If you have ever remodeled a kitchen, you know that a time comes when you will do anything just to have it over. Despite all your planning and preparation, cabinets or tile or painters don’t show up, water geysers out of pipes, and truckers go on strike three states away delaying critical shipments for weeks. Two months past our scheduled completion date, Joyce and I were ready to quit. Like an open heart operation that has lasted six months, the project was draining the life out of the patient without any sign of ever being finished. We had not had a hot meal at home since late fall. That is why Joyce reacted so strongly when Butch Siegel, our contractor, stopped by to say the recycled glass countertop would take another six weeks.

“That countertop was supposed to be here a month ago,” she screamed at him. “We’re not paying you until it’s installed.”

Siegel, who had “Danang 1968” tattooed on his left forearm and “Mother” over a heart on his bicep, looked at me. Hilary, our decorator, had recommended him, “Because everybody uses him.” Like most contractors, however, he practically disappeared as soon as the contract was signed.

Whenever Joyce complained about the lack of progress, he would wink and say, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

Despite the implied familiarity, which probably worked well enough with Hillary, he never reciprocated if we let him slide past a deadline or accepted his excuses for not having ordered the necessary supplies. Instead of doing anything extra for us, Butch kept demanding more for himself, like an alcoholic enabled by sympathetic family.

“The manufacturer doesn’t work well under pressure,” he said, after his usual evasions failed.

As someone who has often been the subject of Joyce’s wrath, I almost felt sorry for him. Now I wish I had done something more than just shrug.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, retreating to his truck.

Joyce had seen recycled glass countertops in a green living catalogue and was instantly hooked. Brilliant on the surface, they had a depth that implied that they went on forever, like the universe itself. Recycled glass countertops were as much the impetus for our remodeling project as my recent inheritance from Mother.

Joyce had argued for weeks with Hillary over that countertop. Like most decorators, Hillary’s taste was the exact opposite of her client’s. Hillary preferred Corian or granite; Joyce demanded recycled glass. At Hillary’s $250 an hour consulting fee, it was very expensive to argue with her. Joyce “finally put my foot down” as she huffed to her breathless friends and “simply insisted” on recycled glass.

So the argument switched to selecting just the right color. More weeks followed designing the entire kitchen around it. When it was finally installed, the island countertop would attract the envy and admiration of Joyce’s friends much as the icons in Santa Sophia had attracted generations of pilgrims. Telling her it would take another six weeks was like telling a city that had built a cathedral to enshrine the bones of its patron saint to wait another generation until they could be recovered from the Saracens.

A day after Joyce screamed at Butch Siegel, someone banged on the door.

“I’ll get it,” Joyce called.

I heard her talking to men with accents so heavy I could not understand them. I went to the door.

“It’s here,” she said breathlessly.

A minute later, two big men in knee length black leather coats crowded past us carrying a huge crate on its side. They smelled so bad I had to step onto the porch for air.

“I’m so excited I can’t stand it,” Joyce said, following them to the kitchen.

They set the crate on its side and started ripping it apart with their bare hands. With each rip, strips of the dull underside of the countertop appeared. It was nearly four feet long on each side and four inches thick, with an inch-wide rim on the underside to hold it in place. Grunting, they lifted the countertop out of the frame and set it onto the island. It fit perfectly. One of the men wiped the splinters off the surface with his coat sleeve and stepped back.

“Oh!” Joyce exclaimed.

I had to pick my way through pieces of the crate to see it.

“My God,” I whispered.

Like the diadem of an eastern emperor, it dazzled and terrified. Deep blue like the cosmos at creation, the surface was flecked with crystals so brilliant that they would entice angels from their prayers. When Joyce turned on the triangle of halogen lights hanging above it, the crystals seemed to swirl into coils and unwind again like intersecting galaxies. I hardly dared touch it. That countertop was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“You pay now,” one of the men said.

“Of course,” I said.

He handed me an invoice that said “Vlascev Glass,” an address near the railroad marshalling yards, a phone number, and writing that looked like Cyrillic script. All I could make out was “$8,500,” $3,000 more than we had agreed to pay.

“The bill isn’t right,” I said.

“You pay,” he repeated.

Something in his tone made my stomach freeze.

“Pay him,’ Joyce said. “It’s perfect.”

“I’ll get my checkbook,” I said.

“No. Cash.”

“I don’t keep $8,500 around the house.”

