Still smiling, Blodgett reached down and patted Duke's furry head.

Liked her, didn't you, boy? We might just get ourselves a piece of that, Duke, how about it? Been a while since we had any strange cunt, hasn't it? He seated himself at the big old-fashioned desk again and resumed going through his papers. There was a lot of work to be straightened out before he left for Florida.

Every few minutes he would stop, however, and smile thoughtfully to himself at the way things were working out, falling into place. He had been trying for several seasons now to get Lauralee to move to Florida for the whole winter. She had proved stubborn on this point and so he had hit on the idea of saying the Doc wanted him to slow down.

Actually, Doc's warning had been nowhere near as dire as he went around telling everyone. His blood pressure was up a little… he should eat less, drink less whiskey, quit smoking. As far as retiring, John Blodgett hadn't worked an honest day for years anyway, and why should he? If a man had some brains and used them, others would do the work and he could sit back and count the money. Take Ray Denham, now, he would work hard, save all his money, and someday he might own a crummy drugstore! Well, if that was his version of the American Dream, let him go after it.

He had been just as poor as Ray at the same age, and look at where he was now. Of course, the Blodgetts hadn't been hillbilly farmers, they were real old southern quality and that still counted for something in Quiggville. If he hadn't come from a good family, Lauralee's grandmother probably would have had their marriage annulled. She'd been only sixteen while he was twenty-four.

That was the year after the war was over, and he'd just got out of the army and had come home to Quiggville to draw his veteran's unemployment benefits while he looked around for something to do.