Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
January 01, 2006 – January 31, 2006
Net Portfolio Value: $3,492.57
As he headed north on the West Side Highway, Shep reflected that he should get fired more often. Traffic was so much lighter in the middle of the day.
Calling their next-door neighbor on his cell while driving was technically against the law. But something inside had started to slide. Every other New Yorker ignored the ban, and Shep was no longer inclined to embrace his role as the sole exception to thinking one’s self an exception.
Usually, he dreaded calling Nancy. All his life the man other people had asked for help, he was uneasy as a supplicant. Although she was always cheerful about doing favors, it was a relief to contact the poor woman for once to let her off the hook. Now pumped full of antibiotics—again—Glynis was free to go home, and he could pick her up on the way back to Elmsford. So grateful to be of service, when relieved of the need to drive down to Columbia-Presbyterian Nancy sounded disappointed. They didn’t make people like that anymore. Christ, in return he’d never even ordered anything from Amway.
He had already resolved not to tell Glynis that he’d been sacked. Nancy had remarked on his sudden freedom in the middle of a workday. But Glynis had grown so oblivious to the fact that he still had a job that he might not have to fake a thing.
For Glynis had given over to such a perfect selfishness that she made Beryl seem like a full-time volunteer for Save the Children. She ordered him around, and he allowed himself to be ordered. Odd how illness conveyed an awesome power, of which Glynis availed herself with not only imperial self-righteousness, but a hint of vitriol. It was payback for something, his stillborn declaration of independence over Pemba merely a single line item on her long list of grievances. Times past, Shep had conceived of himself as a tad henpecked. Glynis had always ruled the roost, getting her way on everything from drapes to where Zach went to school. But that may not have been how she saw matters. He strained to see his wife’s side of things: a brilliant but underappreciated artisan trapped in a conventionally paternalistic marriage, she’d slaved away at raising kids and preparing stylish suppers when she should have been crafting museum pieces. (Never mind that nothing had ever stopped her from doing so; never mind that her husband had himself slaved away at repairing other people’s generally rather depressing and tastelessly decorated houses in order to ensure her freedom to create whatever and whenever she liked. Indulging his own perspective was not what this mental exercise was for.) So her husband having become the menial who vacuumed, shopped, cooked, and ran to the pharmacy must have seemed only just.
The grievance was larger than that, of course. Glynis was only fifty-one, this shouldn’t be happening, she had been wronged, and she was owed. Exactly who paid down the astronomical debt was probably immaterial.
He took the Ninety-sixth Street exit onto Riverside. Weak winter sunlight strobed through the bare branches of the park, flickering off and then stabbing again like an unwanted memory. The scene he’d walked in on two nights before was still with him.
That evening when he’d got back from work, all the lights were on. He ambled upstairs, but Glynis wasn’t nesting in her usual swirl of coverlets in the bedroom. He rapped on his son’s door and asked Zach if he knew where his mother was. The boy shouted over the sound of rapid gunfire that he had no idea, but that she must be somewhere in the house. Shep searched the first and second floors again before heading to the basement. She wasn’t messing with laundry, either, or rummaging in his workshop. He even hit the front and back yards with a flashlight. Before calling the police he decided to be perfectly thorough, and ducked up to the attic. There was nothing up there besides Glynis’s studio, and as far as he knew no one had been up there in months.
He found her slumped over her workbench, the desk lamp providing the tableaux the golden glow of a Rembrandt: Still Life with Illness and Silver. She had managed to insert a blade into her jewelry saw. Strung with the requisite tautness, the slender blades broke easily; this one had broken. It was stuck in a square sheet of thick-gauge sterling that lay across her bench pin. A single saw line wobbled into the sheet from its perimeter perhaps an inch or so. There the snapped saw blade remained, the saw itself dangling from the cut, which held the blade captive. Beside his wife’s limp hand lay a piece of paper scrawled with uncertain shapes and slashed with irritated arrows. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or unconscious, and for a moment he feared—worse than unconscious. So when he touched her brow, he was relieved to find it instead burning with fever. Before carrying her downstairs, he eased her arm aside and worked the broken saw blade from the metal. This square sheet with its minimalist incision was, he suspected, her last creation.
As anticipated, when she looked up from the hospital bed Glynis didn’t act surprised to see him. Nor was Shep surprised to encounter a wife so frail, the tendons extruding from her neck like jewelry saw blades she had swallowed. Accustomed to her decline, lately he was in danger of believing that this was what his wife looked like. Only photographs shocked him into recollection of the woman he had desired for twenty-seven years, so he understood why she might now forbid the taking of pictures. With no visual record, this sunken image would fade, having been rapidly eclipsed by the regal woman he had wed, with her fierce hands, her languid legs, that enchanted forest between them.
He helped her to dress. When he had trouble fitting her arms into the sleeves of the cherry-red fleece from Carol, she snapped at him. “Get away from me. This is harder than doing it myself!” The nurse delivered another prescription, which he could fill on the way home.
“Goldman wants to try something new,” Glynis said in the car, propping her turban on the headrest with her eyes closed. “An experimental drug for colon cancer is getting great results in trials. It might give this gunk in my guts a last knockout punch.” She coughed; she always coughed. “Though I’m sure it comes with another goody bag of special effects.”
He would have liked to ask whether it was worth going through yet another drug, but he knew better. Glynis had not learned the results of her CAT scans since September. “That’s pretty exciting”—it was an effort, pushing an exuberance of air through his throat—”if this stuff is getting such promising results in other patients.”
“Oh, and Goldman told me a wonderful story! Some colleague told his mesothelioma patient after the guy was diagnosed, ‘Don’t make plans for Christmas.’ I mean, talk about callous! So the patient bet this asshole doc a hundred dollars that he’d be alive and kicking two years later. The doc scoffed, and gave him odds of fifty-to-one. Well, that oncologist just had to pay up five grand! I loved it. Thank God I don’t have one of those cynical doctors who take pride in their ‘realism’—who all but hand you the spade to dig your own grave.”
“Too bad Goldman isn’t more cynical,” said Shep, trying to sound hearty, but privately a little exasperated that her internist didn’t keep his wonderful stories to himself. “At fifty-to-one, we might have made some serious money.”
The sun over the Hudson was anemic, as pale and unconvincing as this conversation.
