“Is this the movies?” Uncle Henry asks as Jerome wheels the Buick into the turnaround in front of the Care Center entrance. “I thought we were going to the movies.”

He’s riding shotgun. At the house, he actually tried to get in behind the wheel until Charlotte and Holly got him turned around. No more driving for Uncle Henry. Charlotte filched her brother’s driver’s license from his wallet in June, during one of Henry’s increasingly long naps. Then sat at the kitchen table and cried over it.

“I’m sure they’ll have movies here,” Charlotte says. She’s smiling, and biting her lip as she does it.

They are met in the lobby by a Mrs. Braddock, who treats Uncle Henry like an old friend, grasping both of his hands and telling him how glad she is “to have you with us.”

“With us for what?” Henry asks, looking around. “I have to go to work soon. The paperwork is all messed up. That Hellman is worse than useless.”

“Do you have his things?” Mrs. Braddock asks Charlotte.

“Yes,” Charlotte says, still smiling and biting her lip. Soon she may be crying. Holly knows the signs.

“I’ll get his suitcases,” Jerome says quietly, but there’s nothing wrong with Uncle Henry’s ears.

“What suitcases? What suitcases?”

“We have a very nice room for you, Mr. Tibbs,” Mrs. Braddock says. “Plenty of sunsh—”

“They call me Mister Tibbs!” Uncle Henry bellows in a very credible Sidney Poitier imitation that makes the young woman at the desk and a passing orderly look around, startled. Uncle Henry laughs and turns to his niece. “How many times did we watch that movie, Holly? Half a dozen?”

This time he got her name right, which makes her feel even worse. “More,” Holly says, and knows she may soon cry herself. She and her uncle watched a lot of movies together. Janey may have been his favorite, but Holly was his movie-buddy, the two of them sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between them.

“Yes,” Uncle Henry says. “Yes indeed.” But he’s losing it again. “Where are we? Where are we really?”

The place where you’re probably going to die, Holly thinks. Unless they take you to the hospital to do it. Outside, she sees Jerome unloading a couple of tartan suitcases. Also a suit bag. Will her uncle ever wear a suit again? Yes, probably . . . but only once.

“Let’s look at your room,” Mrs. Braddock says. “You’re going to like it, Henry!”

She takes his arm, but Henry resists. He looks at his sister. “What’s going on here, Charlie?”

Don’t cry now, Holly thinks, hold it in, don’t you dare. But oh poop, here come the waterworks, and in full flow.

“Why are you crying, Charlie?” Then: “I don’t want to be here!” It’s not his stentorian “Mister Tibbs” bellow, more of a whine. Like a kid realizing he’s about to get a shot. He turns from Charlotte’s tears to see Jerome coming in with his luggage. “Here! Here! What are you doing with those traps? They’re mine!”

“Well,” Jerome says, but doesn’t seem to know how to go on.

The oldies are filing in from their trip to the bowling alley, where Holly is sure a great many gutter balls were rolled. The employee who raised his hands to stop traffic joins a nurse who seems to have appeared from nowhere. She is broad of beam and thick of bicep.

These two close in on Henry and take him gently by the arms. “Let’s go this way,” says the bowling alley guy. “Have a look at the new crib, brother. See what you think.”

“Think of what?” Henry asks, but he begins to walk.

“You know something?” the nurse says. “The game’s on in the common room, and we’ve got the biggest TV you’ve ever seen. You’ll feel like you’re on the fifty-yard line. We’ll take a quick gander at your room, then you can watch it.”

“Plenty of cookies, too,” Mrs. Braddock says. “Fresh baked.”

“Is it the Browns?” Henry asks. They are approaching double doors. He will soon disappear behind them. Where, Holly thinks, he’ll begin living the dimmed-out remainder of his life.

The nurse laughs. “No, no, not the Browns, they’re out of it. The Ravens. Peck ’em and deck ’em!”

“Good,” Henry says, then adds something he never on God’s earth would have said before his neural relays began to rust out. “Those Browns are all a bunch of cunts.”

Then he is gone.

Mrs. Braddock reaches into the pocket of her dress and hands Charlotte a tissue. “It’s perfectly natural for them to be upset on moving-in day. He’ll settle down. I have some more paperwork for you if you feel up to it, Mrs. Gibney.”

Charlotte nods. Over the sodden bouquet of the tissue, her eyes are red and streaming. This is the woman who scolded me for crying in public, Holly marvels. The one who told me to stop trying to be the center of attention. This is payback, and I could have done without it.

Another orderly (the woods are full of them, Holly thinks) has materialized and is loading Uncle Henry’s faded tartan bags and his Brooks Brothers suiter onto a trolley, as if this place were just another Holiday Inn or Motel 6. Holly is staring at this and holding back her own tears when Jerome takes her gently by the arm and leads her outside.

They sit on a bench in the cold. “I want a cigarette,” Holly says. “First time in a long while.”

“Pretend,” he says, and exhales a plume of frosty air.

She inhales and blows out her own cloud of vapor. She pretends.

7

They don’t stay overnight, although Charlotte assures them there’s plenty of room. Holly doesn’t like to think of her mother spending this first night alone, but she can’t bear to stay. It isn’t the house where Holly grew up, but the woman who lives here is the woman she grew up with. Holly is very different from the pale, chain-smoking, poetry-writing (bad poetry) girl who grew up in Charlotte Gibney’s shadow, but that’s hard to remember in her presence, because her mother still sees her as the damaged child who went everywhere with her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast down.

It’s Holly driving the first leg this time, and Jerome does the rest. It’s long after dark when they see the lights of the city. Holly has been dozing in and out, thinking in a disconnected way about how Uncle Henry mistook her for Janey, the woman who was blown up in Bill Hodges’s car. That leads her wandering mind back to the explosion at Macready Middle School, and the correspondent with the torn pocket and the brick dust on his hands. She remembers thinking that there was something different about him that night.

Well sure, she thinks as she drifts toward another doze. In between the first bulletin that afternoon and the special report that night, Ondowsky helped search the rubble, thus transitioning from reporting the story to becoming a part of it. That would change anyb—

Suddenly her eyes snap open and she sits bolt upright, startling Jerome. “What? Are you all ri—”

“The mole!”

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and Holly doesn’t care. It probably doesn’t mean anything, anyway, but she knows Bill Hodges would have congratulated her on her observation. And on her memory, the thing Uncle Henry is now losing.