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It’s always darkest before the dawn.
He once read a science fiction novel called The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He doesn’t know about the moon, but would testify in court that whiskey is a harsh mistress, and that’s made right here on earth.
‘Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day,’ Hodges says.
You can find anything on the Internet, he has discovered. Some of it is helpful. Some of it is interesting. Some of it is funny. And some of it is fucking awful.
picture of Johnny Depp that makes him look either drunk, stoned, or dead.
He has an idea that Dr Stamos is going to tell him he has an ulcer, and for that news he can wait.
Hodges, a coronary survivor, thinks, Reminder to self: no fitness club.
being alone after someone you love passes on was the worst kind of paralysis.
‘Oh, I can deal with her thinking I’m crazy. I’ve been dealing with people thinking that all my life, starting with my parents.
‘Well, you know what they say – you can’t be too thin or too rich.’
‘Cross every t and dot every i, huh?
On the screen is a picture of his daughter at seven, bright and smiling, riding high on the backyard swing he put up when they lived on Freeborn Avenue. When they were still a family. Now Allie’s thirty-six, divorced, in therapy, and getting over a painful relationship with a man who told her a story as old as Genesis: I’m going to leave her soon, but this is a bad time.
Memory has a way of slipping a few gears after sixty-five, when people round the third turn start down the home stretch.
If you were standing on top of a burning building and a helicopter appeared and dropped a rope ladder, would you say you needed to think about it before climbing up?’
someplace down deep she is thinking it, and always will. The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.
Hours ago he found out he has only months to live. Now he’s discussing the volume of his cell phone.
‘Lowtown’s where they drink the beer and then eat the bottle it came in,’ he told her once. ‘No place for a girl like you.’
Fifty is a lot for delivering a note, but he has discovered at least one good thing about terminal cancer: you can toss your budget out the window.
He hangs up and heads back to the hospital, breaking into a clumsy trot. He thinks, This goddam place is like the Mafia. Every time I think I’m out, it pulls me back
‘Billy Hodges, you old whore! I thought you were dead!’ Soon enough, Cassie, he thinks. ‘I’d love to bullshit with you, hon, but I need a favor.
Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.
The Strike Avenue cop shop looks like a medieval castle in a country where the king has fallen and anarchy rules.
‘The reasons never matter, because suicide goes against every human instinct, and that makes it insane.’
He was born stupid but didn’t stay that way, as the saying goes.
She became an expert in not thinking, because once you started doing that, certain connections became obvious. And all because of that damn picture. Freddi wishes now she’d resisted the impulse, but her mother had a saying: Too late always comes too early.
Then he goes to bed and stares up into the darkness, waiting for sleep or morning, whichever comes first. 8
Four in the morning is usually an unhappy time to be awake. It’s when unpleasant thoughts and pessimistic ideas come to the fore,
Now he understands why pancreatic is called the stealth cancer, and why it’s almost always deadly. It lurks, building up its troops and sending out secret emissaries to the lungs, the lymph nodes, the bones and the brain. Then it blitzkriegs, not understanding, in its stupid rapacity, that victory can only bring its own death.
One was a boy from a family that was, according to the neighbors, fairly weird about religion – the kind that makes fundamentalist Christians look liberal.
It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
‘You’ll always be my friend, won’t you?’ ‘Always.’ He squeezes her shoulders, which are heartbreakingly thin. During Hodges’s final two months, she lost ten pounds she couldn’t afford to lose. He knows his mother and Barbara are just waiting to feed her up. ‘Always, Holly.’ ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Then why did you ask?’ ‘Because it’s so good to hear you say it.’
Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do.
