Frankenstein

still gray, and his fingernails were still yellow and cracked, so he didn’t look like a whole new person, but he did look like a new Mr. Lyss.
    “Your skin it isn’t so cracked like an old saddle anymore,” Nummy said, meaning that as a compliment.
    “Your Poor Fred has several kinds of skin lotions and maybe ten flavors of aftershave. He might be part sissy, I don’t know. But some of the lotion did wonders for the razor burn.”
    “So far I don’t have much whiskers,” Nummy said. “I seen this mustache once, I wished I could have one like it, but my lip just stays bare.”
    “Count yourself lucky,” Mr. Lyss said. “Shaving is even more trouble than taking a bath and brushing your teeth. People waste their livesbeing slaves to preposterous grooming standards. Your average fool spends ten minutes brushing his teeth twice a day, five minutes each time, which over a seventy-year life is four thousand two hundred hours brushing his damn teeth. That is one hundred and seventy-seven
days
. Insanity. You know what I can do with one hundred and seventy-seven days, Peaches?”
    “What can you do, sir?”
    “What I’ve been doing all along—
living
!” Mr. Lyss looked past Nummy and for the first time saw the kitchen table. “What craziness have you been up to, boy?”
    On opposite sides of the table were two plates, mugs, napkins, and flatware. Between the plates were a dish heaped with scrambled eggs still steaming, a stack of buttered toast, a stack of frozen waffles made crisp in the toaster, a plate of sliced ham, a plate of sliced cheese, a plate of sliced fresh oranges, a container of chocolate milk, butter, apple butter, grape jelly, strawberry jelly, and ketchup.
    “We didn’t get no breakfast at the jail,” Nummy said.
    “We almost were breakfast. We can’t eat a tenth of this.”
    “Well,” said Nummy, “I didn’t know what stuff you like and what you don’t, so I made you choices. Anyways, you was a long time, so I could think it through double and stay out of trouble.”
    Mr. Lyss sat at the table and began to heap food on his plate, grabbing stuff with his hands that you needed a fork to get. It was pretty clear that he’d never had a Grandmama in his life.
    Hoping Mr. Lyss might not eat so fast—or with so much ugly noise—if they carried on a conversation, Nummy said, “You get to live all those extra days because you don’t brush, but don’t some teeth fall out?”
    “A few,” Mr. Lyss said. “It’s a trade-off. Everything in life is a trade-off. You know how much time your average fool spends in the shower?Two hundred sixty-two days over seventy years! That’s an
obsession
with cleanliness. It’s sick, that’s what it is. You know what I could do with two hundred sixty-two
days?”
    “What could you do, sir?”
    “Anything!”
Mr. Lyss shouted, waving a waffle in the air and slinging the butter from it in every direction.
    “Wow,” Nummy said. “Anything.”
    “You know how much time your average fool spends shaving and sitting in a barber’s chair?”
    “How much, sir?”
    “You don’t want to know. It’s too insane to contemplate.”
    “I do want to know, sir. I really do.”
    “Well, I don’t want to hear myself say it. It’ll just depress me to hear myself say it. Life is short, boy. Don’t waste your life.”
    “I won’t, sir.”
    “You will, though. Everyone does. One way or another. Although being an imbecile, you don’t have much to waste. There’s another way you’re lucky.”
    In the time they finished their breakfast-lunch, Mr. Lyss ate a lot more food than Nummy thought he would. Where it went in that bony old body, Nummy couldn’t guess.
    “What I figure,” Mr. Lyss said, as he sucked noisily at whatever was stuck between his teeth, “we better not wait till dark to leave. We’ve got stuff to get, and we’ll need it before twilight, when maybe things might get even hairier than they have been so far.”
    “What stuff?” Nummy asked.
    “For one thing, guns.”
    “I don’t like guns.”
    “You don’t have to like them. I’ll have the guns, not you. Whatwould be the sense of saving hundreds of days of my life from being wasted in unnecessary grooming—and then hand a shotgun to a nitwit so he can accidentally blow my head off?”
    “I don’t know,” Nummy said. “What would be the sense?”
    Mr. Lyss’s face started to squinch up like it did when he was about to go into a fit, but then the squinching stopped.