He refused my offer of refreshment, said he couldn't stay, then put his briefcase aside on the couch as if to contradict that. He sank full fathom five beside the couch's armrest (and going deeper all the time - I feared for the thing's springs), looking at me and wheezing benignly.

"What brings you out this way?" I asked him.

"Oh, Kathi tells me you're planning to bump yourself off," he said. It was the tone he might have used to say Kathi tells me you're having a lawn party and there are fresh Krispy Kremes on offer. "Any truth to that rumor?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling jacked up and very clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. "How did that get there?" she asked me. Not in the forty years since that day had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question.

Finally - long after such a response could have any weight - I said, "That's ridiculous. I don't know where she could have gotten such an idea."

"No?"

"No. Sure you don't want a Coke?"

"Thanks, but I'll pass."

I got up and got a Coke from the kitchen fridge. I tucked the bottle firmly between my stump and my chest-wall - possible but painful, I don't know what you may have seen in the movies, but broken ribs hurt for a long time - and spun off the cap with my left hand. I'm a southpaw. Caught a break there, muchacho, as Wireman says.

"I'm surprised you'd take her seriously in any case," I said as I came back in. "Kathi's a hell of a physical therapist, but a headshrinker she's not." I paused before sitting down. "Neither are you, actually. In the technical sense."