Michael Malone - Weebly

were acts of God, punishments exacted (if not for
personal sins—like self-abuse and skipping Mass—and
Father Crisp had assured the young man they were not
—then for the disobedience of Adam and Eve). What
could he do but accept the facts?
As for Judith, she had married Hawk for the same
reasons that she had dated him. If he had opened the
door of his friend's car a moment earlier or later, she
would not be Mrs. Haig now. For the football star, rich
in collegiate fraternalism, would not have begged her.
He would have forgotten Dingley Falls and Dixwell
High and her. He'd now live, like Arn Henry, in a
Colonial ranch in an executive subdivision with a wife
who remembered her years in the sorority as the
happiest of her life. He would not have gone to night
school while working full-time, he would not still live in
Dingley Falls, elected only to the office of police chief in
a town where only stray dogs and adolescents required
policing. He would not have been outdistanced by
lesser men of his class, not be in debt to rumors of
wealth that were canceled along with the highway on
which he might have driven himself out of insignificance.