She wanted to sleep head to foot

She wanted to sleep head to foot. Instead you showed her how you could build a big, white wall of hotel pillows. In the night she wanted to know who put them there and who you were. She needed help six times to get to the bathroom. She coughed and moaned and groaned each time she got in and out of bed. She wept. In the morning, when you asked her how she slept, she said—what she always said—”Like a log. I didn’t hear a thing.” In contrast, none of us slept at all. When we got home we knew that just as God had numbered her days, we also would number them. When we pulled into our neighborhood, the snow that had covered everything only a week earlier fusing its crystals into a hard glaze had shrunk and withered and what was left as we pulled in coming back from that overnight in Milwaukee where there were so many revelations—how dense and clunky Evita really was, how puckered the salmon at Bel Lux, how grating the mufflered cars zipping along the Milwaukee River all night—pulling into our neighborhood what was left of the snow were the scattered, white, lumpy, twisted bodies, like the ones found at Pompeii, snuggling to themselves for all they were worth.