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corrosives of age and illness and murderous familiarity, still stood strong.
    Henry inched into the corner where, like the plunger or the rusty-bristled toilet brush, he could be most inconspicuous, and tucked himself away. “I have to call Roger,” he said, forgetting his own fastidiousness as he bypassed the sink and pushed brusquely past her.
    The house had five bedrooms. Henry and Evelyn no longer used the master suite, which took up the entire third floor. As they’d entered stage five, the doctors thought it safer to trim the extra flight of stairs from Henry’s routine, and Evelyn, to be closer to him in the guest bedroom, moved into Claudia’s old room. Claudia, who couldn’t have cared less about the fate of a bedspread she’d left behind twenty-five years ago, nevertheless relished the opportunity to imagine a slight.
    “What about Benji’s room?” she asked.
    “Your brother’s room is at the other end of the hall.”
    “My brother’s room is a shrine.”
    Evelyn let this fly buzz about her ears without bothering to swat it.
    “What about the library ?” Now that Claudia equated printed books with an unforgivable assault on trees, on her tenets of urban planning, and so on the planet as a whole, the space the Fishers required to house them had become a fresh source of contention.
    “Your father’s office?”
    “You say that like it’s inviolable space. Daddy doesn’t work in there anymore.”
    Again Evelyn was silent.
    “Fine. Then let the library be.”
    Into this large room with its salvaged army surplus desk and tufted leather sofa, Evelyn followed her husband. The worn walnut stenographer’s chair in which Henry had written five novels, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays creaked under the familiar weight. His fingers dove into the hooded desk lamp’s pool of light and started racing through his Rolodex.
    “Henry,” Evelyn said. Then, sharper: “Henry!”
    Without looking up, he snatched a card from the file and began tapping it on the desk. “I have to call Roger.” Between his shoulder and ear he jabbed the handset of a heavy, corded, black rotary phone that neither lit up nor folded into his pocket nor plotted the route to the nearest Walmart. His Rolodex, his phone, his weathered blue Olivetti: long before he’d gotten sick, these museum pieces (as Benji called them) stood like beloved ports in an endless technological storm. Henry had preached sermon after sermon about the evils of the electronic revolution. Since the day he allowed the children their first Commodore 64, he’d been ranting about the dumbing down of an already dumb culture. The death of privacy. The rise of surveillance. And, thanks to every armchair journalist with an unwelcome opinion and a blog, the democratizing and devaluation of the written word. Of course, the children were right: he sounded like a kook, like an angry messenger from the Amish, like a snob, but he preferred living life without a sleek silver laptop, without a promotional video on YouTube or a website for his bio and bibliography, without even so much as an e-mail address. Happily would Henry Fisher die a Luddite.
    “You’re not calling Roger.”
    He started to dial.
    Evelyn followed a worn path across the rug and put her finger on the switch hook. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
    He puzzled the darkness in the window, tapping the card faster and faster. “The book is done,” he said emphatically. “He needs to read the book.”
    Whether he meant the abandoned manuscript locked in the safe behind him or one of the books he published years ago, Evelyn didn’t know. And better, really, not to ask. She’d learned strategies for getting her husband back to bed, for taking his hand when he got lost in the fog. In the doctor’s office, in the caregiver guides that sat beside her own bed, in her talks with Sandra, the day nurse, these tactics made perfect sense. Speak in a clear, reassuring voice. Respond to