Lifer

There was no wheelchair. That’s the detail I keep coming back to. My father had just been released from the hospital, still gray from the pneumonia, and there was no wheelchair anywhere in the building, so Lyssa found a gurney instead and we wheeled him out into the Paris afternoon like that — flat on his back, blinking at the sky, a man from another country being delivered into a city he didn’t ask to see this way. She gave him the tour anyway. Got him ice cream at Berthillon. He’d come to visit his me and ended up on a gurney getting a guided tour of Paris from a woman he’d just met. That’s Lyssa. She doesn’t hesitate, she just finds the gurney.