This was news to me; if he’d been doing any coughing, it hadn’t been while I was around. Also, he was doing that bad-math thing again. “Al, hello? It’s June. Seven months ago it was December.”

He waved a hand at me — the fingers thin, his Marine Corps ring hanging on a digit that used to clasp it cozily — as if to say Pass that by for now, just pass it.

“At first I thought I just had a bad cold. But there was no fever, and instead of going away, the cough got worse. Then I started losing weight. Well, I ain’t stupid, buddy, and I always knew the big C might be in the cards for me. . although my father and mother smoked like goddam chimneys and lived into their eighties. I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don’t we?”

He started coughing again, and pulled out the handkerchief. When the hacking subsided, he said: “I can’t get off on a sidetrack, but I’ve been doing it my whole life and it’s hard to stop. Harder than stopping with the cigarettes, actually. Next time I start wandering off-course, just kind of saw a finger across your throat, would you?”

“Okay,” I said, agreeably enough. It had occurred to me by then that I was dreaming all of this. If so, it was an extremely vivid dream, right down to the shadows thrown by the revolving ceiling fan, marching across the place mats reading OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET IS YOU!

“Long story short, I went to a doctor and got an X-ray, and there they were, big as billy-be-damned. Two tumors. Advanced necrosis. Inoperable.”

An X-ray, I thought—did they still use those to diagnose cancer?

“I hung in for awhile, but in the end I had to come back.”

“From where? Lewiston? Central Maine General?”

“From my vacation.” His eyes looked fixedly at me from the dark hollows into which they were disappearing. “Except it was no vacation.”