Yeah, right,a resentful voice spoke up. They also want to make sure she’s able to help out when the Wolves come riding out of Thunderclap. It’d be one less gun if she was busy having a miscarriage or a nervous breakdown or something.

He knew that wasn’t fair, but the dream had shaken him badly. The rat was what he kept coming back to; that rat writhing on the meat-fork. Her holding it up. And grinning. Don’t want to forget that. Grinning . He’d touched the thought in her mind at that moment, and the thought had been rat-kebab.

“Christ,” he whispered.

He guessed he understood why Roland wasn’t telling Susannah about Mia—and about the baby, what Mia called the chap—but didn’t the gunslinger understand that something far more important had been lost, and was getting more lost every day this was allowed to go on?

They know better than you, they’re grown-ups.

Jake thought that was bullshit. If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and snorting cocaine until his nose bled? If being a grown-up gave you some sort of special knowledge of the right things to do, how come his mother was sleeping with her masseuse, who had huge biceps and no brains? Why had neither of them noticed, as the spring of 1977 marched toward summer, that their kid (who had a nickname—’Bama—known only to the housekeeper) was losing his fucking mind?

This isn’t the same thing.

But what if it was? What if Roland and Eddie were so close to the problem they couldn’t see the truth?

What is the truth? What is your understanding of the truth?

That they were no longer ka-tet, that was his understanding of the truth.

What was it Roland had said to Callahan, at that first palaver? We are round, and roll as we do . That had been true then, but Jake didn’t think it was true now. He remembered an old joke people told when they got a blowout: Well, it’s only flat on the bottom . That was them now, flat on the bottom. No longer truly ka-tet—how could they be, when they were keeping secrets? And were Mia and the child growing in Susannah’s stomach the only secrets? Jake thought not. There was something else, as well. Something Roland was keeping back not just from Susannah but from all of them.

We can beat the Wolves if we’re together,he thought. If we’re ka-tet. But not the way we are now. Not over here, not in New York, either. I just don’t believe it.