Practical Demonkeeping

true anymore. And she hadn’t been alone long enough to brush up on some new lies. In fact, she felt that she was somehow being unfaithful to Robert just by talking to this guy. But she was a single woman. Finally she wrote her phone number under the map on the napkin and handed it to him.
    “My number’s on the bottom. Why don’t you call me tonight, around five, and we’ll take it from there, okay?”
    Travis folded the napkin and put it in his shirt pocket. “Until tonight,” he said.
    “Oh, spare me!” a gravely voice said. Jenny turned toward the voice, but there was only the empty chair.
    To Travis she said, “Did you hear that?”
    “Hear what?” Travis glared at the empty chair.
    “Nothing,” Jenny said, “I’m starting to go over the edge, I think.”
    “Relax,” Travis said. “I won’t bite you.” He shot a glance at the chair.
    “Your order is up. I’ll be right back.”
    She retrieved the food from the window and delivered it to Travis. While he ate, she stood behind the counter separating coffee filters for the lunch shift, occasionally looking up and smiling at the dark, young man, who paused between bites and smiled back.
    She was fine, just fine. She was a single woman and could do any damned thing she wanted to. She could go out with anyone she wanted to. She was young and attractive and she had just made her first date in ten years—sort of.
    Over all of her affirmations her fears flew up and perched like a murder of crows. It occurred to her that she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to wear. The freedom of single life had suddenly become a burden, a mixed blessing, herpes on the pope’s ring. Maybe she wouldn’t answer the phone when he called.
    Travis finished eating and paid his bill, leaving her far too large a tip.
    “See you tonight,” he said.
    “You bet.” She smiled.
    She watched him walk across the parking lot. He seemed to be talking to someone as he walked. Probably just singing. Guys did that right after they made a date, didn’t they? Maybe he was just a whacko?
    For the hundredth time that morning she resisted the urge to call Robert and tell him to come home.

8
ROBERT
    Robert loaded the last of the laundry baskets full of dishes into the bed of the pickup. The sight of a truckload of clean dishes did not raise his spirits nearly as much as he thought it would. He was still depressed. He was still heartbroken. And he was still hung over.
    For a moment he thought that washing the dishes might have been a mistake. Having created a single bright spot, no matter how small, seemed to make the rest of his life look even more dismal by contrast. Maybe he should have just gone with the downward flow, like the pilot who pushes down the stick to pull out of an uncontrolled spin.
    Secretly, Robert believed that if things got so bad that he couldn’t see his way out, something would come along and not only save him from disaster but improve his life overall. It was a skewed brand of faith that he had developed through years of watching television—where no problem was so great that it could not be surmounted by the last commercial break—and through two events in his own life.
    As a boy in
Ohio
he had taken his first summer job at the local county fair, picking up trash on the midways. The job had been great fun for the first two weeks. He and the other boys on the cleanup crew spent their days wandering the midways using long sticks, with nails extending from one end, to spear paper cups and hot dog wrappers as if they were hunting lions on the Serengeti. They were paid in cash at the end of each day. The next day they spent their pay on games of chance and repeated rides on the Zipper, which was the beginning of Robert’s lifelong habit of exchanging money for dizziness and nausea.
    The day after the fair ended, Robert and the boys were told to report to the livestock area of the fairgrounds. They arrived before dawn, wondering what they would do now that the colorful carny trailers and rides were gone and the midways were as barren as airport runways.
    The man from the county met them outside the big exhibition barns with a dump truck, a pile of pitchforks, and some wheelbarrows. “Clean out those pens, boys. Load the manure on the truck,” he had said. Then he went away, leaving the boys unsupervised.
    Robert had loaded only three forkfuls when he and the boys ran out of the barn gasping for breath, the odor of ammonia burning in their