Lauren looked at them. Then she got up from the table and went out to the front hall and came back with something in her hand. The other shoe. She set it down beside its mate. The two silver heels stood on the kitchen table in the gray winter light, a pair again, absurd and glittering among the pill bottles and the unopened mail.
"I walked to my car in my stockings," Lauren said. "It was nine degrees. I sat in the car with one shoe in my lap and cried so hard I couldn't see to drive. I sat there for twenty minutes outside your house." She almost smiled. "I kept thinking, Your daughter is going to grow up and remember the lady who ran away in the snow."
"She'll remember it," Renée said. "She remembers everything."
Lauren nodded.
They sat for a while longer. The coffee had gone cold. Finally Renée stood and picked up her coat from the back of the chair.
"How long does he have?" she asked. "Your dad."
Lauren looked up, startled. "They said days. Maybe. They stopped his fluids on Monday."
Renée nodded slowly. She had sat with dying people. Not often; her work was at the other end of things. But during her clinicals, and during her father's last month at Advocate Trinity, she had learned what the end looked like, and she knew from the way Lauren's hands moved on the table that no one had told her.
"His breathing's going to change," Renée said. "Toward the end. There'll be long pauses, and you'll think each one is the last, and then he'll breathe again. It can go on like that for hours. There might be a sound, a rattling, in his throat. It sounds terrible. It isn't hurting him. The hospice nurses will give him something for it. His hands and feet might get cold and mottled, kind of purple. That's normal too. He might not respond to you, but the hearing is the last thing to go. So talk to him. Tell him whatever you need to tell him. Even if you think he can't hear. Talk anyway."
Lauren was staring at her. Tears were running down her face, and she didn't wipe them away.
"Why are you telling me this?" she whispered.