OCR Text |
Show 296 care of everything." He stood up, patted his companion's cold wrist. " I ' ll be in tomorrow to check on you again. Don't worry about a thing." Without glancing at the neighboring patient, and feeling all knees and elbows, he walked out of the room, down the long corridor to the elevators, descended to the ground floor where he stepped out, bumped into a large white pot containing gravel and a dead locust sapling, headed for the hopsital coffee shop where he drank three cups of coffee, his f i r s t such indulgence in over a year. His hand shook while he was finding change to pay the cashier, and walking out to the parking lot his knees f e l t like bedsprings. He sat in Sorenson's car for a long time before starting i t , his forehead pressed against the steering wheel, listening to the pulsebeat in his ears. * * * * * * There were certain things you did as a matter of course when your companion got sick. Lorin was going to have to phone his district president and report the situation. He would be relieved of the burden of tracting for the duration, but he would be taken along to various meetings with the district president and his companion. He would be given dinner appointments with various members of the local branch. He would be fussed over and asked periodically how Elder Sorenson was doing. He would be told that his first duty was to hang in there and get his companion well. The other elders would josh him about poisoning his companion to get out of going tracting. He would make some pleasantry about breaking his companion's leg next. All this would be set in motion as soon as he made that phone call. He got lost once or twice because of the system of one-way streets in the downtown area, and an accident on the belt route blocked two lanes for nearly an hour, but it was still only a little past noon when he pulled up in front of the squat white bungalow with the privet hedge |