The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles — a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living room, seemed surer. He was no longer pressing his right hand into his left armpit, as if trying to hold himself together.

“Look a little more like my old self, do I?” he asked in his gravelly voice as he sat down in the easy chair in front of the TV. Only he didn’t really sit, just kind of positioned himself and dropped.

“You do. What have the doctors told you?”

“The one I saw in Portland says there’s no hope, not even with chemo and radiation. Exactly what the doc I saw in Dallas said. In 1962, that was. Nice to think some things don’t change, don’t you think?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Sometimes there’s nothing to say. Sometimes you’re just stumped.

“No sense beating around the bush about it,” he said. “I know death’s embarrassing to folks, especially when the one dying has nothing but his own bad habits to blame, but I can’t waste time being delicate. I’ll be in the hospital soon enough, if for no other reason than I won’t be able to get back and forth to the bathroom on my own. I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around coughing my brains out and hip deep in my own shit.”

“What happens to the diner?”

“The diner’s finished, buddy. Even if I was healthy as a horse, it would be gone by the end of this month. You know I always just rented that space, don’t you?”

I didn’t, but it made sense. Although Worumbo was still called Worumbo, it was now your basic trendy shopping center, so that meant Al had been paying rent to some corporation.