“Just do it, Walter,” Joyce said.

So I got my checkbook and rode between the two men to my bank, where I withdrew $8,500 in cash.

“Is something the matter?” the teller asked as I handed the money to my companions.

“They’re working with our contractor,” I explained.

The ride home was difficult because both of them smoked cigars, and they kept the windows closed. If they had not dropped me off at the head of the street, I don’t think I would have survived. Joyce had all the kitchen windows opened to air out the house when I arrived.

“Hillary’s on the way over,” she said.

When Hillary arrived, glorious in a pink muumuu and oversize white jewelry, she was stunned into temporary silence by the glistening glass. Decorators, however, don’t like to be shown up. Recovering herself, she placed one hand on the countertop and walked slowly around it, searching for flaws.

“Well, look at this,” she said in that tone of voice decorators use when the job is going to cost another $10,000.
She had found a rough spot on the side toward the stove and was leaning over to look at it. With a look of triumph, she straightened up and stepped back. Joyce peered at the glass.

“Oh!” she exclaimed.

I had never seen her so surprised.

“Walter, look,” she said.

Whenever something happens, I have to fix it. So I walked around the countertop and bent over. There was a rough spot, as if the workmen had forgotten to polish it.

“This should be easy to fix,” I said, relieved.

“Walter, look!” she repeated in a tone I knew all too well.

I bent over and squinted at the glass. It was like an opening into the great wall of galaxies that stretched eons of light years across a far corner of the universe. In the center was a gray smear, rising like the gas clouds of the Horsehead Nebula to darken the stars of Orion. No, it wasn’t the Horsehead Nebula. It was a human arm with “Danang 1968” tattooed on the forearm and “Mother” over a heart on the bicep.

“That’s what happens when you use the wrong people,” Hillary said triumphantly.

Joyce was abashed. As soon as Hillary was outside, she slammed the door and turned on me.

“This is unacceptable, Walter,” she said, as if everything were my fault. “Call the contractor.”

So I called Siegel and left a message on his cell. Nothing happened. I called his cell again the next day. I called his office. Nobody knew where he was. When you get to a certain stage of a project, the contractor always thinks another client is more important.

“Then call the glass company,” Joyce said.

No one answered the phone. They didn’t have a recorder for a voice mail.

“Just give me the bill,” Joyce snapped. “I’m going there myself.”

“But, dear,” I began.

“If only there were something I could trust you with, Walter.”

So I don’t blame myself for anything that happened. She returned late in the afternoon with a terrible headache and surgical tape wrapped around her left hand from the middle to the little finger. She asked me for some of the painkillers for my back and went to bed.

“Did you hurt your hand?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said in the same voice as when she broke an acrylic nail or discovered a run in her hose after she had taken them off.

When Joyce is in a mood like that, it’s best not to push her. So for dinner I opened a can of lentil soup and made myself a martini, much as I do on other nights when she is indisposed. I had just sat down at the table and was looking for something in the newspaper I hadn’t read yet, when there was a terrific banging on the door. I turned on the light and looked out the side window. The two men in leather coats were back, carrying something wrapped in a tarpaulin. Apparently, things had gone better for Joyce that afternoon than she had thought.

I opened the door. Again they shoved by me and carried the countertop into the kitchen. Grunting, they unwrapped it and sat it back onto the island. Without speaking, they picked up the tarp and walked out. As soon as I heard their truck start, I closed and locked the door and turned on the halogen lights over the island.

This time the blue was deeper, like the blue-black miles beneath the sea. Yellow lights flickered toward the surface, like fish with chemical lamps swaying before their jaws attracted by the spotlight on a submarine. I was nearly afraid to touch it. When I did, it was as smooth and cool as a solidified nightmare. Gently, I ran my fingers around the edge. On three sides it was perfect. Then, just as I was about to turn the corner away from the stove, I felt something rough, like a tiny blemish on a beautiful woman’s face that her makeup could not cover. Trembling, I bent over and peered into the island.

Who except God has ever seen into a sea like that? Long trails of seaweed drifting in the depths, fish no marine biologist has ever imagined, even a giant squid or a crushed submarine lying twisted in the depths. No, it was not a submarine. Something on it was glowing, as if all the light and energy in the sea were concentrated in it. Yes, I recognized it now. It was a diamond, Mother’s diamond, that I had reset for Joyce for our thirty-fifth anniversary. And the thing on which it rested was her ring finger.

