The door to 412 stood open a few inches. I knocked twice anyway.
“Come in, if you’re not here to poke me with anything,” a voice called.
I stepped inside.
A woman sat propped against three pillows, a paperback mystery face-down on her blanket. She wore a soft blue scarf wrapped over her head where her hair had been. Her face was thinner than any face should be, and her skin had that papery look I’d seen a hundred times on that floor.
But her eyes.
I stopped so suddenly the door swung back and bumped my shoulder.
Those eyes were gray-green, the color of creek water in October, with a fleck of brown in the left one that looked like somebody had dropped a crumb of cinnamon in it. I had memorized that fleck sitting across from her in Mr. Dornan’s sophomore chemistry class. I had stared at it under the gym lights at the Ambrose Junction High prom while a hired band butchered “Unchained Melody.”
