Julia is not in the bed, and the warm depression she leaves behind is cooling. He feels, more heavily each day, the unnaturalness of getting out of bed, of rising for the same drab bran-cereal breakfast with its fistful of vitamins to slug down, the newspaper to face with its fatal car accidents, its tenement fires in the Boston inner suburbs, its never-ending revelations of priestly sexual abuse of now middle-aged and litigious and not very winning child victims, its further revelations of intricate chicanery in the exalted offices of corporations and mutual funds, its obituaries of the deserving obscure, its impending war to face. His left hand frequently possesses the tingling palm that indicates spinal deterioration or a gathering heart attack, with arthritic aches at the base of one fingernail and, less ignorably, in the joints of the thumb, buried deep in his hand’s anatomy. These pains relate, he believes, to the golf season; the aching finger is the third one, with which he has gripped the club most tightly, too tightly, all these years, and the same grip mechanics have somehow misused his thumb—put too much weight on it at the top of the back-swing. For decades he has been trying to get golf pros to show him what he is doing wrong, but all they have said was, with hardly a glance, that his grip looked fine, before they proceeded to complain about his feet, his shoulders, his excessive hip-turn, his wretched outside-in tendency, his stiff-legged and excessively upright stance with its companion fault, the dreaded “reverse C.” But in his heart he knows that your thumb isn’t supposed to hurt at the end of every round. Now he has worn the bones down, beyond repair; the damage and its ache will accompany him to the grave. A surge of love for Julia moves through him, in the wake of the warm sensation that had been she, on the sheet, beneath the blanket. She has stayed with him, will stay with him even as he becomes a pathetic, noisome, malfunctioning cripple.