Of course I couldn’t waken Joyce with something as disturbing as this, so I spent a very bad night. The second martini did not help. Both of us were tossing and muttering to ourselves, until I thought I would never get any sleep. So I waited a few minutes after she got back into bed after her 3 AM dose of Demerol and took some myself.

Ah, to slip into that silent sea again, where marvelous creatures bumped against the windowpane of my submarine, and all my visions were of blinking yellow lights like fireflies hovering around backyard bushes on a summer evening. I did not awaken until Joyce came into the bedroom at 10 AM complaining about how hard it was to get an appointment with our doctor even if something might be serious.

“They told me to come in and wait until he has an opening,” she said.

I suspected that Dr. Mexta’s staff was exaggerating to create the impression of a thriving practice. When they still let me practice law, I had used him as an expert witness before a series of spectacular malpractice verdicts drove him from orthopedic surgery to geriatrics. We had something else in common: Hillary, our decorator. She had imposed her signature look on his new office in a strip mall by installing granite countertops at the nurse’s station and on the sinks in the examining rooms. In today’s competitive medical environment, it can be more important to have the right decorator than to have the right credentials.

“Did you lose your ring, dear?” I asked, daring to broach a touchy subject.

Most women don’t like to be questioned about the whereabouts of their wedding ring.

She looked at the bandage on her left hand.

“Maybe I just put it down somewhere.”

She had never been that fond of Mother. Perhaps she would enjoy a morning catching up on People magazine waiting for the doctor to arrive.

That ring, however, was a family heirloom, and I wasn’t going to let her just throw it away. After having some cottage cheese and toast for lunch, I decided to visit Vlascev Glass. Trips like that always make me wish I had learned to use the GPS on my new car. When you reach a certain age, however, there is only so much technology you can absorb. It had taken me two weeks and several near misses in the parking lot outside the wine store to learn how to turn on the windshield wipers.

Somehow I found my way to the railroad marshalling yards, but I had forgotten how cut up the streets down there were. I did not even know on which side of the tracks Vlascev Glass was. So I spent an hour driving through neighborhoods with signs for Mexican sodas in the windows, narrowly surviving an encounter with a diesel engine that appeared suddenly at a crossing where I had stopped to become reoriented. Exasperated, I was pulling into a gravel parking lot to turn around when I saw the deliverymen’s truck. Behind it was a cinderblock building, filthy with age, with no windows and a sign over the door, “Vlascev Glass.” At one side of the building were several dumpsters with broken glass scattered around them.

I knocked on the door. Nothing happened

Next time we remodel, I promised myself, we will be more careful about our subcontractors.

The bottom of the door was scraped and dented, as if someone in iron tipped shoes had tried to kick it in. Then I remembered how the deliverymen had pounded on our door.

I stepped back and kicked the door several times. Again nothing happened. Turning around, I saw a brown-skinned child with straight black hair watching from across the parking lot with his fingers in his ears, a gesture I had not seen since Vietnam.

Damn it, I thought, kicking the door again. Enough is enough.

Suddenly it swung open. One of the deliverymen was standing there, looking as if he had been suddenly aroused from a deep sleep. The man just looked at me. Lights flashed in the shadows behind him, as if someone were welding signposts to hell.

“We have to talk about the ring,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“It was Mother’s, you know.”

Again no answer.

“Look, I’ll take the countertop no questions asked, but I have to have that ring.”

“You talk to Tudi,” he said.

“Who?”

He reached out, grabbed me by the collar, dragged me inside, and slammed the door. Shoving me ahead of him, he frog-walked me down a hall toward a large room where flames were rippling from the grates of huge ovens. The whole place smelled of sweat, cigars, and burnt electricity. Ahead of us men were shouting and screaming at each other in Spanish and some guttural language, like devils from different cultures condemned to stoke the fires of hell together. Just before we reached the furnace room, he twisted my shoulder, turning me through a doorframe into an office. He kicked the door shut behind us.

“You sit down,” he said, shoving a metal chair against the backs of my knees.

Something big and gray loomed before me.

Then the man said something in a foreign language that had a whining quality to it, and the gray shadow answered. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw a man so fat his stomach spilled out of his black leather coat onto a gray metal desk. Behind and to his left was the other deliveryman. The fat man was raising and lowering the blade on a cigar cutter with his huge left hand.

“Mr. Vlascev, he talk to you now,” the man behind me said.

