He had cut it off a box and it was about two feet by eighteen inches and it said, in black marker, in capitals:

MARRY ME. I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.

I handed him his coffee and his hands were shaking so badly that he took it with both and still slopped some over the side.

And I said, “What is this.”

And Walter Strand looked down at the cardboard as though he had not seen it before and said: “The clinic says about four weeks.”

I knelt down on the pavement.