“Guy I know down in Florida, not much older than we are, had an open-heart and he says it was hell, the recuperation took forever, and furthermore he doesn’t look so great even so. He swings a golf club like a cripple.”

Charlie does one of his tidy small shrugs. “You got to have the basics to work with. Maybe the guy was too far gone. But you, you’re in good shape. Could lose a few pounds, but you’re young – what, Fifty-five?”

“Wish I was. Fifty-six last February.”

“That’s young, Champ. I’m getting there myself.” Charlie is Janice’s age.

“The way I’m going I’ll be happy to hit sixty. I look at all these old crocks down in Florida, shrivelled-up mummies toddling right into their nineties in their shorts and orthopedic sneakers, perky as bejesus, and I want to ask ‘em, ‘What makes you so great? How did you do it?’”

“A day at a time,” Charlie suggests. “One day at a time, and don’t look down.” Harry can tell he’s getting bored with issuing assurances, but Charlie’s all he’s got, now that he and Thelma are on hold. He’s embarrassed to call her, now that he can’t seem to deliver. He says:

“There’s this other they can do now. An angioplasty. They cut open an artery in your groin – ”

“Hey. I’m eating.”

“ – and poke it all the way to your heart, would you believe. Then they pop out this balloon in the narrow place of the coronary artery and blow the damn thing up. Not with air, with saltwater somehow. It cracks the plaque. It stretches the artery back to the way it was.”

“With a lot of luck it does,” Charlie says. “And a year later you’re back in the same boat, plugged up with macadamia nuts and beer yet.”

Beer has come on the end of Jennifer’s lean arm, in a frosted glass mug, golden and foam-topped and sizzling with its own excited bubbles. “If I can’t have a single beer now and then, I’d just as soon be dead,” Harry lies. He sips, and with a bent forefinger wipes the foam from under his nose. That gesture of Nelson’s. He wonders when she fucks how protective Jennifer has to be of that wobbly mohawk. Some punk girls, he’s read, put safety pins through their nipples.

“Coronary bypass is what you want,” Charlie is telling him.