“John,” Frankie said, “I need dough. I was in the can a long time and I haven’t found anything. You can’t fuck around with me like this.”

“My friend,” Amato said, “my wife, Connie? Makes great roast pork. She stuffs it, you know? It’s really great. The other night she makes roast pork. First time since I been home. I couldn’t eat it. I told her, I said: ‘Connie, don’t make no pork for me, ever again.’ But I used to love it, I always said it’s the best thing she makes, and she’s a good cook. I mean, a really good cook. That’s why she’s so fuckin’ fat all the time, she likes to eat and she likes to cook and she cooks great and she eats it. ‘Bacon,’ I said, ‘ham, I don’t care if it does come off a pig. But no kind of pork. You make baked beans, all right? Don’t gimme none with the pork on it. The beans I’ll eat. Not the pork.’ And, well, I went down the clamstand and I ate in my fuckin’ car, and I haven’t, until a month ago I didn’t eat with my family for almost seven years. I still ate down the clamstand. Something got fucked up once, you remember that? I picked a wrong guy for something, everybody’s in a hurry, we got to move, we need the dough, this and that, he’ll be all right, and I, it, I was worse’n the rest of you. So we take him, and I knew, he’s a guy I’m really not sure about. I couldn’t tell you what it was, I just knew it, this was a wrong guy. But I take him anyway. And he was a wrong guy, and I eat greasy, shitty pork, seems like every day, almost seven years, and my kids’re growing up and my business, it’s all right, it’s not doing as good as it should be, and I’m in the can, and now, I can’t get that back, you know? So now, I can’t eat my favorite things any more, because they remind me, I’m, from now on I’m taking my time, and that’s all there is to it.