“Shepherd,” she sighed, “to say I’m really looking forward to this being over doesn’t begin to … Now I know what it’s like for a marathoner, on the twenty-sixth mile. You’d think with the finish line in sight it would get easier. I thought the last few treatments would be practically cheerful—you know, almost through. Instead, it’s harder, it’s worse. Being over and being almost over seem nearly the same. But they’re not. They’re opposites. Almost over means it’s still going on. You want to round up, to say basically that’s it. But that’s not it. Like having one more mile to run, but you’re still running. You realize that however many miles you’ve come already doesn’t make any difference, because a mile is still a long way. Sometimes I think even one more day is more than I can bear. A whole day. You have no idea how long it can seem, a whole day.”
“I know it seems like forever, like it will never end. But it will end,” he said firmly, and this time with feeling.
Glynis waited in the car while he ran into their local CVS. Presumably it was gratifying to have a bartender pour your usual without asking, but it was disheartening to have got on a chummy, first-name basis with your pharmacist. Once he’d pulled in their drive, Shep held his arm out for her to lean on, and they took each porch stair slowly, one at a time. Even the walk from the car had winded her, so he settled her in the living room to recuperate before tackling the flight to the bedroom. Besides, there was something he needed to raise with her, and the more formal nature of a living room seemed fitting.
He left to fetch her some cranberry juice, which he poured into a wine glass, though the bendable straw undercut the stemware’s pretense of adulthood. She was weak enough that leaving her to lift the glass and sip and put it down again invited spilling. The couch was white, and there was always the possibility that she would care.
He set the glass on the side table at her elbow, turned the straw toward her, and shook two tablets from the vial of antibiotics, placing one, then the other, on her tongue. All the while he was nagged by something wrong. Something missing. It was the silence. He looked to the Wedding Fountain on the glass coffee table. He was distressed to note that the silver of those sluicing, intertwining swans’ necks had jaundiced, now turned the same off-yellow of the afternoon’s sickly sun. Hitherto in the worst of all this he had still managed to find a moment to polish the sterling. Worse, the steady, lilting trickle that had formed the aural backdrop to many a happier pre-dinner drink had ceased. He must have forgotten to top up the water for at least a week.
Shep filled a pitcher in the kitchen. When he returned to pour the water into the basin, it sat stagnant. Predictably, once the fountain ran dry, the pump had burnt out. Not for the first time, and there was no reason to be alarmed by the small impending repair. Nevertheless, the omen unsettled him.
This clearly wasn’t the moment, but it took discipline not to fix the fountain then and there; he had some spare pumps in the basement. That was what he did, he fixed things. He fixed things, or had until this morning, for a living. As he stared down at the still water, the strain of not remedying this minor mechanical malfunction right away reflected back at him the greater strain of more than a year: he couldn’t fix things.
Abandoning the pitcher on the floor, he eased beside his wife on the sofa and took her hand. “I’m not sure if you’re keeping track of the date. Are you remembering that tomorrow morning you’re supposed to give your deposition about Forge Craft?”
She took a ragged breath and coughed. “I remember.”
“I’m concerned that you may not be up to it.”
“Well, the timing isn’t great. I’m over the fever, but the infection isn’t … So I guess we could always …”
“I know we could reschedule, but I’m concerned about that, too. We’ve moved this appointment several times now. It’s become embarrassing, and too many delays may count against us in the suit. You know that I’ve never been that big on the whole business. But there’s no point in pursuing it at all if we lose. I wish you’d got this over with when you were stronger. It’s not only delivering a statement on video. Forge Craft’s lawyers will be there. Rick has warned me that it takes hours, and the cross-examination can be grueling. But I’m not going to ask for another delay. You either go through with it tomorrow, or we withdraw the suit.”
“I don’t want to withdraw it,” she said sulkily. “Someone has to pay.”
“Then you have to testify tomorrow.”
“I feel terrible, Shepherd! Why can’t you reschedule? Even by next week, I’m sure to—”
“No.” The sensation of laying down the law was strangely exhilarating. She would not have heard a refusal from her husband for many months. “If you feel so strongly about ‘making someone pay,’ then I don’t understand why you keep putting it off. Get the deposition over with. Tomorrow. Or we’re calling the whole thing quits.”
Glynis was sitting upright, palms flat on her thighs, eyes closed, the turban lending her figure a droll hint of the swami. In such a composed position she would have radiated a meditative repose, save that she had begun to shake. When he touched her hand, it was trembling like one of their electric toothbrushes.
“Glynis?” he said gently. “What is it you’re afraid of? I’ll be with you, and we can take lots of breaks.”
Deep in her diaphragm came a lurch, rising to her throat, where she tried to keep it swallowed. Successive shudders shook her body as if someone were pounding on her chest with a sledgehammer, trying to knock down a door.
“Gnu, what’s wrong? If it’s too stressful, we can just withdraw the suit—”
Though the shudders that rocked her were seismic, the lone vowel that emitted from her mouth was timorous, something like ih.
“Sh-sh.” He stroked her hand. “Take it easy, we can hash this out later.”
“It’s,” she said more clearly now, fighting with the words, wrestling with them in her throat as if they were trying to take over.
“Take some deep breaths, and don’t try to talk.”
Yet when he made a bid to embrace her, with strength he’d not have imagined she still possessed she shoved him away. Although Shep had become adept at not taking anything that Glynis did these days personally, the violent physical rejection was unexpectedly wounding. He withdrew to the opposite arm of the sofa and folded his arms.
“It’s,” she squeezed out again, and then finally threw the words at him, getting them out of her with the twinned revulsion and relief of vomit: “It’s—all—my—fault.”
“What’s all your fault, Glynis.” The coldness in his voice was an indulgence. “I can’t think of anything that’s your fault.”
“This!” she spat, sweeping a hand over her concave midsection. “All of it!”
“All of what?”
“The cancer, the chemo!” she got out through her weeping. “I asked for it! I did this to myself!”
“You’re talking crazy. You’re just exhausted—”
“Shut up!” she cried, slamming her hands to her thighs. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
She waited for him to demonstrate his obedience. As he sat mutely apart from her, she seemed to regain a measure of self-control.
“At Saguaro,” she said. “The millboard blocks, the mitts, the lining for the crucibles—sure, in the mid-seventies putting asbestos in products like that wasn’t against the law. But it had become an issue, okay? I knew about it, and my teachers did, too. In fact, my metalsmithing professor was really concerned about it, right? I mean, how did you think I knew these things contained asbestos to begin with?”
