He’d seen them only because as a boy he had been Big Ed’s helper on his chimney sweep rounds back before the war. Reminders like that plagued him now, not because they didn’t comfort him in his daydreams, but because they inevitably ended in the present. He shuddered and lit a cigarette. Beside him, Molly looked up from House and Garden to offer a snappish look of disapproval. He had taken up smoking again eighteen months ago, six months after Tray had gone. “No more need to set examples,” he had told her then, lighting up an old-fashioned Camel, unfiltered, the real thing, then inhaling all the way down and exhaling through the nose like in his marine days. He might have said “Mind if I smoke?” if the receptionist had been less disdainful. She was young and pretty and sat discreetly behind an antique desk, ignoring them as she answered the phone with cloying ingratiation. “Banks, Pepper and Forte.” It was Forte they had come to see.
