic sign on each front door, and she laughed at most things, but she had never once laughed at Ivah, and she had never once, in eleven weeks, made Ancil feel that he was doing it wrong.
Ivah lay in the hospital bed they had set up in the front room where the couch used to be. The couch was in the barn under a tarp. It had come on a truck from Bedford with two young men who set it up in twenty minutes and wouldn't take the twenty-dollar bill Ancil tried to give them. From the bed Ivah could see out the big window down across the lower pasture to the creek, and the sycamores along the creek, and the line of the ridge beyond, and she said that was the only part of the whole business she didn't mind, that she got to lie and look at the best view on the place all day like a rich woman in a magazine.
"What's it say," she said. Her voice was down in her chest this morning, scraped.
"It says four-ten."
"I mean the pain. What'd I tell you."
"You told me eight."
"It was a nine."