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Dolores comes through in her house slippers, a magazine rolled in one fist. She stops at the end of the table and frowns down at the lighthouse.

"Nobody's played a decent hand at that table since Hildie went out west."

"She'd have this whole thing done," Sylvia says, nodding at the sky. "She always did the middle first. Worked backward, that one. Drove me crazy."

Every one of them talks about her in the past tense. She's only been gone ten weeks, but around here, that's an eternity.

Mom talked to her once after the move, but Hildie got agitated and didn't stay on the phone long. Since then, all I've heard is Carson saying she's settling in. That's it.

Sylvia presses the last of my four pieces home and pats it. The sky grows a little.

I decide I want a ginger ale.

Getting up takes the same two-step process in reverse. One hand on the table, weight forward, then up. I leave the lighthouse behind me and go find the machine.

The machine drops the can with a bang, and I bend to fish it out of the tray. It's cold and already sweating in my hand. I straighten up and crack the tab, and the hiss of it is loud in the empty alcove.

Down the hall, Manny says a name, and I know the shape of it before he's finished saying it.

I turn.

Carson is at the front desk with his hat in one hand and the chained pen in the other, filling in the top line of a form. He stands the same as he did in December, shoulders squared to the work in front of him.

Summer has been hard on him in a way that looks unfairly good. His skin is darker than it was at Christmas, sunburned across the back of his neck, and his hair has gone pale at the ends.

His T-shirt is soaked through in a stripe down his spine and pulled tight across his shoulders. His forearms, braced on that counter, are corded like he's spent every day since February throwing hay bales for fun.

I'm thirty weeks pregnant with his children, and I can't see my own ankles, and the sight of him still lands low in my belly, somewhere beneath the place his babies are kicking.

Past the desk, an aide is bringing Hildie out of room 14, second from the end, the same door as December.

She's thinner. Her light blue cardigan is buttoned to her throat in July, every button. She walks beside the aide with her face turned toward the wall.

I don't know why she's here.

Mom comes out of the staff kitchen with the empty foil pan in both hands and stops in the middle of the floor. Then she sets the pan on the counter and crosses to Hildie and takes both her hands.

"Yesterday. I was here until two yesterday."

"I know it." Manny doesn't come around the desk. "I couldn't tell you. She came back around four. She's a resident, so per HIPAA, I can't tell one family about another."

Hildie lets Mom hold her hands. She looks down at all four of them and turns Mom's over to see the back of it.

"Aren't you kind," she says. "Thank you for coming, honey."

She doesn't address my mom by name, and her eyes are blank. I've watched these two women finish each other's sentences over a card table. I know exactly what's not in this room.

Hildie turns to the aide. "What time does the bus run?"

Carson looks up from the clipboard. His eyes find me, then drop to my stomach, and hold there. I can't read his face. Is he happy to see me, disgusted by my humongous belly, or indifferent?

The last time he saw me, at my first ultrasound, I was eight weeks pregnant, and my jeans still buttoned.

The pen slips out of his fingers and swings on its chain, tapping the front of the counter.

"Mackie."

"Hey, you. Wow, I didn't have seeing the cowboy in Florida on my bingo card."