Michael Malone - Weebly

Well, anyhow, you call me if you change your mind
and get lonely.
And you tell Chinkie Henry there's not a thing you
can do. You got to take care of yourself now, Judith. I
know. You scared me so bad yesterday, I went over
and made Dr. Scaper listen to my heart. He said I
shouldn't have bothered, said I'd live forever. But my
father, and his father before him, both died of their
hearts. 'Course, you don't drink, but still."
If the allotment of heartbeats to glasses of alcohol
was inevitably predetermined with arithmetic precision,
and if A.A. Hayes had kept count of his daily drinks in
his thirty years of daily drinking, he could now calculate
his own demise and scoop Death for his paper. But in
that time Hayes had lost count of much more than
bottles. He drank in order to lose count; not like Walter
Saar, to get in touch with who he was, but to stay out of
touch with who he might have been.
Still, he congratulated himself that, as yet, he had
not taken to antemeridian imbibing. Even this morning,
with all four of his incomprehensible children home on