Practical Demonkeeping

feel as if he had betrayed her. Nope, he could wait until his show was over and go smoke in his workshop, where the wife would never dare to set foot.
    Suddenly the house felt very empty. It was like a great vacant warehouse where the slightest noise rattles in the rafters. A presence was missing.
    He never saw the wife until she knocked on his workshop door at noon to call him to lunch, but somehow he felt her absence, as if the insulation had been ripped from around him, leaving him raw to the elements. For the first time in a long time Effrom felt afraid. The wife was coming back, but maybe someday she would be gone forever. Someday he would really be alone. He wished for a moment that he would die first, then thinking of the wife alone, knocking on the workshop door from which he would never emerge, made him feel selfish and ashamed.
    He tried to concentrate on the exercise show but found no solace in spandex tights. He rose and turned off the TV. He went to the kitchen and put his coffee in the sink. Outside the window the hummingbirds went about their business, shimmering in the morning sun. A sense of urgency came over him. It became suddenly very important to get to his workshop and finish his latest carving. Time seemed as fleeting and fragile as the little birds. In his younger days he might have met the feeling with a naive denial of his own mortality. Age had given him a different defense, and his thoughts returned to the image of he and the wife going to bed together and never waking, their lives and memories going out all at once. This too, he knew, was a naive fantasy. When the wife got home he was going to give her hell for going away, he knew that for sure.
    Before unlocking his workshop he set the alarm on his watch to go off at lunchtime. If he worked through lunch he might miss his nap. There was no sense in wasting the day just because the wife was out of town.
     
    When the knock came on his workshop door, Effrom thought at first that the wife had come home early to surprise him with lunch. He ground out his cigarette in an empty toolbox that he kept for that purpose. He blew the last lungful of smoke into the exhaust fan he had installed “to take out the sawdust.”
    “Coming. Just a minute,” he said. He revved up one of his high-speed polishing tools for effect. The knocking continued and Effrom realized that it was not coming from the inside door that the wife usually knocked on, but from the one leading out into the front yard. Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses . He climbed down from his stool, checked the pockets of his corduroys for quarters, and found one. If you bought a Watchtower from them, they would go away, but if they caught you without spare change, they would be on you like soul-saving terriers.
    Effrom threw the door open and the young man outside jumped back. He was dressed in a black sweatshirt and jeans—rather casual, Effrom thought, for someone carrying the formal invitation to the end of the world.
    “Are you Effrom Elliot?” he asked.
    “I am.” Effrom said. He held out his quarter. “Thanks for stopping by, but I’m busy, so you can just give me my Watchtower and I’ll read it later.”
    “Mr. Elliot, I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness.”
    “Well, I have all the insurance I can afford, but if you leave me your card, I’ll give it to the wife.”
    “Is your wife still alive, Mr. Elliot?”
    “Of course she’s alive. What did you think? I was going to tape your business card to her tombstone? Son, you’re not cut out to be a salesman. You should get an honest job.”
    “I’m not a salesman, Mr. Elliot. I’m an old friend of your wife’s. I need to talk to her. It’s very important.”
    “She ain’t home.”
    “Your wife’s name is Amanda, right?”
    “That’s right. But don’t you try any of your sneaky tricks. You ain’t no friend of the wife or I’d know you. And we got a vacuum cleaner that’d suck the hide off a bear, so go away.” Effrom started to close the door.
    “No, please, Mr. Elliot. I really need to speak to your wife.”
    “She ain’t home.”
    “When will she be home?”
    “She’s coming home tomorrow. But I’m warning you, son, she’s even tougher than I am on flimflam men. Mean as a snake. You’d be best to just pack up your carpetbag and go look for honest work.”
    “You were a World War One veteran, weren’t you?”
    “I was. What of it?”
    “Thank you, Mr. Elliot. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
    “Don’t