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People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary__ mother had accepted him as her son__ lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she__ barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she__ hunted through her son__ drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. __And yet,_ he whispered, __he janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he__ openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers_ What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he__ become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. __he irony,_ he said, __ is that now that I__ this blind man, it__ clearer to me than it__ ever been before. What__ the line? __as blind but now I see__ He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. __ou accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought_said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message_ That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I__ fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That__ what makes me sad. Everyone__ so scared to be happy._ __ know what you mean,_ I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. __o you don__,_ he said. __ou mustn__. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you__e afraid._ ____ not afraid. It__ more like_ I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. ____l give you what I learned from all this,_ he said. __ccept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.