He wanted to say that just because she knew didn’t make it her fault, but he could tell the edict to “shut up” was still in force, and her question was rhetorical.
“Anyway, that professor, I still remember her name, Frieda Luten. She’d read up on all this stuff. So at the beginning of my first term she’d collected all the blocks and mitts, absolutely anything that might be a ‘health and safety’ issue, and put them in the storage closet. The shelves were marked ‘Do Not Use and Do Not Touch.’ She’d ordered replacement supplies, but didn’t want to throw the old stuff out. Forge Craft’s salespeople had told her that the company was probably going to announce a recall, when the school could trade the old supplies in for their new, safer products. The company did issue a recall, too, though not until the next year. That’s the recall that Rick Mystic said would help to hang them in our suit.”
He couldn’t contain himself. “So are you telling me that you never used those products after all? In that case, how would you—”
“I’m not finished.”
Shep contained himself.
“You have to understand,” she said, training her gaze dully forward toward the Wedding Fountain; defunct and tarnished, it now looked disturbingly junky, like a gaudy thrift-store knickknack. “Or remember. What it was like to be young. That feeling that older people’s neurotic little worries don’t apply to you. The asbestos thing, it was abstract. I thought everyone was making a big deal over nothing, the same way they made a big deal over red dye number two when I’d eaten all the maraschino cherries off my Dairy Queen hot fudge sundaes as a kid and lived to tell the tale. And you know, they’re always changing their minds about what’s good for you and what’s going to kill you—like all that hoo-ha over saccharine, and then they bring in aspartame, which is probably just as bad … Well, who can take any of the toxic this and toxic that seriously after a while? And there wasn’t any Internet in those days; I couldn’t Google asbestos and get fifteen million hits. So I didn’t know anything about the cover-up that had been going on for over a hundred years, or about all those miners dying back in the 1930s. And I was pretty fucking broke.”
She turned and glared. He felt he was meant to say something. “So … ?”
“Oh don’t be an idiot! I stole that stuff, Shepherd! I knew I was going to need to set up my own studio once I was out of school, and you should know—metalsmithing materials cost a fortune! I figured if those supplies were out of commission, nobody would miss them. For God’s sake, why do you think I remember the exact label on the bottom of the soldering blocks, or the exact little purple flower pattern on the heat-proof mitts? Because I stole a whole boxful of stuff from those ‘Do Not Use and Do Not Touch’ shelves, because I packed it all with me when I moved to New York, and because I worked with it in Brooklyn for years! It’s no different than if I’d smoked two packs a day for decades and then act all surprised when I get lung cancer, since I knew that stuff was contaminated and I used it anyway, because I was too—fucking—cheap!”
Ah. On his own account, Shep was relieved. The original alert having come from Forge Craft’s own sales force, they would have to withdraw the suit. Even if there was no record of the upstanding heads-up, to pursue their claim for opportunistic financial gain wouldn’t be right. To protect her, perhaps he could explain to Mystic that she no longer had the strength to make it through a deposition. Now he would escape a tedious legal process that had made him queasy from the start.
At last she did not resist when he slipped to her side of the sofa and slid his arm around her shoulders. “That’s ironic,” he murmured. “One of the things I took a shine to when we met was how frugal you were. You sure drove a hard bargain for that worktable I built you in Brooklyn.” He chuckled. “What you were willing to part with barely covered the materials. Accepting peanuts, well—that’s how I first knew I must have had it bad for this woman. I’d never have worked for next to nothing for anyone else. But I wanted to fuck you,” he said softly into her ear, and even saying that he started to get hard. “I really, really, really wanted to fuck you.”
“I don’t know how you can bring yourself to still speak to me,” said Glynis, her voice muffled in his shirt. She’d noticed his erection, and reached for it, held it lightly through his slacks. Stroked it in sync with his stroking of her shoulder, as if caressing a beloved albeit increasingly elderly family pet. “After I blamed you. I can’t quite understand what drove me to that. Except that it was so hard to take … the diagnosis … what was going to happen to me, the surgery, the treatments … I just couldn’t handle the blame, too. It was too much. It wasn’t as if I didn’t remember about swiping those supplies from that closet at Saguaro, exactly. I just didn’t.… turn to it. But turning against you instead, putting it on you instead—because you were there—because you were strong and I thought you could bear what I couldn’t—because it made a better, a plausible story that I could stand to tell to other people … Well, it wasn’t fair, and I don’t know how you can ever forgive me.”
“I’m more than still speaking to you,” he whispered, kissing the smooth top of her head. “Eventually you pointed the finger elsewhere, and that was nice. It was easier for me after that, not thinking I’d made you sick, just from …” indeed, it was hard to say it aloud without his throat catching, “hugging you hello when I got home.”
Shep was debating doing something with this hard-on versus simply enjoying the state, those insistent, pumping twinges that made him feel young again, and married again, when the phone rang. He might have let it go, but it sometimes behooved him to remember that he had a son, now late coming home from school. The poor kid’s parents having been inaccessible in every other sense for over a year, they might at least deign to answer the phone.
It wasn’t Zach. Recognizing the voice on the other end, he raised a forefinger to Glynis with an apologetic arch of his eyebrows. She looked suddenly so spent that a few minutes to rest might be welcome. He slipped off to the foyer. As the voice carried on, he feared its penetrating wail was audibly escaping the receiver, and he slid out to the front porch. It was cold outside, but he had gone so cold inside that he might as well match the temperature of the air and his blood, like a reptile.
It would be fair to say that Shepherd Armstrong Knacker re-entered the living room a changed man. For the benefit of what little remained to him of his married life, he would have wished that his immediate resolution to shelter his shattered wife from a certain piece of news was central to his transformation. But ever since he had read her prognosis on the Web and kept it to himself like his own private cancer, ever since he had concealed from her the results of her CAT scans at her own perplexing behest, shielding Glynis from vital information had become habitual. If by only dint of omission, he was, and had now long been, dishonest at home.
Yet until that phone call, he had never been dishonest in public. He had always filed painstakingly accurate tax returns, declaring remits from jobs paid, with a wink, in cash. Unlike his tragically light-fingered wife, he had never stolen a single screwdriver from Pogatchnik. He had signed a contract with Twilight Glens; bound by his word, he had never seriously entertained that notion of cancelling the monthly payments, and leaving the institution or the government to sort out the messy business of selling the house in Berlin out from under his sister to cover the outstanding bill.
