it was just the ordinary sort of stitch he remembered from the last lap of the mile run in highschool track, or if this was how the onset of a fatal heart-attack felt.
After thirty or forty seconds the pain began to abate, so maybe it had just been a stitch, after all. Still, it went a good piece toward supporting McGovern's thesis, didn't it? Let me tell you something, Ralph-at our age, mental illness is common." At our age it's common as hell." Ralph didn't know if that was true or not, but he did know that the year he had made All-State Track was now more than half a century in the past, and sprinting after Rosalie the way he'd done was stupid and probably dangerous. If his heart had seized up, he supposed he wouldn't have been the first old guy to be punished with a coronary thrombosis for getting excited and forgetting that when eighteen went, it went forever.
The pain was almost gone and he was getting his wind back, but his legs still felt untrustworthy, as if they might unlock at the knees and spill him onto the gravel path without the slightest warning.
Ralph lifted his head, looking for the nearest park bench, and saw something that made him forget stray dogs, shaky legs, even possible heart-attacks. The nearest bench was forty feet farther along the left hand path, at the top of a gentle, sloping hill. Lois Chasse was sitting on that bench in her good blue fall coat. Her gloved hands were folded together in her lap, and she was sobbing as if her heart would break.
Part II THE SECRET CITY CHAPTER 12
"What's wrong, Lois?"
She looked up at him, and the first thought to cross Ralph's mind see at the was actually a memory: a play he had taken Carolyn to Penobscot Theater in Bangor eight or nine years ago. Some of the characters in it had supposedly been dead, and their makeup had consisted of clown-white greasepaint with dark circles around the eyes to give the impression of huge empty sockets.
His second thought was much simpler: Raccoon.
She either saw some of his thoughts on his face or simply realized how she must look, because she turned away, fumbled briefly at the clasp of her purse, then simply raised her hands and used them to shield her face from his view.
"Go away, Ralph, would you?" she asked in a thick, choked voice.
"I don't feel very well today."
Under ordinary circumstances, Ralph would have done as she asked, hurrying away without looking back, feeling nothing but a vague shame at having come across her with her mascara smeared and her defenses down. But these weren't ordinary circumstances, and Ralph decided he wasn't leaving-not yet, anyway. He still retained some of that strange lightness, and still felt that other world, that other Derry, was very close. And there was something else, something perfectly simple and straightforward. He hated to see Lois, whose happy nature he had never even questioned, sitting here by herself and bawling her eyes out.
"What's the matter, Lois?"
"I just don't feel well!" she cried. "Can't you leave me alone?"
Lois buried her face in her gloved hands. Her back shook, the sleeves of her blue coat trembled, and Ralph thought of how Rosalie had looked when the bald doctor had been yelling at her to get her ass across the street: miserable, scared to death.
Ralph sat down next to Lois on the bench, slipped an arm around her, and pulled her to him. She came, but stiffly... as if her body were full of wires.
"Don't you look at me! "she cried in that same wild voice.
"Don't you dare My makeup's a mess! I put it on special for my son and daughter-in-law... they came for breakfast... we were going to spend the morning... 'We'll have a nice time, Ma," Harold said. but the reason they came... you see, the real reason-" Communication broke down in a fresh spate of weeping. Ralph groped in his back pocket, came up with a handkerchief which was wrinkled but clean, and put it in one of Lois's hands. She took it without looking at him.
"Go on," he said, "Scrub up a little if you want, although you don't look bad, Lois; honest you don't."
A little raccoon all, he thought. He began to smile, and then the smile died. He remembered the day in September when he had set off for the Rite Aid to check out the over-the-counter sleep