‘Yes. She wanted a ball for our niece.’

‘Well, something’s wrong with her. She fell down. She’s unconscious. Mr Ghosh says he thinks she might have had a heart attack. He called nine-one-one. You better come.’

Ray locks the car and follows her into the store. It’s cold inside after the car. Mary is lying on the floor with her legs spread and her arms at her sides. She’s next to a wire cylinder full of kickballs. The sign over the wire cylinder says HOT FUN IN THE SUMMERTIME. Her eyes are closed. She might be sleeping there on the linoleum floor. Three people are standing over her. One is a dark-skinned man in khaki pants and a white shirt. A nametag on the pocket of his shirt says MR. GHOSH MANAGER. The other two are customers. One is a thin old man without much hair. He’s in his seventies at least. The other is a fat woman. She’s fatter than Mary. Fatter than the girl in the blue smock, too. Ray thinks by rights she’s the one who should be lying out on the floor.

‘Sir, are you this lady’s husband?’ Mr Ghosh asks.

‘Yes,’ Ray says. That doesn’t seem to be enough. ‘I sure am.’

‘I am sorry to say but I think she might be dead,’ Mr Ghosh says. ‘I gave the artificial respiration and the mouth-to-mouth, but …’ He shrugs.

Ray thinks of the dark-skinned man putting his mouth on Mary’s. Frenching her, sort of. Breathing down her throat right next to the wire cylinder full of plastic kickballs. Then he kneels down.

‘Mary,’ he says. ‘Mary!’ Like trying to wake her up after a hard night.

She doesn’t appear to be breathing, but you can’t always tell. He puts his ear by her mouth and hears nothing. He feels air moving on his skin, but that’s probably just the air conditioning.

‘This gentleman called nine-one-one,’ the fat woman says. She’s holding a bag of Bugles.

‘Mary!’ Ray says. Louder this time, but he can’t quite bring himself to shout, not down on his knees with people standing around, one of them a dark-skinned man. He looks up and says, apologetically, ‘She never gets sick. She’s healthy as a horse.’

‘You never know,’ the old man says. He shakes his head.

‘She just fell down,’ says the young woman in the blue smock. ‘Didn’t say a word.’

‘Did she grab her chest?’ asks the fat woman with the Bugles.

‘I don’t know,’ the young woman says. ‘I guess not. Not that I saw. She just fell down.’

There’s a rack of souvenir tee-shirts near the kickballs. They say things like MY PARENTS WERE TREATED LIKE ROYALTY IN CASTLE ROCK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEE-SHIRT. Mr Ghosh takes one and says, ‘Would you like me to cover her face, sir?’

‘God, no!’ Ray says, startled. ‘She might only be unconscious. We’re not doctors.’ Past Mr Ghosh, he sees three kids, teenagers, looking in the window. One of them is taking pictures with his cell phone.

Mr Ghosh looks where Ray’s looking and rushes at the door, flapping his hands. ‘You kids get out of here! You kids get out!’

Laughing, the teenagers shuffle backwards, then turn and jog past the gas pumps to the sidewalk. Beyond them, the nearly deserted downtown shimmers. A car goes by pulsing rap. To Ray the bass sounds like Mary’s stolen heartbeat.

‘Where’s the ambulance?’ the old man says. ‘How come it’s not here yet?’

Ray kneels by his wife while the time goes by. His back hurts and his knees hurt, but if he gets up, he’ll look like a spectator.

The ambulance turns out to be a Chevy Suburban painted white with orange stripes. The red jackpot lights are flashing. CASTLE COUNTY RESCUE is printed across the front, only backwards. So you can read it in your rearview mirror. Ray thinks that’s pretty clever.

The two men who come in are dressed in white. They look like waiters. One pushes an oxygen tank on a dolly. It’s a green tank with an American flag decal on it.

‘Sorry,’ this one says. ‘Just cleared a car accident over in Oxford.’

