Another Quarter Heard From

Stories, we got stories:

By the end of the 1980s, Deb had divorced Jimmy.  A few years later, they remarried.  But soon she left him a second painful time, and he moved to Los Angeles to get away from the situation.  He freelanced as a paralegal, which kept him afloat.  But he had no health coverage, so when a molar went rotten he yanked it himself with needle-nose pliers.  he was drunk at the time and bungled it, splintering the tooth and leaving chunks in the bloody gum.  Herman happened to call a few days later and heard about the tooth and the fever that had followed.  he demanded that jimmy go to the hospital. At the emergency room, they told him the wound had gone septic.  While waiting for the on-call dentist, he suffered a heart attack.  Jimmy was fifty-six, but by the time he was discharged he had become an old man. In the following months, he aged further, grew forgetful and anxious, suspected that people were walking up behind him.  He checked endlessly that his doors and windows were locked, that the gas was off.  He often called in sick at the law firm where he freelanced, then eventually retired--it was foisted on him.

-Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists  (2010)