Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,6
schedule.’ She said she’d pay me double. She was desperate to keep talking about herself and I’m thinking, This is your problem, you consume yourself focusing on every stray bit of your life. I tried reasoning with her, I tried coaxing her, I tried being forceful with her, and then I decided that was wrong, I was playing into her, so I picked up the phone. She got the message. She left.”
“Good, you—”
“Wait, that’s not all. I went out to my car, checked my rearview mirror, and there she was, standing right behind me. If I hadn’t looked, I would have run her over.”
Simon thought about the bizarre situation taking shape and the jeopardy Amy had been in. Driving over someone could never be explained, even if the victim was asking for it. “What did you do?”
“I leaned out to talk to her, but she put her hands over her ears. So I hit the horn. She left.”
He hoisted his glass in the air. “Congratulations. You won.”
“Therapy isn’t a power struggle. I’m not supposed to induce anxiety in my patients. She surprised me, and I reacted badly.”
He leaned across the space between them and gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I’m sure you’ll be ready for her next time.”
The message on the postcard said: “What good are funerals? They offer no solace. If God had all possibilities in His hands at Creation, was Death really the best He could come up with as The End? Faithfully …”
The signature was unreadable. The first letter looked like a ragged F or P. The rest of the name ran together, a row of inverted v’s, like a child’s drawing of waves. Simon turned the card over. GREAT SALT LAKE was scrolled atop a borderless expanse of water. On the side hung a white bag, thumbnail size, marked GENUINE GSL SALT. He rolled the bag between his fingers as he walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. Amy was at the breakfast table hammering the keys of her laptop. It was her day to enter session notes.
He waited for her to look up. “Do we know anyone who died recently in Salt Lake?”
“I don’t think people drown there. You can almost sit on the water.”
“I meant in the city.” Simon held the card in front of her eyes.
“It does make you think,” she said.
“What?”
“Why God created the kind of death we have out of all the possibilities.”
“Such as?”
“He could have had everyone die at the same age, or everyone die painlessly, or have the dead reappear as spirits to reassure us they’re doing okay on the other side—that one would have been especially nice.”
“Maybe God created all those possibilities in other worlds. We just got the one with frequently painful death and unknown afterlife.”
Amy pointed at the card. “Did you notice, this is addressed to Master Simon Howe.”
He looked again. “I haven’t been called Master since my grandmother died and stopped sending me birthday cards.”
Amy reached up and squeezed the bag of salt. “Sending a tourist card from a funeral, that sounds like something one of your cousins would do.”
Simon took the postcard and slid it under the bright yellow fish magnet on the refrigerator, which is where they saved all the odd things they might need later.
He stood in the semicircle of his reporters and wrote Story Ideas on the easel. The black marker squeaked across the paper, leaving a faint grade-school smell. Outside the window Erasmus Hall, Red Paint’s resident harbinger of the apocalypse, shook a fistful of tracts at anyone passing by. “Repent!” filtered through the glass, a scratchy, almost plaintive plea. Erasmus was losing his voice.
A purposeful cough drew Simon’s attention back into the newsroom. “Okay, Barbara,” he said, “anything interesting from the Selectmen this week?”
His editorial assistant stood up and smoothed her black skirt down her legs. “They just faxed over the agenda,” she said. “They’re supposed to debate the town meeting article on the Common improvements, but Jack Harris may show up again and make a fuss about them breaking the open meeting law a couple weeks ago. They had him thrown out last time.”
Simon wrote Possible Chaos at Selectmen’s Meeting. “Sign up Ron to go with you in case Harris shows,” he said. “We don’t want to miss a shot of the Selectmen tossing him out the door this time.” Simon turned toward Joe Armin, a young man with an inch-long pin through his left ear, which he pulled at whenever anyone was looking his