The other one sees Mary lying on the floor, legs spread, hands to her sides. ‘Aw, gee,’ he says. Ray can’t believe it.

‘Is she still alive?’ he asks. ‘Is she just unconscious? If she is, you better give her oxygen or she’ll have brain damage.’

Mr Ghosh shakes his head. The young woman in the blue smock starts to cry. Ray wants to ask her what she’s crying about, then knows. She has made up a whole story about him from what he just said. Why, if he came back in a week or so and played his cards right, she might toss him a mercy fuck. Not that he would, but he sees that maybe he could. If he wanted to.

Mary’s eyes don’t react to a penlight. One EMT listens to her nonexistent heartbeat, and the other takes her nonexistent bloodpressure. It goes on like that for awhile. The teenagers come back with some of their friends. Other people too. Ray guesses they’re drawn by the flashing red lights on top of the EMT Suburban the way bugs are drawn to a porch light. Mr Ghosh runs at them again, flapping his arms. They back away again. Then, when Mr Ghosh returns to the circle around Mary and Ray, they come back and start looking in again.

One of the EMTs says to Ray, ‘She was your wife?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, sir, I’m sorry to say that she’s dead.’

‘Oh.’ Ray stands up. His knees crack. ‘They told me she was, but I wasn’t sure.’

‘Mary Mother of God bless her soul,’ says the fat lady with the Bugles. She crosses herself.

Mr Ghosh offers one of the EMTs the souvenir tee-shirt to put over Mary’s face, but the EMT shakes his head and goes outside. He tells the little crowd that there’s nothing to see, as if anyone’s going to believe a dead woman in the Quik-Pik isn’t interesting.

The EMT pulls a gurney from the back of the rescue vehicle. He does it with a single quick flip of the wrist. The legs fold down all by themselves. The old man with the thinning hair holds the door open and the EMT pulls his rolling deathbed inside.

‘Whoo, hot,’ the EMT says, wiping his forehead.

‘You may want to turn away for this part, sir,’ the other one says, but Ray watches as they lift her onto the gurney. A sheet has been neatly folded down at the end of the gurney. They pull it up all the way up until it’s over her face. Now Mary looks like a corpse in a movie. They roll her out into the heat. This time it’s the fat woman with the Bugles who holds the door for them. The crowd has retreated to the sidewalk. There must be three dozen, standing in the unrelieved August sunshine.

When Mary is stored, the EMTs come back. One is holding a clipboard. He asks Ray about twenty-five questions. Ray can answer all but the one about her age. Then he remembers she’s three years younger than he is and tells them thirty-four.

‘We’re going to take her to St Stevie’s,’ the EMT with the clipboard says. ‘You can follow us if you don’t know where that is.’

‘I know,’ Ray says. ‘What? Do you want to do an autopsy? Cut her up?’

The girl in the blue smock gives a gasp. Mr Ghosh puts his arm around her, and she puts her face against his white shirt. Ray wonders if Mr Ghosh is fucking her. He hopes not. Not because of Mr Ghosh’s brown skin, Ray doesn’t care about that, but because he’s got to be twice her age. An older man can take advantage, especially when he’s the boss.

‘Well, that’s not our decision,’ the EMT says, ‘but probably not. She didn’t die unattended—’

‘I’ll say,’ the woman with the Bugles interjects.

‘—and it’s pretty clearly a heart attack. You can probably have her released to the mortuary almost immediately.’

Mortuary? An hour ago they were in the car, arguing.

‘I don’t have a mortuary,’ he says. ‘Not a mortuary, a burial plot, nothing. Why the hell would I? She’s thirty-four.’

The two EMTs exchange a look. ‘Mr Burkett, there’ll be someone to help you with all that at St Stevie’s. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Don’t worry? What the hell!’

The EMT wagon pulls out with the lights still flashing but the siren off. The crowd on the sidewalk starts to break up. The counter girl, the old man, the fat woman, and Mr Ghosh look at Ray as though he’s someone special. A celebrity.