“Who?” I said, squinting.

“Tudomir Vlascev,” the fat man said, drawing out the words as if he were speaking to a slow child. “What the hell you want?”

“Tudomir?” was all I could think to say.

“Call me Tudi. Now what the hell you want?

“I’m not complaining about the quality of the work, Tudi, but I need that ring back.”

“It cost a lot?”

He patted his coat for something.

“Let’s just say it means a lot to me.”

Vlascev removed a huge cigar from some inner pocket and placed the tip in the cigar cutter. Looking up, he winked at me. Then he pounded the blade down with a fist so large the cutter disappeared.

“You like cigars?”

“Joyce won’t let me have cigars anymore,” I said.

Slowly, without breaking his stare, Vlascev placed the cigar half way into the cutter and pushed down the guillotine again.

“Here,” he said, holding one half out to me.

Something told me not to get up. The man behind me stepped forward, took the cigar and stuck it in my mouth, while Tudi struck a match. After he had lit his cigar, he handed the match to the man behind him. He stepped forward and lit my cigar. I could see the match was burning his fingers.

“Now, Mister Complainer, what we do with you?” Vlascev said, raising and closing the cigar cutter blade again.

“I always enjoy a drink with my cigar,” I said.

For a second, silence. Then Tudi laughed and said something in Russian. The other men chuckled, and the one beside him produced a bottle and glasses from somewhere behind Tudi and set them on his desk.

“Tudi say you got balls,” he said, grinning at me. “For now.”

I had forgotten how well a good cigar and vodka went together. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the Demerol still circulating in my blood, but I felt like I was 25 again, before I ever met Joyce, when tobacco and alcohol produced some of my best ideas. Perhaps I should write up a case note for Dr. Mexta to submit to The New England Journal of Medicine about how the right combination of stimulants and circumstances can reverse the aging process. It might help to establish him in his new specialty.

“Well, smart guy?” Tudi said, slapping the cigar cutter blade down again. “What you got for me?”

“You’re making a terrible mistake with the way you dispose of body parts,” I said, recalling Joyce’s appointment with our doctor. “I have some contacts in the medical profession who would pay for a steady supply.”

Tudi looked at the man beside me, grinned, and said something incomprehensible. Both men laughed.

“No shit?”

“Give me Joyce’s finger back, and we’ll see what Dr. Mexta can do.”

Tudi pointed his cigar at me like the muzzle of a revolver.

“I give you the finger and the ring, Mr. Complainer. It work, we partners. It not work . . .” He slammed the cigar cutter to finish the thought.

That is how I became an entrepreneur at the age of 67.

I had not realized what a good preservative recycled glass was until Dmitri and Vladi, as I discovered their names to be, removed Joyce’s ring finger from the countertop. Unfortunately, they had to return the countertop to the shop to be recrafted, because they had chiseled from the top down to retrieve the finger. I knew Joyce would be terribly disappointed when she got home to find that the remodeling was still not complete.

I wish I could remember her cell phone number, because if I had called instead of driven to Dr. Mexta’s office, he would not have been so defensive about the reattachment procedure.

“I just sewed the stump up,” he exclaimed when I presented him with the missing digit. “I would have waited if I knew you had the finger.”

Joyce had been able to see him after only a two hour wait, testimony to the difficulty physicians have maintaining a profitable patient load when then they have to switch specialties. I was confident that I had chosen my man well.

“I’ll have to charge you another co pay,” he continued, holding up the finger to the light. “Didn’t you want the ring?”

The finger was just swollen enough that I couldn’t remove it with soap and water.

“It was Mother’s,” I said, suddenly overcome.

Luckily for us, Joyce was so woozy from her first anesthetic of the day that she did not resist the second. I spent a pleasant enough hour in his waiting room leafing through a copy of the latest issue of Connoisseur, silent testimony to the class of patients he hoped to attract. Several elderly couples had joined me by the time Dr. Mexta’s nurse Gloria called me back to see the doctor’s handiwork.

“Took me a while to get the circulation going again, but we did it,” Dr. Mexta said, winking at his nurse.

Joyce’s ring finger was so swollen I could not make out the nail.

“In her finger?”

“No. She arrested during the procedure.”

“Arrested?” I repeated.

I knew Joyce had a problem with traffic tickets, but why would they track her to a doctor’s office to serve a warrant?

