Katie doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell her.

I have a very close friend here. Someone I’d known in high school in Port Oriskany. What there is between us would be hard to explain for much is silence.

It has been a good conversation, I think after Katie hangs up. I am trembling, but then I am always trembling when I call my sister, and this evening it’s worse than usual of course since the news has come at last, unavoidable, unsurprising, yet devastating as a poisonous gas hissing into the house—Our brother Lionel is free, “maxed-out.”

The Misunderstanding

HE WAS SURE: HE WAS BEING FOLLOWED.

Left the Shamrock at about 11:00 P.M., headed for his car. The lot behind the tavern was filled so he’d had to park across the street in the Bank of Niagara lot deserted at this hour.

Aware of them behind him. Murmuring together, about him. Muffled laughter like distant thunder.

Thought he’d seen them earlier, on the street by the movie house. Black kids. Except these looked older, taller.

That tight sensation in his brain. Hearing the faint beat beat beat of what sounded like somebody hammering at a distance but (the doctor had said) was the very beat of his blood, in his brain.

Twenty-four hours Jerome had been monitored, wearing a blood-pressure cuff on his upper left arm beneath his clothes, that contracted to the point of pain every half hour during the day and every hour of an interminable night and the discovery was, he had a condition called hypertension. Sure, he knew what this was. Every old person they knew had hypertension. The old sod had had hypertension along with a dozen other ailments but he’d lived to be—eighty-seven? Going strong until the day he died. Stubborn old bastard, never gave up whiskey.