Straight Man

truck, which is covered with a slate gray tarp.
    “You think your ma will like it?”
    With a tark and antibrakes? How can she not?
    “Let’s eat breakfast,” he suggests, indicating The Circle, which I never would have guessed served food.
    “I ate breakfast about four hours ago, Mr. Purty,” I tell him, though it occurs to me that I also lost it shortly thereafter. Perhaps because of this, I’m hungry again, and in truth Mr. Purty has cheered me up. The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding.
    “I like breakfast,” Mr. Purty says. “Lots of times I eat it for lunch. Sometimes even dinner. Your ma like breakfast, does she?”
    “I’ve never known her to eat it,” I say truthfully.
    He nods morosely. Figures. “This place here’s got the best scrapple in Pennsylvania,” he assures me. “I bet you never even ate scrapple.”
    “Never,” I have to admit.
    “Well, come on then,” he says wearily, as if he doubts I’ll care for the taste, but at least I’ll be glad for the experience.
    It turns out that scrapple is like a lot of food that’s conceptually challenging. That is, better than you might expect. We chew our intestines in silence until Mr. Purty sees me grinning and reads my thought. “I’d never ask your mother to eat scrapple,” he assures me.

CHAPTER
18
    If possible, Julie and Russell’s house looks even more forlorn in the daytime, its incompleteness more pronounced, its windows more darkly vacant, Julie’s little Escort more of a contrast, sitting in the double garage large enough to accommodate a couple of minivans and a riding mower. Since the Escort is sitting there by itself, however, I can rule out one of the scrapple-induced scenarios that occurred to me as I drove over the mountain from The Circle and down into the village of Allegheny Wells. I half-expected to see the long drive full of familiar vehicles, including Lily’s. Inside, they’d all—friends, relatives, loved ones—be waiting for me, ready to intervene on my behalf. My wife has already done one such intervention with her father, and she may have decided it’s time to try one with me. The possibility struck me with such force at the top of the mountain that I pulled off at a scenic overlook to think it through. Up in the cold, rarefied air, it had almost seemed as if Occam’s Razor might be applied. An intervention might have explained, sort of, Julie’s strange telephone call. And Lily has beeninsisting for some time that she’s not the only one worried about me. Maybe they’ve all gotten together, I thought. Maybe the duck episode has convinced my loved ones that I need to be reined in.
    The trouble with scenic overlooks is that you can’t see the details on the ground below, and when I open the car door now and hear last autumn’s brittle leaves stirring in the breeze, the sound might be that of William of Occam having a quiet chuckle at my expense. The point of an intervention, after all, is to modify a specific behavior. In Lily’s father’s case, for instance, his children and grandchildren were trying to prevent him from drinking himself to death, a fairly unambiguous intention he’d all but announced. The charges leveled against him so relentlessly by the gathered clan were all variations on a single theme. Here’s how your drinking has affected me, hurt me, humiliated me, angered me. An intervention on behalf of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., would lack this sort of focus. Teddy Barnes would remind me that I don’t love Lily enough. My mother would express her disappointment that I’ve become a clever man. Billy Quigley would regret that I’m a peckerwood, his daughter Meg that I lack the courage to eat a peach. Finny (the man) and Paul Rourke would accuse me of being unprincipled, Dickie Pope of being too idealistic. In other words, I’m a rather vague pain in the collective ass.
    I enter my daughter’s house through the kitchen, knocking but not waiting for my knock to be acknowledged, the prerogative of a man entering a house that so minutely resembles his own. Once inside I hear Johnny Mathis on the stereo, strong evidence that Julie is the only one home. Russell is a blues man, not the sort of fellow who’d listen willingly to a lyric that included a phrase like “the