“Her heart stopped,” Dr. Mexta explained. “Gloria was able to get her back by massaging her chest.”

Gloria blushed. Late thirties, blond, conveniently divorced with children old enough to be left alone in the evening, she had that almost busting out of the uniform look that past middle aged surgeons prefer in their operating staff. I noticed that Joyce’s blouse was disheveled.

“She’s going to be a little tender for the next few days,” Gloria said. “I may have cracked some ribs.”

“We wouldn’t have to fool with stuff like this if I had my hospital privileges back,” Dr. Mexta said.

Just then Joyce began to stir.

“Careful, dear,” Gloria said.

The doctor had performed the procedure on an examining table, and the nurse was concerned that she might roll off onto the floor. At a spot where the sheet had bunched up, I saw that the table top was granite.

“Two Ibuprofens every four hours and wrap it in ice until the swelling’s down,” Dr. Mexta continued, preparing his exit like any good surgeon before his patient fully regained consciousness. “And tell her to watch those ribs. Call me when she’s better.”

I was still looking at her ring finger. The nail had disappeared.

“What happened to the nail?” I asked, blocking the door.

The doctor was surprised by the question.

“The nail? Sometimes they fall off. I don’t know. Let me see.”

He lifted her hand and turned it over.

“Oh my,” he said.

The nail was on the bottom surface, not the top.

Just then Joyce awoke, frightening enough in normal circumstances but particularly menacing now. She raised her hand slowly, looked at her purple finger, and tried to close it. Instead of joining the other digits in a fist, it curled upward in a little circle.

“What have you done to me?” she screamed, prompting Gloria to refill a large syringe.

“Anything you can do about this, Doctor?” I pleaded, knowing who would be blamed when we got home.

“Sorry, Walter,” he said, looking helplessly at his nurse. “With her heart, we can’t go to that well too often.”

“Did you want this?” Gloria said, handing me Mother’s ring to distract me.

It’s surprising what a good nurse can do with a little lotion.

Without Demerol, I don’t know how today’s physicians could manage their patients. When we finally left Dr. Mexta’s office, he had a solid three-hour backlog in his waiting room, Joyce had her finger again, and I had Mother’s ring along with a solid resolve to be more careful to whom I entrusted it in the future.

Vladi and Dmitri met us in the kitchen. Apparently home security systems are not as effective as the television marketers tell us. Joyce was still so light headed that she really did not appreciate our new countertop, deep oranges, reds, and blues that looked like sunset over the ocean from one angle, and the brilliant Pacific sunrise on a forgotten atoll when the halogen lights were on. Vladi and Dmitri were so excited by Dr. Mexta’s work product that they took pictures of it with their cells for Tudi. He reacted unexpectedly.

I was showing them to the door, when Vladi got a text message. He grabbed me by the collar and held me up against the wall.

“Tudi say how the hell I make any money on this?” he said.

“I’m talking to Butch Siegel tomorrow. See if you and Dmitri can find his arm. It should be good for an easy $10,000.”

He let me down so fast my knees almost buckled.

“Maybe that not so easy,” he said.

“Then just find one that fits.”

“What side?”

I wasn’t sure anymore, and Joyce had already taken her Ibuprofens and gone to bed.

“I think it was a right.”

The next few days were difficult enough for Joyce and me and exhausting for her mother, who moved back in with us to nurse her little girl back to health with chicken soup laced with Demerol. Shortly after I had carried her suitcase upstairs, Vladi and Dmitri arrived with something that looked like a country ham wrapped with ice in wax paper.

“I’m going to see our contractor,” I called to Mother, letting Tudi’s two deliverymen drive me to Butch Siegel’s office.

I noticed there was a granite countertop at the receptionist’s station and copies of Connoisseur scattered amongst back issues of People on a coffee table, demonstrating again the breadth of Hillary’s practice. The receptionist was surprised when instead of asking for Butch, I just followed Vladi and Dmitri into his office. Like many contractors, he did not enjoy surprise visits from customers.

“It’s not about the countertop,” I began to put him at his ease. “We’re here to help you do something about that arm.”

Obviously sensitive about his missing limb, Butch was sitting half turned away from us in a huge swivel desk chair so we could only see his right arm.

“For $10,000, we can have everything taken care of,” I continued.

“$25,000,” Vladi corrected me.

“Good as new,” I reassured him.

Butch opened his desk drawer and took out his checkbook.

“Cash,” Vladi said.

