She says it feels as if her lungs are filling up with seaweed. It won’t be long now. They’ll come one day, and instead of loading an empty oxy tank into the back of that wagon, they’ll load May in.

They’ll take her Off to Derry Home, and that’ll be ’ “Was it cigarettes?” Ralph asked.

McGovern favored him with a look so alien to that lean, mild face that it took Ralph several moments to realize it was contempt. “May Locher never smoked a Cigarette in her whole life. What she’s paying off is twenty years in the dyehouse at a mill in Corinna and another twenty working the picker at a mill in Newport. It’s cotton, wool, and nylon she’s trying to breathe through, not seaweed.”

The two young men from Derry Medical Services got into their van and drove away.

“Maine’s the northeastern anchor of Appalachia, Ralph-a lot of people don’t realize that, but it’s true-and May’s dying of an Appalachian disease. The doctors call it Textile Lung.”

“That’s a shame. I guess she means a lot to you.”

McGovern laughed ruefully. “Nah. I visit her because she happens to be the last visible piece of my misspent youth. Sometimes I read to her and I always manage to get down one or two of her dry old oatmeal cookies, but that’s about as far as it goes. My concern is safely selfish, I assure you.”

Safely selfish, Ralph thought. What a really odd phrase. What a really McGovern phrase.

“Never mind May,” McGovern said. “The question on the lips of Americans everywhere is what we’re going to do about you, Ralph.

The whiskey didn’t work, did it?”

“No,” Ralph said. “I’m afraid it didn’t.”

“To make a particularly apropos pun, did you give it a fair shot?”

Ralph nodded.

“Well, you have to do something about the bags under your eyes or you’ll never land the lovely Lois.” McGovern studied Ralph’s facial response to this and sighed. “Not that funny, huh?”

“Nope. It’s been a long day.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

They sat in companionable silence for awhile, watching the comings and goings on their part of Harris Avenue. Three little girls were playing hopscotch in the Red Apple’s parking lot across the street.

Mrs. Perrine stood nearby, straight as a sentry, watching them.

A boy with his Red Sox cap turned around backward went past, bopping to the beat of his Walkman headset, Two kids were tossing a Frisbee back and forth in front of Lois’s house. A dog barked.

Somewhere a woman was yelling for Sam to get his sister and come inside. It was just the usual streetlife serenade, no more and no less, but to Ralph it all seemed strangely false. He supposed it was because he had gotten so used to seeing Harris Avenue empty lately.

He turned to McGovern and said, “You know what was just about the first thing I thought of when I saw you in the Red Apple parking lot this afternoon? In spite of everything else that was going on?”

McGovern shook his head.

“I wondered where the hell your hat was. The Panama. You looked very strange to me without it. Naked, almost. So come clean-where’d you stash the lid, son?”

McGovern touched the top Of his head, where the remaining strands of his baby-fine white hair were combed carefully left to right across his pink skull. “I don’t know,” he said. “I missed it this morning.

I almost always remember to drop it on the table by the front door when I come in, but it’s not there. I suppose I put it down somewhere else this time and the exact locale has slipped my mind for the nonce.

Give me another few years and I’ll be wandering around in my underwear because I can’t remember where I left my pants. All part of the wonderful aging experience, right, Ralph?”

Ralph nodded and smiled, thinking to himself that of all the elderly people he knew-and he knew at least three dozen on a casual walk-in-the-park, hi-how-ya-doing basis-Bill McGovern bitched the most about getting on in years. He seemed to regard his vanished youth and recently departed middle age as a general would regard a couple of soldiers who desert on the eve of a big battle. He wasn’t about to say such a thing, however. Everyone had their little eccentricities; being theatrically morbid about growing old was simply one of McGovern’s"Did I say something funny?” McGovern asked.

“Pardon?”

“You were smiling, so I thought I must have said something funny.”

He sounded a bit touchy, especially for a man so fond of ribbing his upstairs neighbor about the pretty widow down the street, but Ralph reminded himself it had been a long day for McGovern, too.

“I wasn’t thinking about you at all,” Ralph said. “I was thinking about how Carolyn used to say practically the same thing-that getting old was like getting a bad dessert at the end of a really fine meal.”

This was at least half a lie. Carolyn had made the simile, but she had used it to describe the brain tumor that was killing her, not her life as a senior citizen. She hadn’t been all that senior, anyway, just sixty-four when she died, and until the last six or eight weeks of her life, she had claimed to feel only half of that on most days.

Across from them, the three girls who had been playing hopscotch approached the curb, looked both ways for traffic, then joined hands and ran across the street, laughing. For just a moment they looked to him as if they were surrounded by a gray glow-a nimbus that illuminated their cheeks and brows and laughing eyes like some strange, clarifying Saint Elmo’s fire. A little frightened, Ralph squeezed his eyes shut and then popped them open again. The gray envelope he’d imagined around the trio of girls was gone, which was a relief, but he had to get some sleep soon. He had to.

“Ralph?” McGovern’s voice seemed to be coming from the far end of the porch, although he hadn’t moved. “You all right?”

“Sure,” Ralph said. “Thinking about Ed and Helen, that’s all.

Did you have any idea how screwy he was getting, Bill?”

McGovern shook his head decisively. “None whatsoever,” he said.

I “And although I saw bruises on Helen from time to time, I always believed her stories about them. I don’t like to consider myself a tremendously gullible person, but I may have to reassess my thinking on that score.”

“What do you think will happen with them? Any predictions?”

McGovern sighed and touched the top of his head with his fingertips, feeling for the missing Panama without realizing it. “You know me, Ralph-I’m a cynic from a long line of them. I think it’s very rare for ordinary human conflicts to resolve themselves the way they do on TV. In reality they just keep coming back, turning in diminishing circles until they finally disappear. Except disaPPearing isn’t really what they do; they dry up, like mudpuddles in the sun.”

McGovern paused and then added: “And most of them leave the same scummy residue behind.”

“Jesus,” Ralph said. “That is cynical.”

McGovern shrugged. “Most retired teachers are cynical, Ralph.

We see them come in, so young and so strong, SO convinced that it’s going to be different for them, and we see them make their messes and then paddle around in them, just as their parents and grandparents did.

What I think is that Helen will go back to him, and Ed will do okay for awhile, and then he’ll beat her up again and she’ll leave again. It’s like one of those sappy country-western songs they have on the juke out at Nicky’s Lunch, and some people have to listen to that song a long, long time before they decide they don’t want to hear it anymore. Helen’s a bright young woman, though. I think one more verse is all she’ll need.”

“One more verse might be all she’ll ever get,” Ralph said quietly.

“We’re not talking about some drunk husband coming home on Friday night and beating his wife up because he lost his paycheck in a poker game and she dared to bitch about it.”

“I know,” McGovern said, “but you asked for my opinion and I gave it to you. I think Helen’s going to need one more go-round before she can bring herself to call it off.