My own other, most personal favorite is “Cold Snap,” the title story of Thom’s second collection. Before I was a writer, I’d had some other jobs, not as a janitor or a copywriter, like Thom had, but mostly as a bartender and social worker. My sympathy for the burned-out helper cannot be exaggerated. Richard, our hero in “Cold Snap,” is a hot mess, as is often the case for the Jones protagonist. Thom avoided the “worried well” and the complacent as suitable subjects almost as assiduously as he avoided the lucky and the measured optimist. Richard has a quintessentially Jonesian terrible outlook. “I can fuck up a wet dream with my attitude,” the man says and no reader would argue. He has gotten himself sent home from Africa, with malaria and minus his medical license, because he’s one inch shy of being a junkie and people have noticed. (In Jones’s fiction, not only are characters free to make bad choices, but they also suffer the consequences. There’s no room for bravado and not much for freewheeling self-deception.) Richard, being a mess, has cut his thumb and it’s giving him no end of trouble, and he has to—he has to—get some pain pills, as so many of Jones’s characters do. His sister, Susan, is a schizophrenic, which is not as central to this story as the self-inflicted lobotomy she endured when she tried to kill herself.

Richard shows off for us by playing Russian roulette. He claims that not dying has made him euphoric, like Van Gogh, minus the slicing of the ear. He doesn’t die. But he doesn’t fool Thom Jones, and therefore he doesn’t fool us. The man is wild with grief and the only help on the horizon, the unlikely and lovely and damaged cavalry to the rescue, is his sister. Susan tells Richard that she dreams of a happy life for them, driving a ’67 Dodge around heaven, and after the telling of the dream, in their real life together, they have an elaborate lunch (“the best little lunch of a lifetime”) in Richard’s car. They listen to “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love” on the radio. “What can be better,” Richard says, “than a cool, breezy, fragrant day, rain-splatter diamonds on the wraparound windshield of a Ninety-eight Olds with a view of cherry trees blooming in the light spring rain?” I love this story more than I can say. It is peace and trouble, love and grief, doom and the tiny flicker of hope, if one can bear to have it.