Dateline Shrine. Dad looked out of it when I got here, this slim version of him. Two hundred pounds, maybe.

"Do you want to go outside?" I asked him.

"What's outside?" he replied.

It's the same thing he said to me the other day. I wheeled him out of Dammert, through the break room, and down the long hallway to St. Francis and the exit there. But first we stopped to get a soda.

"You want a Diet Coke?" I asked him. "Diet Dr. Pepper?"

"I'll take somethin'," he replied.

We sat down at the chairs and tables outside St. Francis.

"How'd you guys know where to go this mornin'?" he asked me.

"Huh?"

"How'd you guys know where to go?"

"Who's 'you guys'?"

"Anybody who's going over there," he said.

There is some sort of event going on at the Retirement Community today, maybe that's what he was talking about. It might be Mary Crowe's visitation.

He takes his first sip of the Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar.

"Oh, man," he says.

He can still relish a soda. Seventy-five cents from the vending machine in the break room. He had a roll of quarters in one of his drawers in the house, quarters wrapped in plastic, from the bank. It'd been in there for years. One day a few months ago I saw it in there and I knew what I would do with those quarters...

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