Straight Man

you’d nodded off there for a minute.”
    I assure him I’ve been hanging on every word.
    “Anyway. If this guy calls back, I guess I’ll take the job. If I can scrape together plane fare.”
    The phone rings inside. “That must be Lily,” I tell him, “calling to offer you the money.”
    “She’s always right there,” he admits. “You lucked out.”
    We listen to the phone ring.
    “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Russell wants to know, as the machine picks up.
    After a few seconds we hear a voice leaving a message. With the closed patio door between us and the machine, I can’t tell who it is.
    Russell gets to his feet. “I guess I’ll let you go back to your life. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention Atlanta to Julie.”
    I promise him I won’t.
    “And thanks for everything,” he says, looking around the deck. “I always feel right at home here for some reason.” He surveys my house with more affection than I’ve ever seen him view his own. “You lied about the wasps though,” he says, pointing at the eaves where a nest would hang if we had truly identical houses.
    We shake hands. “Promise me you won’t leave without seeing Julie,” I tell him, because I suspect that this is his plan.
    “I’ll call her,” he says. “I don’t think she wants to see me.”
    “You should go see her anyway,” I tell him. He needs to see that she’s all right. That she isn’t on the floor anymore. That she won’t be going around for the rest of her life with one hand over her eye. “Lily will be back tomorrow, sometime. You can meet over here if you want.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “Where are you staying?”
    “With a friend.”
    I hand him a slip of paper and a pen. “Leave me a number where I can reach you if I have to.”
    He’s reluctant, but he does as he’s told.
    “Aren’t you going to tell me how you managed to fall in the sewer earlier?”
    I consult the stars for dramatic effect. “I fell asleep and wet my pants. Then I got embarrassed and hid in the ceiling above my office.”
    He shrugs. “You don’t want to tell me, just say so, Hank.”
    “Maybe some other time,” I suggest. Later, I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with something more plausible than the truth. Sure, I’m out of practice, but
The New York Times
once said of young William Henry Devereaux, Jr., son of the famous literary critic, that his stories had “taken firm root in the garden of realistic fictions.”
    “My feelings are kind of hurt,” Russell admits. “I mean, I told you everything.”
    “Not everything, Russell,” I say. “We never tell everything.”
    He looks surprised to learn that I know this. Like maybe it’s his secret. What does he think a man like me
does
for a living?

CHAPTER
30
    Russell has been gone maybe twenty minutes when a car pulls in at the foot of our road. I track its headlights through the trees as it snakes up the incline past my neighbors’ houses. When it passes the driveway of the last of these, it can mean only one thing. I am to have a visitor.
    I momentarily hope it’s Lily, returning early to surprise me, but I know it isn’t. You’re married to a woman as long as I’ve been married to Lily, you get to know not only the sound of her vehicle but the sound that vehicle makes with her at the wheel. I’ve watched my wife come up this hill hundreds of times, and I know this is not she. It’s not Lily’s car, not her speed, not her headlight pattern. This is someone who’s been here before, but not for a while, at least not at night, who remembers how sharp the turns in the road are without remembering exactly where they are, who has to go slow enough to really watch. I fear it’s Teddy Barnes come to celebrate my victory, to ask if it’s true, what Gracie said about my being in the ceiling, to plan further strategy, to find out if Lily’s returned and bring her up to date onher husband’s lunacy. Or, worse, he may want to talk about his wife and Orshee.
    Telling Occam to stay, a command he occasionally obeys, I get up and turn on the outside lights, then go over to the railing in time to see Tony Coniglia, one of the very few people in the world whose companionship I might actually enjoy tonight, get out of his car. “
You
are not answering your phone,” he observes. “And you’re not returning calls, as that lying machine of yours promises.”
    He’s carrying a bottle. Occam woofs down at him.
    “I myself have had a dozen calls