“Heart attack at forty, a massive one. Then a second one. Hell, it was the first one that damn near got me. Now it’s atrial fibrillation. I get that. You know what that is? Your heart skips. It beats without rhythm. I’m living on pills. Heart pills. Blood pills. Nerve pills. I did it to myself, too. No one else. I decided the only thing in life was money and went right for it. And I got it, too. First as a service manager for Toyota, and then with my own agency. Worked twice as many hours as I should have. Drank. Smoked. Did coke. Yeah, that’s right, did coke and dropped like a rock right on the showroom floor. Right on the floor. The second one I spent ninety hospital days on. They had to operate twice. I threw off some clots and they had to go in and get the clots and a fucking staph infection set in in the incision. Isn’t that the way? Yeah, well, it gets pretty damn rough sometimes. ’Cause I just get out and over that and then my wife took it. Went into a coma. Comatose thirty days, then she went, tumor under the brain. That’s why they couldn’t find it, they said. They couldn’t see it. Under the brain. So what can you do? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. You just get over one thing and something else goes. Sometimes it gets me. We had a lot of plans. There was nothing wrong with her. We both agreed I had to slow down and do something else. It was headed that way. We’d finally worked a lot of things out. Nothing wrong with her. Nothing at all. So what can you do? The kids pretty much have lives of their own. They seem to forget about poor old Dad. I set the oldest one up in business, too. They’re good kids, though. Can’t blame them. I wasn’t any different myself at their age. Who does care about old Dad? Ah, what the hell. I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know one good reason why I’m still here. It’s already over. Some goddamn primitive instinct to survive, I guess. Hell, that’s all the past, isn’t it. You can’t think about that crap. You do, you might as well go upstairs and get it over with.”