Tubber’s waitress, Glenda, seeing T.K.’s empty glass, rushes over with a refill: scotch, straight up. He’s given her orders to keep a full glass in front of him for the rest of the afternoon.

“A victory celebration?” she asks.

“No, a wake,” he snaps.

Glenda doesn’t press him for details. When Tubber hired her, he gave her two instructions. “Keep your hands out of the till,” he told her, “and don’t talk too much to the customers.” Since Glenda was never much for idle conversation anyway, Tubber gets a 50 per cent compliance rate. In silence, she moves on to another table.

T.K. sits alone, his face to the wall. An inflatable plastic sling encases his right arm, the one Matision dislocated. On the table in front of him there are two empty glasses lined up neatly side by side, perfectly squared off with the table’s forward edge. “One dead Prospector,” T.K. sings under his breath, “I’m so blue.” It’s a common rope skipping chant, one he hears children reciting a hundred times a day from the sidewalks outside his apartment. “Another gets his throat cut, and then there are two.” He downs his scotch and positions the glass beside the others.

Glenda comes hustling over with his next one.

She sets it in front of him. He swishes it around a few times, prepares to slug it down, when a hand touches his shoulder. He swings around. It’s Sarah.

“I thought you might want some company.”

On the one hand, it’s the last thing in the world he wants. He’s never considered mourning to be a team sport. Then again, he desperately needs to tell somebody about the deep, possibly irreparable fissure that Eddie’s death puts into the fragile web of his self-esteem. He waves her to the chair next to him. “Drink?”

“No, nothing.”

They sit in silence for several minutes. Finally, T.K. speaks. “He died laughing, you know. He actually died laughing.”

“I know. They showed it on television.”

“Sometimes during a game I would find myself looking at him, thinking to myself, that old son of a bitch. Nobody’s ever gonna get him. He’s gonna be around forever. Only he turned out to be as mortal as everybody else. There I am out there. Half a god. I can’t give life, but I can sure as hell take it away.”

“His death wasn’t your fault.”