For decades now, he had listened to his best friend regale him with what a “Mug” he was—alternatively, what a Patsy, Fall Guy, Sap, Slave, Jackass, or Lackey he was, depending on the man’s cockeyed terminological vogue. While Shep might sometimes have conceded that his taxes were not always devoted to purposes that he personally might have endorsed, for the most part Jackson’s purple rants about the real class divide being between the takers and the taken had fallen on deaf ears. Shep had found the man’s tirades merely entertaining, an amusing diversion for passing the time while circling Prospect Park.
But now they were his best friend’s legacy. Aside from one sick kid and one fat one, and a wife whose preternatural composure had finally cracked in half, the memory of those diatribes was all that he had left behind. To honor them was to act on them. For once in Shep Knacker’s life, he’d make Jackson proud.
Glynis was curled in a ball at the end of the couch. Shep knelt before her and gently prized her open, like spreading a tight bloom without snapping the petals. “Gnu,” he said levelly, taking her hands. “Sit up, would you? That’s right. Now, I want you to listen to me. Look me in the eye, okay? It’s all right, I’m not angry with you. I understand how hard it’s been, carrying this secret for so long. But I’ve been carrying secrets, too. They’re not much easier.”
He waited until she met his gaze squarely.
“You know that with the sale of Knack of All Trades, and our investments finally recovering after the tech-stock crash and then 9/11, we were pretty well off, right? That’s what made it possible for me to announce I was going to Pemba, with or without you. We had the money. Fine, my timing was bad, and that’s an understatement. But Glynis, your treatments have been very expensive. Those two specialists at Columbia-Presbyterian are out of network. I’ve tried to spare you this side of things, so you could concentrate on getting better. But I think it’s time I put you in the picture.
“We’re going broke, Glynis. From the age of eighteen, I—Jackson and I—worked sixty-plus hours a week, building up that company from scratch. Ever since its sale, I—Jackson and I—have been step-and-fetching for some fat, feckless former employee with a chip on his shoulder who hates our guts. Meanwhile, you and I have never lived high on the hog, and now I’m sorry that I hardly ever took you out to dinner while you still had an appetite. But everything I earned and everything we saved—it’s gone, Glynis. My account at Merrill Lynch has been savaged. It’s touch and go whether I can make next month’s rent, much less another bill for chemo.
“And here’s another thing I didn’t tell you: I was fired today, Glynis. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a salary anymore, but more to the point we have no more health insurance. I could buy into COBRA, but we can’t afford that, either. So the next bill for chemo is one hundred percent mine, and once you’re out of the system they double the price. We’re headed for bankruptcy. You may think you have some idea of how I feel about that. You probably assume that I feel embarrassed. But I’m not embarrassed. I’m angry.”
Their financial plight didn’t seem to be making much of an impression, but his fury did. “My, my,” she marveled. “Well, it’s about time.”
“Jackson”—Shep stopped to collect himself. He did not want to cry, or he did, but he did not want to have to explain why. He was having a hard time saying the name, though it seemed important to say it. “Jackson lets the unfairness of it all get him down. It eats him up. And that’s a shame. But the way he thinks about the world isn’t completely crazy. When you play by the rules and other people don’t, you’re a fool. When you hold up your end of things, other people figure that while you’re at it you might as well hold up their end of things, too. Jackson’s been explaining till he’s blue in the face that people like him and me, we’re taken advantage of. We’re punished. For the sale of Knack alone I paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars to the federal government in capital gains. Add up all I’ve shoveled those sons of bitches since high school, and it has to be somewhere between one and two million bucks. And that’s the same government, when my wife has cancer, won’t buy her a single Tylenol. They won’t take care of my elderly father, either, though he’s paid into the system his whole life, too—just because he’s led his life responsibly, like I have, and he isn’t destitute. Jackson’s right. It’s not fair. And I don’t think he’d want us to roll over and take it. Maybe the best tribute to a really good friend is to listen to the guy for once, to—to take him seriously for once, in a way, I’m ashamed to say, I may never have done before.”
Shep’s use of the present tense was an anachronism, but Jackson lets and Jackson thinks came readily enough; the verbs weren’t merely for concealment. It had taken his father years to remember to say that Shep’s mother was a good cook, that she worked tirelessly for his congregation. For the living, with no conception of any other state, the use of the past tense in relation to the bewilderingly disappeared was a discipline, a learned grammar and an unnatural one.
“My father would say it’s only money, of course,” Shep continued. “Maybe you think the same thing, when the only currency in your life right now is your health. But I can’t keep this roof over your head without money, or heat this place to ninety degrees in February, or drive you to the hospital in a car. Besides, I don’t want to be ‘cynical,’ but—whatever happens to you? I have to survive afterward, if only to take care of our son. I’ve tried to take care of you, too, the best I could, but now I’m asking something in return.”
“You want me to go back to making molds for chocolate bunny rabbits?”
He smiled. They gave Pulitzers for lesser achievements than a sense of humor at times like these. “In a way,” he said. “Back when you took that part-time job to spite me, I’d dared to suggest that it was too bad you hadn’t made at least a small contribution to our income. But right now you can make a big contribution. In fact, you can save the day. You can lay a chocolate egg. A big chocolate nest egg.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I understand what you just told me. That in fact you’d been forewarned about those products in art school, which were withdrawn from use before you ever started your coursework. That you knew perfectly well that they contained asbestos. That you knew perfectly well that asbestos was supposed to be deadly. That you stole those supplies in defiance of warnings from your teacher, who was alerted to an upcoming recall by Forge Craft’s own salespeople. I think you’re right, that if you were to testify to all that, our case would be compromised, and our chances of a big payoff would go way down.
“But Saguaro closed years ago. Even if she went on to teach somewhere else, Frieda Luten has probably retired, and who knows where. None of your former classmates has cropped up in this case. Petra may remember something, but she’s your friend and she’ll keep her mouth shut. No one knows what really happened but you and me. So I want you to give that deposition tomorrow and really put your heart into it. And I want you to lie.”
Starting promptly at 9:00 a.m., the deposition in a sterile conference room in Lower Manhattan the next morning took four hours. Shep assumed one of the chairs along the wall, while Glynis took the hot seat at the head of the oval table; other than be present and occasionally insist on a break, he couldn’t help her. The camera to her left stared her down on its tripod, destined to record every hesitation, every broken eye contact, every nose-scratching tell. Forge Craft brought a team of four lawyers, all men, all studiedly supercilious. Once Glynis was finished describing the products she remembered, giving a detailed account of how they were used in which processes, their lawyer conducted his Q&A.
