I went up the paved walk, up the steps, then paused, frowning. The sign reading WELCOME

TO AL’S DINER, HOME OF THE FATBURGER! was gone. In its place was a square of cardboard reading CLOSED & WILL NOT REOPEN DUE TO ILLNESS. THANK YOU FOR

YOUR BUSINESS OVER THE YEARS & GOD BLESS.

I had not yet entered the fog of unreality that would soon swallow me, but the first tendrils were seeping around me, and I felt them. It wasn’t a summer cold that had caused the hoarseness I’d heard in Al’s voice, nor the croaking cough. Not the flu, either. Judging by the sign, it was something more serious. But what kind of serious illness came on in a mere twenty-four hours? Less than that, really. It was two-thirty. I had left Al’s last night at five forty-five, and he’d been fine.

Almost manic, in fact. I remembered asking him if he’d been drinking too much of his own coffee, and he said no, he was just thinking about taking a vacation. Do people who are getting sick—sick enough to close the businesses they’ve run single-handed for over twenty years—talk about taking vacations? Some, maybe, but probably not many.

The door opened while I was still reaching for the handle, and Al stood there looking at me, not smiling. I looked back, feeling that fog of unreality thicken around me. The day was warm but the fog was cold. At that point I still could have turned and walked out of it, back into the June sunshine, and part of me wanted to do that. Mostly, though, I was frozen by wonder and dismay.

Also horror, I might as well admit it. Because serious illness does horrify us, doesn’t it, and Al was seriously ill. I could see that in a single glance. And mortally was probably more like it.

It wasn’t just that his normally ruddy cheeks had gone slack and sallow. It wasn’t the rheum that coated his blue eyes, which now looked washed-out and nearsightedly peering. It wasn’t even his hair, formerly almost all black, and now almost all white—after all, he might have been using one of those vanity products and decided on the spur of the moment to shampoo it out and go natural.

The impossible part was that in the twenty-two hours since I’d last seen him, Al Templeton appeared to have lost at least thirty pounds. Maybe even forty, which would have been a quarter of his previous body weight. Nobody loses thirty or forty pounds in less than a day, nobody. But I was looking at it. And this, I think, is where that fog of unreality swallowed me whole.

Al smiled, and I saw he had lost teeth as well as weight. His gums looked pale and unhealthy. “How do you like the new me, Jake?” And he began to cough, thick chaining sounds that came from deep inside him.

I opened my mouth. No words came out. The idea of flight again came to some craven, disgusted part of my mind, but even if that part had been in control, I couldn’t have done it. I was rooted to the spot.

Al got the coughing under control and pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket. He wiped first his mouth and then the palm of his hand with it. Before he put it back, I saw it was streaked with red.

“Come in,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to talk about, and I think you’re the only one who might listen. Will you listen?”

“Al,” I said. My voice was so low and strengthless I could hardly hear it myself. “What’s happened to you?”

“Will you listen?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll have questions, and I’ll answer as many as I can, but try to keep them to a minimum.

I don’t have much voice left. Hell, I don’t have much strength left. Come on in here.” I came in. The diner was dark and cool and empty. The counter was polished and crumbless; the chrome on the stools gleamed; the coffee urn was polished to a high gloss; the sign reading IF

YOU DON’T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE was in its accustomed place by the Sweda register. The only thing missing was the customers.

Well, and the cook-proprietor, of course. Al Templeton had been replaced by an elderly, ailing ghost. When he turned the door’s thumb-latch, locking us in, the sound was very loud.

4

“Lung cancer,” he said matter-of-factly, after leading us to a booth at the far end of the diner.

He tapped the pocket of his shirt, and I saw it was empty. The ever-present pack of Camel straights was gone. “No big surprise. I started when I was eleven, and smoked right up to the day I got the diagnosis. Over fifty damn years. Three packs a day until the price went way up in ’07. Then I made a sacrifice and cut back to two a day.” He laughed wheezily.

I thought of telling him that his math had to be wrong, because I knew his actual age. When I’d come in one day in the late winter and asked him why he was working the grill with a kid’s birthday hat on, he’d said Because today I’m fifty-seven, buddy. Which makes me an official Heinz.

But he’d asked me not to ask questions unless I absolutely had to, and I assumed the request included not butting in to make corrections.

“If I were you—and I wish I was, although I’d never wish being me on you, not in my current situation—I’d be thinking, ‘Something’s screwy here, nobody gets advanced lung cancer overnight.’ Is that about right?”

I nodded. That was exactly right.

“The answer is simple enough. It wasn’t overnight. I started coughing my brains out about seven months ago, back in May.”

This was news to me; if he’d been doing any coughing, it hadn’t been while I was around.

Also, he was doing that bad-math thing again. “Al, hello? It’s June. Seven months ago it was December.”

He waved a hand at me—the fingers thin, his Marine Corps ring hanging on a digit that used to clasp it cozily—as if to say Pass that by for now, just pass it.

“At first I thought I just had a bad cold. But there was no fever, and instead of going away, the cough got worse. Then I started losing weight. Well, I ain’t stupid, buddy, and I always knew the big C might be in the cards for me . . . although my father and mother smoked like goddam chimneys and lived into their eighties. I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don’t we?”

He started coughing again, and pulled out the handkerchief. When the hacking subsided, he said: “I can’t get off on a sidetrack, but I’ve been doing it my whole life and it’s hard to stop. Harder than stopping with the cigarettes, actually. Next time I start wandering off-course, just kind of saw a finger across your throat, would you?”

“Okay,” I said, agreeably enough. It had occurred to me by then that I was dreaming all of this. If so, it was an extremely vivid dream, right down to the shadows thrown by the revolving ceiling fan, marching across the place mats reading OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET IS YOU!

“Long story short, I went to a doctor and got an X-ray, and there they were, big as billy-be-damned. Two tumors. Advanced necrosis. Inoperable.”

An X-ray, I thought— did they still use those to diagnose cancer?