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“You know Larry. Coffee Larry. The guy at my station.”
She stared at me.
“The homeless guy.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“How am I supposed to say it? Sarah.” She lowered her voice, leaned across the table. “You’re marrying the homeless man who lives at your subway stop.”
“He’s dying, Dana. Liver failure. He’s got a month, maybe less. He doesn’t want to be buried as a nobody. If I marry him, I can claim him. I can make sure he gets—” I heard my own voice crack and hated it. “I can make sure somebody buries him with his name.”
Dana was quiet for a second. She reached over and put her hand on mine.
“Honey,” she said. “This is a lot. Even for you.”
“What does that mean, even for me?”
“You know what it means.” She wasn’t being cruel. Dana was never cruel. “You collect people. You always have. The intern nobody would train, you trained him. Your neighbor with the leg, you did her grocery runs for four months. You are the person who fixes things. And I love that about you. But you can’t fix dying, Sarah.”
“I’m not trying to fix dying,” I said. “I’m trying to fix the paperwork.”
She looked at me for a long time.