Located with a lackluster Web search, Rick Mystic was only in his thirties, and Shep had learned to discount his own alarm that this was just a kid; if he kept mistrusting anyone younger than himself, he’d soon trust no one. Mystic had the well-proportioned, square-cut good looks that would have come across well on TV; a leading lady in flats would have helped disguise the fact that he was short. Belying the classic ambulance-chaser tag, the lawyer claimed to have had a favorite uncle die from asbestosis, which gave his specialty a sense of personal mission. Although with that flash suit and designer haircut the young man couldn’t have been motivated by philanthropy alone, Shep figured that they could harness Rick Mystic’s avarice to their own purposes, just as they had co-opted Philip Goldman’s ego. After all, altruism trailed near the bottom of the list of effective human drivers.
Thus aside from generational prejudice, Shep’s primary misgiving about their lawyer was ridiculously decorative: Mystic’s insertion of “sort of” or “kind of” two or three times a sentence. Sure, the verbal tic was commonplace. But this modern proclivity for incessant qualification leant all assertions an exasperating vagueness, an evasion, a suspicious shilly-shallying uneasiness with being pinned down. That table would never be “brown;” it would be “sort of brown,” and what color was that? In a lawyer, too, the tic provided discourse an imprecision at odds with the profession, and in the case of Glynis’s deposition a surreal understatement: since her illness, hadn’t she been “sort of unable to work?” With these qualifying types, Shep wondered what terrible thing they thought would happen if they landed on a noun or adjective and stuck, committing to a quality or an object that was exactly this or exactly that, and not slightly something else.
“No, I can’t work,” Glynis replied. Though her sentences were cogent, every other phrase was punctuated with a cough and a raspy pause to catch her breath. “And I’ve tried, too. I can’t concentrate enough to follow the plot of Everybody Loves Raymond. So I tune into the Food Channel. My attention span is about as long as a recipe for goat-cheese brochettes.”
“And would you describe yourself,” said Mystic, “as kind of in pain?”
“I often feel nauseated,” she said, “and have trouble breathing. Honestly, it’s harder to go get my own glass of water than it used to be to complete an hour of step aerobics at the Y. And in the deepest sense, I have no privacy. Other people are constantly poking needles in my arms. Shoving tubes down my throat and capsules up my colon. My life is one big violation. I used to love my body. Only a year ago at fifty, I was still beautiful. Now I hate my body. It is wholly a house of horrors. I should have a life expectancy of over eighty. Now I believe that number is … greatly reduced.”
Of those gathered, only Shep recognized what a concession she’d made.
Thereafter, the defending lawyers took turns trying to poke holes in her testimony. They cited a host of other suspect materials in everyday life with which she might have come in contact since art school, but she batted the queries away like a pinch hitter: did she look like the kind of woman who would install her own insulation?
Citing the same theory about clinging fibers that their first oncologist had floated, one lawyer brought up her husband’s handyman business, in which he must also have worked with, say, asbestos-enhanced cement. In addition to observing that during most of their married life Shep’s duties were managerial, Glynis asserted archly that she was never given to embracing her grubby husband in the days he still made house calls “before he’d had a shower.” Moreover, she said, that route to contamination was too complicated. “Remember Occam’s Razor? The simplest explanation is usually the best one. In fact, I looked up the definition on the Web.” Glynis read from her notes, “‘When multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions.’ So there’s no need to construct an elaborate scenario of my husband—who has not come down with an asbestos-related cancer—working with asbestos, getting it on his clothes, embracing me, and leaving fibers on my own clothes that I inadvertently ingest, when I flat out worked with asbestos myself.”
Surely, another lawyer sneered, her schooling was so long ago that she could not possibly remember the individual products with which she had worked, including the brand of the manufacturer.
“To the contrary,” said Glynis, affecting the same imperious manner that had always both infuriated and beguiled her husband. “I was just learning my craft, getting my first inspirations. That was a vivid time in my life”—she stopped to cough again—”as opposed, I’m afraid, to this one. So my recollection is quite sharp, just as you might remember with unusual clarity when you first fell in love. And I had fallen in love. Those were the years when I first fell in love with metal.”
Shep had more than once encountered the glib aphorism that “you always kill the thing you love;” he had never come across its inverse: that the thing you love would kill you.
“Also,” Glynis continued, “the studio kept catalogues from Forge Craft along with other reference books and trade magazines on the shelves beside the drill press. I used to flip through those catalogues, since I was hoping to set up my own studio once out of school. I remember being horrified by how much everything cost. Being worried whether I’d ever be able to afford my own polishing machine, my own set of hammers, my own centrifugal casting apparatus. Because at that time, Forge Craft had a virtual monopoly on metalsmithing supplies nationwide. That’s why the company was able to get away with pricing its products sky-high. So Saguaro wouldn’t have stocked tools and materials from anywhere but Forge Craft, which had knocked out the commercial competition. So maybe right now you’re a victim of your own success.”
Yet what most impressed Shep was her coolness during a line of questioning intended to achieve, in the popular imagination, the impossible: putting a dollar value on human life. To this end, they grilled her on exactly how much money her metalsmithing work had netted per annum, and Glynis managed to quote the meager figure without apparent embarrassment. More insultingly, they wanted to know whether before falling ill she did the shopping, what proportion of childcare responsibilities she’d assumed with Zach, how many meals she’d prepared in the average week, and even how often she’d done the laundry. They were measuring the value of his wife’s life in wash loads of lights and darks. Glynis’s blithely factual answers to these degrading questions were the product of far greater self-control than Shep could ever have marshaled in her place. From the reflex of decades, Shep thought, I can’t wait to tell Jackson about this circus, before he caught himself.
Glynis was magnificent. She never faltered or let them trip her up, meeting the gaze of her tormentors straight on. On Mystic’s advice she’d worn no makeup, and the accusatory specter of her sunken cheeks, her glaucous lips, the sheen of her bald hairline when her turban slipped, was a more piercing indictment of their company’s products from the 1970s than anything she said.
Only when the procedure had drawn formally to a close and the opposition’s lawyers had cleared off did Glynis’s posture collapse, and she slid onto the slick polished table like a pool of spilled tea. She was so depleted that Shep half-carried her to the car.