So we drove together to Butch’s bank for the money, then on to Dr.Mexta’s for the procedure. Vladi and Dmitri dropped us off at the door.

“Doctor is not doing surgery today,” Gloria said from behind her granite countertop.

I set my wax paper bundle on the countertop. The ice had melted, and the shape was just visible.

“Is that leaking?” she asked.

“Just tell the doctor that I have the case that will restore his reputation and his hospital privileges.”

Gloria didn’t need to hear more.

“Let me see your insurance,” she said, taking Siegel’s insurance card. “This has a $250 co-pay for surgery. Plus you’re out of network. That’s another $2,500. Still want to do this?”

Butch handed her his credit card.

In a few minutes she had hustled several octogenarians out of the back to free up an operating theater. Crowded into the tiny examining room, the three of us watched while Dr. Mexta held up the arm to the overhead light. It was so discolored I could not see the tattoos.

“You sure this is yours?” the doctor said, glancing at his new patient.

“Just get it over with, Doc,” Siegel said.

“OK with me, Butch. I just don’t want any complaints when this is over.”

As Gloria showed me back to the waiting room, I nearly slipped on some pinkish water on the floor. Like any good office nurse, she quickly disappeared, so the angry patients in the waiting room would not have anywhere to focus their anger. Without enough copies of Connoisseur to go around, I settled myself in for an uncomfortable wait. After nearly two hours with only People magazine and the early afternoon game shows to distract me, I was coming to appreciate how important it is to be on good terms with your physician.

“Walter?” Gloria finally called from the doorway. “You can come back now.”

Some day I will tell Dr. Mexta that not everyone over the age of 60 enjoys being called by their first name.

Butch Siegel was already sitting up on the side of the examining table, stretching his newly reattached arm across his back. Perhaps the tendons had been loosened during the procedure, or the anesthetic had not yet worn off, but he had a remarkable range of motion. He could reach all the way up his back and pinch his neck. Seeing me, he fixed me with the same look of horror, frustration and rage that his clients had so often turned on him.

“It’s the wrong arm,” he said.

“Looks fine to me, Butch,” I said, trying to be cheerful.

“The one I lost was a left, damn it. This one’s a right.”

I looked at Dr. Mexta, who was standing with his back to his patient washing his hands in the basin in the granite counter top.

“You can only work with what you have to work with,” he said.

“We tattooed it just like the other one so no one will notice,” Gloria said hopefully.

“At no extra charge,” Dr. Mexta added.

Like many brilliant people, he was so absorbed with the big picture that he was helpless with details. At least we wouldn’t have to listen to Siegel say, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” anymore.

Dr. Mexta recovered his hospital privileges and membership in The American Academy of Limb and Organ Replacement Surgeons on the strength of close up photos Gloria took on her cell of Joyce’s finger and Siegel’s new arm. Apparently Dr. Mexta’s colleagues were big picture people as well. With a secure hospital base, he was able to offer organ and limb replacement surgery to a wider public. The only limiting factor was a high rate of rejections, because Tudi’s people did not always take the time to find compatible donors. 

By the end of the year, our kitchen was finally finished, Dr. Mexta was current in his alimony, Gloria had a new Lexus IS, badge of honor for practice administrators, and Vladi and Dmitri were dropping by with enough cash that I had to take Joyce and Mother out for dinner more often than I would have liked. It’s not that they are that difficult to entertain, at least after the first glass of sherry. It’s the way Joyce closes her left hand so her ring finger curls up to show off the new wedding ring I had to buy her after she had been so careless with Mother’s.

Even Hillary became a convert to recycled glass. At least she did not argue when Vladi and Dmitri dropped by her showroom one morning to offer her a tour of Vlascev Glass. After a call to Butch Siegel she demurred, but was more than happy to rep the line. When we finally had a party to celebrate our new kitchen, she deigned to attend and compliment Joyce on her taste in countertops.

The only threat to our new lives were the debt reduction measures in Congress, where Medicare was in everyone’s gun sights. If the Republicans succeeded in reducing it to vouchers for doctors like coupons for canned goods and deodorant, Dr. Mexta’s procedures would be priced out of the market. Sometimes when I dropped by Tudi’s shop for a cigar and a few shots, he would talk like a liberal Democrat about the inviolability of Medicare.

“Why don’t you just send Vladi and Dmitri to Washington to get them off our backs?” I suggested.

And he did.