Harriet Stanton's family trip to New York, which she'd been looking forward to for years, had not turned out as planned.
It had been derailed by a chance incident that could have changed her life forever.
Harriet now stood before the mirror of the hotel suite she'd spent a restless night in and looked over her suit. Dark. Not black but navy blue.
How close she'd come to selecting the former color. Bad luck, making that choice.
She plucked a few pieces of random lint off the wool, brushed at some dust - the hotel was not as nice as advertised online (but it was affordable and frugality was important in the Stanton family, which hailed from a town where accommodation standards were set by a Holiday Inn).
Fifty-three years old, with slim shoulders and a pear-shaped build (but a slim pear), Harriet had a staunch face that was ruddy and weathered - from gardening, from marshaling children after class in the backyard, from picnics and barbecues. Yet she was the least vain woman on earth, and the only creases that troubled her were not in her face but in the skirt of the suit - one set of wrinkles that she could control.
Given her destination, a grim place, she might easily have ignored the imperfection. But that wasn't Harriet's way. There was a right approach and a wrong, a lazy, a misguided approach. She unzipped and sloughed off the skirt, which slid easily over the beige slip.
She deftly ratcheted open the cheap ironing board with one hand (oh, Harriet knew her laundry implements) and plugged in the inadequate iron, which was secured to the board with a wire; were handheld appliance thefts such a terrible problem in New York? And didn't the hotel have the guests' credit cards anyway?
Oh, well. It was a different world here, so different from home.
As she waited for the heat to gather she kept replaying her husband's words from yesterday as they'd walked through the chill streets of New York.
'Hey, Harriet, hey.' He'd stopped on the street, halfway between FAO Schwarz and Madison Avenue, hand on a lamppost.
'Honey?' she'd asked, circling.
'Sorry. I'm sorry.' The man, ten years older than his wife, had seemed embarrassed. 'I'm not feeling so good. Something.' He'd touched his chest. 'Something here, you know.'
Cab or call? she'd wondered, debating furiously.
Nine one one, of course. Don't fool around.
In twenty minutes they were at a nearby hospital emergency room.
And the diagnosis: a mild myocardial infarction.
'A what?' she'd asked.
Oh, it seemed: heart attack.
This was curious. Outfitted with low cholesterol, the man had never smoked cigarettes in his life, only occasional cigars, and his six-foot-two frame was as narrow and strong as the pole he'd gripped to steady himself when the heart attack had struck. He trekked through the woods after deer and boar every weekend during hunting season when he could find the time. He helped friends frame rec rooms and garages. Every weekend he muscled onto his shoulder forty-pounders of mulch and potting soil and carried them from pickup truck to shed.
'Unfair,' Matthew had muttered, upon hearing the diagnosis. 'Our dream trip to the city, and look what happens. Damn unfair.'
As a precaution, the doctors had transferred him to a hospital about a half hour north of their hotel, which was apparently the best cardiac facility in the city. His prognosis was excellent and he'd be released tomorrow. No surgery was called for. There would be some medication to lower his blood pressure and he'd carry around nitroglycerine tablets. And he should take an aspirin a day. But the doctors seemed to treat the attack as minor.
To test the iron she flicked a dot of spit onto the Teflon plate. It sizzled and leapt off. She spritzed a bit of water onto the skirt from the Dannon bottle and ironed the wrinkles into oblivion.
Slipping the skirt back on, she reexamined herself in the mirror. Good. But she decided she needed some color and tied a red-and-white silk scarf around her neck. Perfect. Bright but not flamboyant. She collected her handbag and left the room, descending to the lobby in an elevator car outside which a chain jangled at every passing floor.
Once outside, Harriet oriented herself and flagged down a cab. She told the driver the name of the hospital and climbed into the back seat. The air inside was funky and she believed the driver, some foreigner, hadn't bathed recently. A cliche but true.
Despite the sleet, she rolled down the window, prepared to argue if he objected. But he didn't. He seemed oblivious to her - well, to everything. He punched the button on the meter and sped off.
As they clattered north in the old taxi, Harriet was thinking about the facilities at the hospital. The staff seemed nice and the doctors professional, even if their English was awkward. The one thing she didn't like, though, was that Matthew's room in Upper Manhattan Medical Center was in the basement at the end of a long, dim corridor.
Shabby and creepy. And when she'd visited last night it had been deserted.
Looking at the elegant town houses to the left and Central Park to the right, Harriet tried to cast off any concerns about visiting the unpleasant place. She was thinking that maybe the bad luck of the heart attack was an omen, hinting at worse to come.
But then she put those feelings down to superstition, pulled out her phone and sent a cheerful text that she was on her way.