Cold Fire

Mrs. Danforth, the administrator into whose office they were shown, was new since Henry Ironheart had been checked in. She had the slightly plump, well-groomed, and inoffensively self satisfied look of a minister's wife in a prosperous parish. Though she could not understand why they needed her to verify something that Jim knew already, she checked her records and showed them that, indeed, Henry Ironheart's monthly bill was always promptly paid by James Ironheart, of Laguna Niguel, by check.

"I'm glad you've come to visit at last, and I hope you'll have a pleasant time," Mrs. Danforth said, with genteel reproach meant to make him feel guilty for not visiting his grandfather more often while at the same time not directly offending him.

After they left Mrs. Danforth, they stood in a corner of the main hallway, out of the bustle of nurses and wheelchair-bound patients.

"I can't just walk in on him," Jim said adamantly. "Not after all this time. I feel. my stomach's clutched up, cramped. Holly, I'm afraid of him.”

"Why?" "I'm not sure." Desperation, bordering on panic, made his eyes so disquieting that she did not want to look into them.

"When you were little, did he ever harm you?" "I don't think so." He strained to see back through the clouds of memory, then shook his head. "I don't know.”

Largely because she was afraid to leave Jim alone, Holly tried to convince him that it would be better for them to meet the old man together.

But he insisted she go first. "Ask him most of what we need to know, so when I come into it, we won't have to stay much longer if we don't want to. in case it goes bad, gets awkward, unpleasant.

Prepare him for seeing me, Holly. Please.”

Because he appeared ready to bolt if she did not play things his way, Holly finally agreed. But watching Jim walk into the courtyard to wait there, she already regretted letting him move out of her sight. If he started to lose control again, if The Enemy began to break through, nobody would be with him to encourage him to resist the onslaught.

A friendly nurse helped Holly find Henry Ironheart when he proved not to be in his room. She pointed him out at a card table in the cheery recreation center, at the other end of which a half dozen residents were watching a game show on television.

Henry was playing poker with his cronies. Four of them were at a table designed to accommodate wheelchairs, and none wore the standard nursing-home attire of pajamas or sweatsuits. Besides Henry, there were two fragile-looking elderly men-one in slacks and a red polo shirt; the other in slacks, white shirt, and bow tie-and a birdlike woman with snow-white hair, who was in a bright-pink pantsuit. They were halfway through a hotly contested hand, with a substantial pile of blue plastic chips in the pot, and Holly waited to one side, reluctant to interrupt them. Then one by one, exhibiting a flair for drama, they revealed their cards, and with a whoop of delight the woman-Thelma, her name was-raked in her winnings, theatrically gloating as the men goodnaturedly questioned her honesty.

Finally intruding into their banter, Holly introduced herself to Henry Ironheart, though without identifying herself as Jim's fiancee.

"I'd like to have a few minutes to talk with you about something if I could.”

"Jesus, Henry," the man in the polo shirt said, "she's less than half your age!" "He always was an old pervert," said the guy in the bow tie.

"Oh, get a life, Stewart," Thelma said, speaking to Mr. Bow Tie.

"Henry's a gentleman, and he's never been anything else.”

"Jesus, Henry, you're gonna be married for sure before you get out of this room today!" "Which you certainly won't be, George," Thelma continued. "And as far as I'm concerned"-she winked-"if it's Henry, marriage doesn't have to be part of it.”

They all roared at that, and Holly said, "I can see I'm going to be aced out of this one.”

George said, "Thelma gets what she's after more often than not.”

Noticing that Stewart had gathered the cards up and was shuffling the deck, Holly said, "I don't mean to interrupt your game.”

"Oh, don't worry yourself," Henry said. His words were slightly slurred as a result of his stroke, but he was quite intelligible.

"We'll just take a bathroom break.”

"At our age," George said, "if we didn't coordinate our bathroom breaks, there'd never be more than two of us at the card table at any one time!" The others wheeled away, and Holly pulled up a chair to sit near Henry Ironheart.

He was not the vital-looking, square-faced man she had seen in the photograph on the living-room wall of the farmhouse last evening, and without help Holly might not have recognized him. His stroke had left his right side weak, though not paralyzed, and a lot of the time he held that arm curled against his chest, the way an injured animal might favor a paw.