“You were a star,” he whispered, wishing that bearing nearly all of her weight were harder than it was.
“I did it for you,” she slurred. “And the lying? I enjoyed it.”
Yet once they got home, the dignity she’d assumed for hours had left a residue, and she refused to let him carry her upstairs. Instead she crawled the flight on all fours. With a recuperative sag on both landings, the fifteen steps took her half an hour.
Shep had left multiple messages on Carol’s cell on breaks during the deposition; she wasn’t picking up. Once Glynis had dropped to sleep upstairs, he tried again, and finally Carol answered. While during her initial call the night before Carol had been hysterical, now she was catatonic. At least the dead monotone allowed for the exchange of information. She had walked into the kitchen with Flicka. “I will never forgive him for that,” Carol added flatly. “It was child abuse. I don’t use the term lightly.” Unsurprisingly, the girl had immediately plunged into a dysautonomic crisis; “that surly, offhand thing she’s got going,” said Carol, “it’s all an act. Compensation. She can’t take stress. Taking any old test in school, she falls apart. So you can imagine … I hate to admit it, but dealing with Flicka yesterday, the blood pressure, the retching—and I almost joined her—well, it was a relief. Concentrating on my daughter’s immediate medical needs, whose urgency trumped even what Jackson had done. I guess we’ve always used her like that … At the beginning, as a point of unity, a mutual project, but later as a distraction … We’d focus on Flicka to avoid each other.”
Bundling Flicka off to New York Methodist, Carol had called Heather, still at school, from the car. She’d insisted the younger girl come straight to the hospital, where they’d all three spent the night. Flicka had stabilized, and by this evening would probably be discharged; Carol was planning to decamp with the girls to a neighbor’s. Meanwhile, according to the neighbor, the police had come, an ambulance. It came as no surprise that Carol did not, under any circumstances, wish to re-enter that house. Shep promised at his first opportunity to go there for her, to retrieve any clothes they might need, Flicka’s medications, perhaps Carol’s computer. Of the many favors he had offered to do his friends over the years, this one seemed costlier than most.
When she conceded that the neighbor was good-hearted enough but that they were not very close—it was a relationship of pie exchanges and kindly reminders to move your car for alternate-side parking—he begged her to bring the remains of her family to Elmsford instead. There was Amelia’s room, and the couch downstairs. He admitted that he had not yet told Glynis. He said they would deal with that, though he was not sure how.
“You will deal with it,” said Carol, her voice the color of ash, “by telling her. She’s ill, but she’s still with us. Being sick isn’t the same thing as being stupid or a small child. Ask Flicka. Glynis was Jackson’s friend, too, and she deserves to know. If I can tell a twelve-year-old,” the pause was heavy, “you can tell your wife.”
“I guess telling her,” he said, “makes it … more real.”
“It was real,” Carol said wearily. “It was very, very real.”
“Jackson and I took a long walk yesterday. I should have noticed something. But I was too wrapped up in my own problems. Actually, all I noticed was he seemed unusually at peace. Philosophical. In fact, it’s the only time in recent memory that he didn’t seem pissed off. Maybe that was the giveaway, if I’d been paying attention.”
“This is what people do,” said Carol. “Comb back through the past, take it on themselves. But Jackson himself was always going on about ‘personal responsibility.’ So if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Jackson’s. His, and …” She sighed. “I don’t want to get into it now, but mine, too.”
“Now you’re doing the same thing.”
“I told you. It’s compulsive.”
He implored her to come up to Elmsford once more, and she relented. They arranged that she would arrive with the girls around nine o’clock that night. Meanwhile, for later this afternoon Shep had made an appointment with Philip Goldman, to whom it was about time he spoke without the encumbrance of his magnificent but delusional wife.
“So what’s this,” said Shep in Goldman’s office, “about an experimental drug?”
The internist usually communicated a rambunctious quality; a small room had trouble containing him, and he was wont to prop his foot on the edge of his desk and spring his chair back, to bounce up to draw illustrations of some medical procedure on scraps of paper, to punctuate his points with generous sweeps of his large hands. But now that boundless energy was more cramped, his restiveness reduced to fidget. In the tinier, more circumscribed tap of a pencil and jiggle of a knee, the doctor was deprived of the grand kinetic theater on which his illusion of attractiveness depended. The fact that his eyes were too close together, or that his middle was paunchy, became more pronounced. Losing, Philip Goldman was not as handsome.
“It’s called peritoxamil,” said Goldman, “also known as—”
“Cortomalaphrine,” Shep said sourly.
“Come again?”
“Never mind. In-joke.”
“It’s in phase-three trials, and is showing a lot of promise. Not for mesothelioma, but there could be some crossover effect from therapy for colon cancer. Now, I’m afraid that your wife is—isn’t qualified right now to participate in the clinical trials themselves, but—”
“You mean she’s too sick,” Shep interrupted again. “Since she’s a goner anyway, she’d drag down the cheerful statistics.”
“That’s a harsh way of putting it, but—”
“I like a harsh way of putting it. Let’s put it that way, then.”
Goldman eyed his patient’s husband with a nervous side glance. Shep Knacker had always been so docile, so cooperative. But the doctor would have seen all manner of reactions to extreme medical circumstances, and maybe belligerence was a standard variation.
“The point is,” said Goldman, “we can appeal for the drug’s release for compassionate use. Explain that we’ve depleted the traditional arsenal at our disposal. I grant it’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got. Frankly, at this juncture there’s not much to lose. One small downside, however.”
“It makes your head fall off.”
Goldman’s half smile was unamused. “Not a side effect—except for you. Since peritoxamil isn’t FDA-approved, it’s not going to be covered by your insurer.”
“Uh-huh. And how much does this new snake oil cost?”
“For a course? In the area of a hundred thousand dollars. Fortunately, it’s in capsule form, so Mrs. Knacker wouldn’t have to come in for treatments.”
“A hundred grand. There’s ‘not much to lose’? I guess I’m not in your income bracket. Since that strikes me as losing a whole lot.”
Goldman seemed taken aback. “We’re talking about your wife’s life here—”
“Jim!”
The doctor shot him a worried look. “I have to assume that money is a secondary issue at best, if it’s an issue at all.”
