May 10th, 1981 — long illness. Some part of him that was as addicted to the chapter-plays as Annie had been as a child had decided he could not die until he saw how it all came out.
"I had to get away and think. "Im going to kill you, you lying cocksucker,she said, and staggered toward him. It was the tide, his father had tried to explain, but he had always known it was the piling. Ten minutes later she came in with the syringe, the Betadine, and the electric knife.
He had paused to throw on the first thing in the downstairs hall closet which came to hand — this turned out to be a dark-maroon smoking jacket. An anticlimax, but things could worse.
By the time the sun finally peered through the clouds again, Annies Cherokee was nothing but a vague hump in the driveway. Let me tell you, Paul — Ive stretched thread and strands of hair from my own head all over this house and have found many of them snapped later on.