The Book of Joe

divine prophecy, that I’ve made all the progress I’m going to at this juncture, and to push it would be a mistake.
    So even though there are a million things I want to say, I decide to wrap things up with one essential question. “Carly.”
    “Yes?” In the window, her reflection turns to face mine.
    “Do you think you’d like to go on a date sometime?”
    Outside there is a clap of thunder so powerful it rattles the window, and inside, Carly looks at me with the eyes of a stranger and says, “Maybe. I don’t know. Ask me again tomorrow.”
    I’m following Carly out of the Duchess when the sound of the swinging doors behind the counter causes me to turn my head. Sheila has just walked through those doors to the kitchen and in the instant before they swing shut, I see a man leaning against a steel counter. His back is to me as they embrace, but just before the doors swing closed, I catch a quick glimpse of his profile, and although the angle is bad, I’m fairly certain the man is my brother, Brad.

Twenty-Nine
    I drive Carly back to her office with no idea at all as to how our lunch has gone, other than not as planned. She says a fast, awkward thank-you, keeping the eye contact to a minimum, her forced politeness ringing like a rebuff in my ears.
    As I drive away from the corporate park, a bruise-colored Lexus sedan falls in behind me. I had noticed the same car earlier, trailing us from the Duchess back to the Minuteman offices. I consider flooring it, fairly confident that the Mercedes is more than up to the task, but the foul weather and the growing pile of moving violations in my glove compartment convince me otherwise. Instead, I turn into the Mobil station on the corner of Stratfield and Pine, pull up under the protective awning, and step out to pump my gas. The Lexus hesitates for a second and then pulls in to the pump next to me. The door swings open, and I hear the nasal vocals and power chords of Green Day blasting over the stereo just before the driver cuts the engine. Sean Tallon climbs out of the car, looking like a movie in his cartoonish ankle-length leather raincoat and black motorcycle boots.
    “Hey, Sean,” I say, eyeballing his outfit. “What’s Shaft wearing?” In situations that make me nervous, I often find it’s best just to run my mouth like an idiot.
    Sean jams his gas cap into the nozzle handle to keep his gas flowing, a brilliantly simple technique that has never occurred to me, and then approaches me, smirking at my little joke. “Goffman,” he says. “You still here?”
    “Afraid so,” I say, tightening my grip anxiously around my own gas nozzle.
    “I figured after your dad kicked that you’d have gotten the hell out of Dodge.”
    “Events have conspired to keep me here a bit longer.”
    Sean nods and leans against my car. In the last seventeen years he’s packed on a layer of fat and disproportionate bulges of muscle that makes him imposingly bearish, and his complexion is cratered and raw, as if he washes his face every morning with steel wool. His once-proud nose has been broken, and its now-bulbous tip is stained with a thin network of winding capillaries. I didn’t notice this physical depreciation in the dim lighting of Halftime - I was too preoccupied with getting the shit kicked out of me - but now, in the harsh light of day, I can see the tire tracks of a rough life are all over him. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes, lights one, and takes a long, hard drag, holding the cigarette dramatically between his thumb and forefinger. I strongly doubt that Sean ever misses an episode of The Sopranos. For a while he says nothing, and we stand beneath the shelter of the station while all around us it continues to pour. I look down at my feet, watching the odd patches of spilled gasoline form little rainbow-colored amoeba shapes on the rain-splattered pavement. My father is dead, I think apropos of nothing in particular, and feel a minor spasm in my belly, some heretofore dormant muscle suddenly clenching.
    “I lost my temper in the bar the other night,” Sean says, smoke bleeding out slowly through his nostrils. “I didn’t know about your father.”
    “I see.”
    “I’m not apologizing,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. “You deserved it. All that shit you wrote.” He jams the cigarette between his lips and fishes through his coat pockets, eventually coming out with two crumpled pages that have been sloppily torn from a copy of Bush Falls.