"Daisy Duke, as I live and breathe," I say, and she's got the same mix of sweat and fun-smell coming off her hair as when she sat with me while I shouted and raved about my knee for a week after coming to Tony the Tiger's. She puts me down in her chair as gently as an air-traffic controller. She gives my knee a look of professional displeasure, as though it were swollen and ugly because it wanted to piss her off. "Lookin' down and out there, Maxes. Been to a doctor yet?" Tony the Tiger, sitting on the stove, head ducked under the exhaust hood, stuffs his face with a caramel corn and snorts. "The boy won't go. I tell him to go, but he won't go. What to do?" I feel like I should be pissed at him for nagging me, but I can't work it up. Dad's gone, taken away with all the other Process-heads on the mothaship, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The riots started immediately. Process HQ at Yonge and Bloor was magnificently torched, followed by the worldwide franchises. Presumably, we'd been Judged, and found wanting. Only a matter of time, now. So I can't get pissed at Tony for playing fatherly. I kind of even like it. And besides, now that hospitals are turf, I'm as likely to get kakked as cured, especially when they find out that dear ole Dad was the bull-goose Process-head. Thanks, Pop. "That right? Won't go take your medicine, Maxes?" She can do this eye-twinkle thing, turn it off and on at will, and when she does, it's like there's nothing average about her at all. "I'm too pretty to make it in there." Daisy turns to Tony and they do this leaders-of-the-commune meaningful-glance thing that makes me apeshit. "Maybe we could get a doc to come here?" Daisy says, at last. "And perform surgery in the kitchen?" I say back. All the while, my knee is throbbing and poking out from under my robe. Daisy and Tony hang head and I feel bad. These two, if they can't help, they feel useless. "So, how you been?" I ask Daisy, who has been AWOL for three weeks, looking for her folks in Kitchen-Waterloo, filled up with the holiday spirit. "Baby, it's cold outside. Took highway 2 most of the way -- the 407 was drive-by city. The heater on the Beetle quit about ten minutes out of town, so I was driving with a toque and mittens and all my sweaters. But it was nice to see the folks, you know? Not fun, but nice." Nice. I hope they stuck a pole up Dad's ass and put him on top of the Xmas tree. "It's good to be home. Not enough fun in Kitchener. I am positively fun-hungry." She doesn't look it, she looks wiped up and wrung out, but hell, I'm pretty fun hungry, too. "So what's on the Yuletide agenda, Tony?" I ask. "Thought we'd burn down the neighbours', have a cheery fire." Which is fine by me -- the neighbours split two weeks before. Morons from Scarborough, thought that down in Florida people would be warm and friendly. Hey, if they can't be bothered to watch the tacticals fighting in the tunnels under Disney World, it's none of my shit.