“So if I say it is an issue, I’m an animal, right? But even if I fall in line and say, by all means, doctor, do anything you can, throw the kitchen sink at that cancer—a gold-plated kitchen sink—because I love my wife and money is no object. Why do you assume I’ve got a hundred grand?”
“It’s often possible to take out a personal loan in such cases. Mr. Knacker, I know you’re under stress, but I’m concerned about your combative tone. You don’t seem to appreciate that we’re on the same side here. You, Mrs. Knacker, and everyone in this hospital are united in a common cause.”
“Are we? So what are you trying to achieve?”
“Obviously, I’m trying to extend your wife’s life for as long as possible.”
“Then we’re not on the same side.”
“Oh? What’s your objective, then?”
“To end her suffering as soon as possible.”
“It’s really Mrs. Knacker’s decision, when she wants to call off further treatments. But when I spoke to her about peritoxamil, she sounded keen to try it. Obviously, we’ll make every effort to keep her comfortable. But to talk about … Well, simply planning to ‘end her suffering’ once and for all is defeatist.”
“Fine. I am defeatist,” Shep announced. “I have been defeated. I admit it: mesothelioma is too big for me. If this really has been a battle,” with weather, he thought, “maybe it’s time to lay down our arms. As for that being my wife’s decision, I realize she’ll try anything. But it is not my wife’s decision if she’s not the one who’s going to pay for it.”
Goldman was overtly discomfited by this kind of talk. He kept averting his gaze, working his face without concealing his disapproval, and edgily hitting his keyboard’s space bar. Shep got the impression that making a medical decision of any magnitude in consideration of how much a treatment cost, in mere money—”only money,” as his father would say—was crude, foreign, and offensive. “I want to be very clear, Mr. Knacker. This drug is our last hope.”
“I was fired yesterday, Dr. Goldman. I just lost my job.”
It was interesting, the subtle but discernible change in the internist’s demeanor, once he registered the implications. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I bet you are. But I’d been repeatedly absent and late for work. My wife’s illness alone has substantially raised the health insurance premiums for my employer. As the former custodian of that company, I applaud my being dropped from its workforce as an astute business decision.”
“That’s an awfully understanding spin to put on your own misfortune.”
“I am known,” said Shep, “for my understanding. But as a result of my early retirement, the World Wellness Group will not only neglect to pay a hundred K for pterodactyl, or whatever it’s called, but it won’t be paying your bills, either.”
“I see,” said Goldman. “And I infer that your personal resources are somewhat depleted.”
“Somewhat? You could say that.”
“With what you just informed me, I can see why you might be feeling a little angry.”
“No, you do not see. Getting fired was the nicest thing that’s happened to me in over a year. But you’re right that I’m ‘a little’ angry. I realize this is just what you people do. It’s the way you’re programmed. You just keep plowing through the drugs, working down the list, keeping everyone’s chin up, looking on the bright side, never saying die. My wife, for example, never says die. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I heard her use the d-word. Nobody in this biz is ever supposed to throw up their hands and call it quits, so long as there’s any last teensyweensy, teeny-tiny smidgeon of a chance that some new therapy will eke out a few extra days. So you’ve just been following the script. But can we, for once, with Glynis not here, drop the pretense? This ‘experimental drug’—you don’t really believe it would make any difference, do you?”
“I did say it was a long shot.”
“What are the odds? Fifty-to-one? Willing to put any of your own money on that?”
“It’s hard to put a number on. Let’s just say the chances are distant.”
“Me, I wouldn’t put a hundred grand on ‘distant’ even if I were a betting man. Would you?”
Goldman declined to answer.
“Secondly, let’s skip the ‘I don’t believe in making prognoses’ thing. You’ve been around the block. You know more about mesothelioma than anyone in the country, you’re an expert. So tell me: how long has she got?”
The expression on Goldman’s face reminded Shep of wrestling as a boy in Berlin, when sitting on Jeb’s chest and pinning each wrist to the ground he finally got his friend to cry uncle!
“Maybe a month? Possibly more like three weeks.”
Shep crimped forward, as if from a gut punch.
“I realize that’s difficult to hear,” Goldman continued softly. “And I’m very, very sorry.”
Three weeks was within the range that Shep had forecast himself, but it was different hearing the bleak estimate from a doctor. It wasn’t possible to keep being pugnacious, aggressive, and hostile, although as the humor slipped he knew he would miss it. This appointment excepted, the amount of his life that Shep Knacker had spent being pugnacious, aggressive, and hostile probably totaled under five minutes.
As Shep recovered himself, the doctor filled the silence. “I think of all the patients I’ve ever had, your wife may have shown the most tremendous spirit. She’s put up a remarkable, a truly admirable struggle.”
“That’s nice of you to say, and I realize you’re trying to pay her a big compliment, but … this way of thinking …”
Shep stood up, and paced the small patch of carpet before the door. “Struggle. Surmounting the odds. Like, the online support group that Glynis joined for a while was always talking up hanging tough. Refusing to let go. Not giving up. Going the last mile. You’d think they were organizing a grammar-school sports day. Dr. Goldman, my wife is very competitive! She’s a high achiever, a perfectionist—which is why, though it doesn’t seem to make sense, she hasn’t been as professionally productive as she would have been with lower standards. A striver like that—how’s she not going to rise to this stuff? And then you guys jack up the stakes even more. It’s not just a potato-sack race, it’s a war. The battle against cancer. The arsenal at our disposal … You make her think that there’s something she has to do, to be a good soldier, a trooper. So if she deteriorates anyway, then there’s something she didn’t do: she didn’t show courage under fire. I know you mean well, but after all this military talk she now equates—dying—with dishonor. With failure. With personal failure.” It was the first time that Shep had put it together for himself.
“The military language is just a metaphor,” said Goldman. “A way of talking about medical issues that laymen understand. It’s not meant to hold the patient accountable for a therapy’s results.”
“But for Glynis, when you ‘admire her struggle’ she thinks you blame her when it doesn’t do any good, don’t you see? That’s why she won’t quit. That’s why she and I can’t talk about … well, anything.”
“I see no reason for her to ‘quit.’ Glynis—Mrs. Knacker takes heart from her tenacity. Since I’ve come to know her somewhat, I think I’d counsel you to keep my prognosis to yourself.”
“What’s one more secret?” Shep said morosely, plopping back in his chair. “Though that’s a fucking big secret.”
“I’m only thinking of preserving the quality of the time she has left. Keeping her upbeat.”
