Taft

You can tell them what they should do until you don’t have any breath left, but the thing that stops them, the thing that scares them bad enough to stop, is something they have to come to by themselves.

Doctors are for sick people and Taft isn’t sick. Once they start looking it opens up a whole can of worms. They find things wrong, one thing and then another until you’re dead. That’s the way it went with his father. He went in to see about a simple cough and came back with cancer. The more those doctors looked, the more they found. They said his father was shot through with it. They said they needed to explore. The exploring took them deeper down the mine shaft, into veins stuffed with cancer. They said he wouldn’t live six months, and so he didn’t. Taft believes people are like wells, clear water with some sediment on the bottom. As long as you don’t disturb them, they’re going to be fine.

Marion and I keep no secret store of love for each other, I will promise you that. Everything that was kind between us we killed with years of dedication and hard work. When I hang up the phone with her now it’s hard to imagine that one tender word has ever passed between us.

I thought it was just for a while, like you always think something bad is for just a while.

Your dad been gone long?" "Last June," he said. "Early." "That's no time." "It changes. Sometimes he's been dead for years and other times it was yesterday or this morning or ten minutes ago. It just depends on how things are going. There's no counting on it." Carl put his finger in his drink and spun it around. He was trying to make the ice melt faster. "Sometimes I think he's going to walk in that door.

had been looking. The water on the glass was steady