The waiting room at St. Aurelius Medical Center had the particular quality of midwinter afternoons in that part of the city, a gray, fluorescent sameness that flattened everyone inside it into a common category of waiting. The chairs were the institutional kind, hard plastic in a color that had once been meant to suggest calm and had instead achieved only a kind of resigned neutrality. A television mounted high on the wall cycled through a news program that nobody was watching. The radiator near the window knocked twice every few minutes with a reliability that had become, over the course of the afternoon, a kind of ambient clock.CRSAID
She had been there since just past one.
The woman in the corner was perhaps seventy-five, perhaps older, the kind of age that becomes difficult to fix precisely because what you notice first is not the years but the quality of stillness that has accumulated in them. She wore a coat that had been good once, a dark wool double-breast that had gone thin at the elbows and loose at the buttons, the kind of coat you keep because you know its weight and its warmth rather than because it still looks the way it once looked. Her scarf was the faded green of something washed many times. Her shoes were sensible and old and had clearly walked a great many miles in all weathers. She sat with an old brown leather bag in her lap, both hands on the handle, and every so often she would open it slightly and look inside with the brief, focused attention of someone confirming that something important was still there, and then she would close it again and look at the middle distance.
