Before Mr. Patterson was shot, I remember the rust-flecked mirror over the station commode becoming the boxing mirror – the place where all fighters must examine their every move and weakness – and I saw a man that had grown soft and old. At forty, I didn’t care for that feeling a bit.

I’d always been a groper.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG, I WAS HALF ASLEEP IN AN EASY chair, an empty bowl of peach ice cream in my lap, and watching television over the heads of my two children who lay on the floor, inches away from the screen. We’d just watched a show called Topper about a ghost couple and their ghost Saint Bernard who haunted an uptight banker. The kids liked it a lot anytime the ghost dog got into the banker’s booze, but now had grown a little bored and sleepy with Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, and that’s when I’d begun to doze after a long day of pumping gas and fixing engines.

Joyce walked into the room, drying her hands on a dish towel, and took a deep breath. Her face was white as she pointed me back to the kitchen.

I put down my spoon and followed. “Hugh Britton called. Mr. Patterson has been shot. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”

“My gun is in the nightstand.”

“I know where your gun is.”

“Keep it close.”

“I’ll lock the doors.”

The hospital was just up the hill from our little brick house, and I ran all the way through the fine, heated summer night. The little windows of the postwar cottages on the gentle slope glowed with soft light, and in the tiny square yards children played and grimy men drank beer and worked on cars. Women sat on stoops and smoked cigarettes in hair curlers, and I ran by them all up a curved drive, past all the cars and a few ambulances, and into the dull, attic heat of the hospital lobby.