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that Sully and Cass exchanged glances.
    Rub’s spirits plunged. He remembered yesterday. “Albany.”
    â€œHow come I was in Albany?”
    â€œFor your disability.”
    â€œAnd what did they tell me?”
    Rub fell silent.
    â€œCome on, Rub. This was only yesterday, and I told you at The Horse as soon as I got back.”
    â€œI know they turned you down, Sully. Hell, I remember.”
    â€œSo what do you do first thing this morning?”
    â€œHow come you can’t just say no?” Rub said, summoning the courage to look up. The conversation had attracted exactly the sort of interest Rub had hoped to avoid over in the far booth, and everybody at the counter seemed interested in watching him squirm. “I wasn’t the one busted up your knee.”
    Sully took out his wallet, handed Rub a ten-dollar bill. “I know you didn’t,” Sully said, gently now. “I just can’t help worrying about you.”
    â€œBootsie told me to buy a turkey is all,” he explained.
    Cass came by then and refilled Sully’s cup, topped Rub’s off. “I don’t think you heard her right. She probably said you
were
a turkey.”
    Rub put the ten into his pocket. Everybody in the place was grinning at him, enjoying how hard it was for him to get ten dollars out of his best friend. He recognized in one or two of the faces the same people who, as eighth-graders, had always enjoyed the fact that he couldn’t produce his homework for Old Lady Peoples. “You’re all in cahoots against me,” he grinned sheepishly, relieved that at last the ordeal was over and he could leave. “It’s less work to go out and earn money than it is to borrow it in here.”
    â€œDid they even look at your knee yesterday?” Cass wanted to know. In the five minutes since Rub had left, the diner had emptied out. Sully was the only customer seated at the counter now, which allowed him to flex his knee. It was hard to tell, but the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. Mornings were the worst, until he got going. He didn’t really blame Rub for not understanding why he could neither sit nor stand for very long, or how if he happened to be seated the knee throbbed until he stood up, giving him only a few moments’ peace before throbbing again until he sat down, back and forth, every few minutes until he loosened up and the knee settled into ambient soreness, like background music, for the rest of theday, sending only the occasional current of scalding pain, a rim shot off the snare drum, down to his foot and up into his groin, time to rock and roll.
    â€œThey don’t look at knees,” Sully told her, finishing his second cup of coffee and waving off another free refill. “They look at reports. X rays. Knees they don’t bother with.”
    In fact, Sully had suggested showing the judge his knee, just approaching the bench, dropping his pants and showing the judge his red, ripe softball of a knee. But Wirf, his one-legged sot of a lawyer, had convinced him this tactic wouldn’t work. Judges, pretty much across the board, Wirf said, took a dim view of guys dropping their pants in the courtroom, regardless of the purpose. “Besides,” Wirf explained, “what the knee looks like is irrelevant. They got stuff that’d make even my prosthesis swell up like a balloon. One little injection and they could make you look like gangrene had set in, then twenty-four hours later the swelling goes down again. Insurance companies aren’t big believers in swelling.”
    â€œHell,” Sully said. “They can keep me overnight. Keep me all week. If the swelling goes down, the drinks are on me.”
    â€œNobody wants you overnight, including the court,” Wirf assured him. “And these guys can all afford to buy their own drinks. Let me handle this. When it’s our turn, don’t say a fuckin’ word.”
    So Sully had