“But won’t she know? What’s going on in her own body?”
“You’d be surprised. Not necessarily. Still, I’d advise you to contact her family and friends. Underscore that we’re talking days or weeks but not months, and they mustn’t delay a last visit. So they can say goodbye.”
“What good is saying goodbye when you can’t say goodbye?”
“Pardon?”
“If we’re not telling Glynis, nobody can say goodbye. Not even I can say goodbye.”
“Well, sometimes hasta la vista is just as warm, but it’s easier to hear, isn’t it? And we say, ‘See you later,’ to all kinds of people whom we’ll never meet again, really.”
“I guess,” Shep said reluctantly. “Maybe you’re right, Glynis doesn’t want to hear it. She sure hasn’t wanted to hear anything else.”
“I suppose I can see why you might want to pass on the peritoxamil. But she was very eager to take it. If you want to keep her on an even keel I could prescribe a placebo.”
Which really would entail treating Glynis like a twelve-year-old on “cortomalaphrine.” His wife’s final days being webbed in a skein of deceit depressed Shep more than he could say. “Maybe. I’ll let you know.”
“Meanwhile, keep me apprised of her condition, and contact me if you need any advice about how to keep her comfortable.”
“There is something you can do,” said Shep, looking at his lap. “I really don’t want her to die in a hospital. But also I don’t want her to experience any more pain than she has to. I’d like something to—ease the end.”
“There’s nothing easy about the end. It can be very unpleasant. Professionals have a better chance of keeping her comfortable.”
Repeated at least three times now, the set phrase jarred. Shep suspected that the medical establishment’s usage of comfortable strained the definition of the word.
“Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider, about the hospital?” the doctor pressed. “You feel strongly about this?”
“I do. And I honestly think that if Glynis ever faces up to what’s happening she’ll feel the same way, too.”
“Painkillers are controlled substances. We’re closely watched by the FDA. I can’t hand out capsules willy-nilly, because of the danger of addiction.”
“The government is afraid that my wife will become a drug addict when she’s dying?”
Goldman sighed. “I grant it’s not all that rational …” He bit his lip. “This is a little risky … But I suppose I can give you a prescription for liquid morphine. It’s not complicated. Just a few drops on her tongue when she seems—”
“Uncomfortable,” said Shep, with a trace of his earlier sourness. He stood up. “Thank you. And what I said before, you know, my ‘tone’—I didn’t mean that I’m not grateful.”
“I know you’re grateful, Mr. Knacker. And I’m sorry I haven’t been able to do more for your wife. We’ve tried everything we could—as you observed. But mesothelioma is a virulent, deadly disease. It’s not for nothing that asbestos means ‘inextinguishable’ in Greek. And you’re a repairman, so you understand: there are only so many tools in the toolbox.”
After they’d shaken hands and he was leaving, Shep turned back in the doorway. “One last thing. The surgery, all the chemo. The blood transfusions, the chest drains, the MRIs? According to my calculations, Glynis’s medical bills for all these treatments already come to over two million dollars. That sound about right to you?”
“It’s plausible,” the doctor conceded.
If in a moment of idle perversity Shep had worked out that so far they’d paid over $2,700 per day, he’d also estimated that Glynis would often have paid that much to skip one. Of course, he couldn’t vouch for the comparative awfulness of her disease left alone to its evil devices, but as for whether the cure or the cancer had been worse it was at least a contest. “So what exactly did we buy? How much time?”
“Oh, I bet we’ve probably extended her life a good three months.”
“No, I’m sorry, Dr. Goldman,” Shep said on the way out. “They were not a good three months.”
Back in Elmsford, Zach had left a message from Rick Mystic, leaving the lawyer’s home number. Since Carol and the girls would be arriving in an hour or so, Shep returned the call in his study right away, closing the door.
Rick got straight to the point. “They want to settle.”
They did not, for once, sort of want to settle. “That was quick.”
“These kind of cases can drag out for years, but when they move they can change your life in an afternoon. I bet Forge Craft’s people were kind of impressed by your wife’s deposition. But they were also kind of impressed by her—condition.”
“You mean they’re afraid she’s going to …”
“Yeah. In which case, the size of a jury award could sort of skyrocket. You’ve got them sort of scared.”
“So what are they offering?”
“One-point-two million.”
Since twelve divided evenly by three, calculating what would remain after the lawyer’s one-third contingency fee was elementary arithmetic; Mystic’s cut amounted to somewhat more than the U.S. government’s contingency fee for his sale of Knack. “So what do you advise?”
“Well, if you take them to court, especially once you’ve suffered—a greater loss, I’m kind of certain you could double that. But I’d be kind of remiss if I didn’t warn you what a jury trial would involve. It’s kind of brutal. Once liability has been established, the process is all about assessing what your marriage was worth. In dollars. So it’s kind of in their interest to prove that your marriage was sort of shitty. A sort of shitty marriage doesn’t, legally, merit nearly as high a compensation as a good one.”
“What business is it of theirs, what quality of marriage I had?” The past tense made him glad that the study door was closed. “You’re telling me they, what, deduct ten grand for every time Glynis and I had a fight?”
“You may find that kind of ludicrous, but you’re kind of right. I mean, they’d grill you on how often you had sex. They’d go after your friends and see if they could find anybody who described your marriage as kind of unhappy, or kind of fractious. I had one client who had a sort of iron-clad case on an evidential level; her husband had worked for twenty years in fireproofing with sprayed asbestos. But they dug up that she’d had a, sort of, lesbian affair during the marriage. She hated to let her family know, and withdrew the suit. It was a kind of blackmail, really. And in your case, what you told me about being sort of packed and ready to move to Africa? By yourself if necessary, right before you found out that Glynis had cancer? I promise you they’d find someone who knew that story, and it would look kind of bad.”
“If I accept the settlement, how soon could they cut me the check?”
“You’d have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But after that? They’d cut you a check in a heartbeat. Especially with Glynis in sort of rough shape. They wouldn’t want to be, uh, overtaken by events—when you might have, you know, kind of a change of heart. The worst coming to worst could make you decide to sort of go for the jugular.”
“I’ll have to talk to Glynis. But if you get us that money ASAP—and I mean, like, Monday, not weeks from now, because we don’t have weeks—then I say take it.”
Once he hung up the phone, Shep once more thought mournfully about Jackson. It was criminal that his best friend never lived to witness this conversion: from Mug, to Mooch.