Ricky Bennick

He hesitated a moment, biting down on his answer before he'd managed to complete even one word of it. Then he shrugged his shoulders, turned out the palms of his hands and said with a chuckle of defeated resolve, "Probably forty."

It was half past eleven at night. Paul was up in the room working, preparing something rake-shaped, which he'll use tomorrow to gather the loose cash that collects about the feet of his great friends. Tony, Karl and I sat in the Library, a tall room agleam in the low bar-room light with dim lamps and a patterned wallpaper of hunter green and silver stripes. Outside, snow was falling. We sat in a corner of the room by a window that over-looked the powder-sugared landscape of snow-covered mountain chalets, luxe boutiques and, in the distance, the lighted bottom of Ajax mountain, the gondola there, the shops. No one passed in the streets. Occasionally, two bars of creeping light would herald the slow crawl of one of the hotel's courtesy S.U.V.s., and shortly thereafter, that too would disappear from the window's frost-latticed frame. Light from a street lamp outside cast over Tony's face the most forgiving of glows. In the orange of that night and that space, it was easy, especially in my meager of the man, to forget he was nearing fifty. The lines bordering his eyes melted away and became smooth skin that appeared taught and new.