Forever Odd

see snapshots of her with Kelsey, the husband she lost to cancer.
        On her music system, Elvis sings “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”
        I put my hands on her shoulders. She does not react, of course.
        She gave me so much-encouragement, a job at sixteen, the skills of a first-rate fry cook, counsel-and all I gave her in return was my friendship, which doesn’t seem enough.
        I wish I could spook her with a supernatural moment. Make the hands spin on the Elvis wall clock. Send that ceramic Elvis dancing across the kitchen counter.
        Later, when they came to tell her, she would know it had been me, fooling with her, saying good-bye. Then she would know I was all right, and knowing I was all right, she would be all right, too.
        But I don’t have the anger to be a poltergeist. Not even enough to make the face of Elvis appear in the condensation on her kitchen window.
        CHIEF WYATT PORTER and his wife, Karla, are having dinner in their kitchen.
        She is a good cook, and he is a good eater. He claims this is what holds their marriage together.
        She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.
        What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.
        This is how I like to believe Stormy and I would have been if we could have gotten married and lived together as long as the chief and Karla: so perfect for each other that spaghetti and a salad in the kitchen on a rainy night, just the two of them, is more satisfying and more gladdening to the heart than dinner at the finest restaurant in Paris.
        I sit at the table with them, uninvited. I am embarrassed to be eavesdropping on their simple yet enrapturing conversation, but this will be the only time that it ever happens. I will not linger. I will move on.
        After a while, his cell phone rings.
        “I hope that’s Odd,” he says.
        She puts down her fork, wipes her hands on a napkin as she says, “If something’s wrong with Oddie, I want to come.”
        “Hello,” says the chief. “Bill Burton?”
        Bill owns the Blue Moon Cafe.
        The chief frowns. “Yes, Bill. Of course. Odd Thomas? What about him?”
        As if with a presentiment, Karla pushes her chair away from the table and gets to her feet.
        The chief says, “We’ll be right there.”
        Rising from the table as he does, I say, Sir, the dead do talk, after all. But the living don’t listen .

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    SIXTY-ONE
        
        HERE IS THE CENTRAL MYSTERY: HOW I GOT FROM THE portcullis-style gate in the flood tunnel to the kitchen door of the Blue Moon Cafe, a journey of which I have no slightest recollection.
        I do believe that I died. The visits I paid to Ozzie, to Terri, and to the Porters in their kitchen were not figments of a dream.
        Later, when I shared my story with them, my description of what each of them was doing when I visited comports perfectly with their separate recollections of their evenings.
        Bill Burton says I arrived battered and bedraggled at the back door of his restaurant, asking him to call Chief Porter. By then the rain had stopped, and I was so filthy that he set a chair outside for me and fetched a bottle of beer, which in his opinion, I needed.
        I don’t recall that part. The first thing that I remember is being in the chair, drinking Heineken, while Bill examined the wound in my chest.
        “Shallow,” he said. “Hardly more than a scratch. The bleeding’s stopped on its own.”
        “He was dying when he took that swipe at me,” I said. “There wasn’t any force behind it.”
        Maybe that was true. Or maybe it was the explanation that I needed to tell myself.
        Soon a Pico Mundo Police Department cruiser came along the alley, without siren or flashing lights, and parked behind the cafe.
        Chief Porter and Karla got out of the car and came to me.
        “I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish the spaghetti,” I said.
        They exchanged a puzzled look.
        “Oddie,” said Karla, “your ear’s torn up. What’s all the blood on your T-shirt? Wyatt, he needs an ambulance.”
        “I’m all right,” I assured her. “I was dead, but someone didn’t