Three feet in the evening
Richard Bausch The central hallway at Long View Senior Village shone now like a calm lake with sun on it, because each day a staff member ran a buffer over it. Cleanliness had been Ms. Gable’s first priority from the start of her time as head nurse and administrator there. Soon after her arrival, which was at the height of the pandemic, the whole place began to smell faintly of cleanser. And it was true that the number of cases had indeed begun slowly to subside— though probably other, still unknown factors contributed to this. Over the harrowing previous months, as the numbers of the sick and dying kept climbing, Clement Dyson and three other men had, by a kind of terrible default, come to form what she now called her prize quartet—Dyson, Sid Bishop, Silas Borgman, and Harold Slocum. The four who remain, Dyson called them. At times, she seemed not far from eligibility for a room at Long View herself, at least in terms of temperament, though she was only in her fifties. Dyson mentioned this to the others one fall morning—in a gently teasing way since she was standing right there. This was in the solarium, which resembled a big family room: two sofas, six wing chairs, a TV, a wide, low coffee table, and an upright piano no one used. “You could move right in,” he added. She gave a small companionable chuckle. They all liked the lilt of it. “I might could take you guys up on that one of these days.” “You could be happy living at Long View,” Slocum told her. “What ‘long view,’” Dyson said, and made a spitting sound. “Long View. Some view.”