the means.
She puts a sticker under the art deco lamp in the hall and nearly trips on the dog bowl that Abby has left there in hopes Dollbaby will be home any day now. Impossible, of course, and now on top of everything else, she has to deal with that. She will make up something, tell all about the phone call she got—so so sad—Dollbaby wandering way out in the county, hit by a car. If she had known the child was going to be this torn up and spend days searching, she would have just said right up front something like Dollbaby got hit by a car. But then it would have potentially been her fault instead of the way she planned it, which was to say Dollbaby got out of the fence Ben built for her. How’s that for a disappearing chamber? How’s that for some fucking magic?
Notes about: Willis Morgan Hall
Born: March 13, 1921 Died: March 14, 2007, 5:20 p.m.
Holderness, New Hampshire
Willis Hall died of throat cancer in the old farmhouse where he had spent his whole life, where every room smelled of the sweet cherry pipe tobacco he smoked for years along with cigars and, ten years prior, cigarettes. He was known in his handsome early years as the boy who would imitate the Philip Morris ads or say “Hey, good looking, got a cigarette?” and had met two of his three wives with that line. All three of his ex-wives were with him at the end. He joked that he and the king Yul Brynner played had a lot in common. They both should have quit smoking sooner and they both had lots of wives gathered at the deathbed. The only time he was ever away from home was when he was in the service. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, which he liked to say was indeed just as bad as it sounded. Bulge is not a nice word, he said. Used most often for what is unattractive—eyes and stomachs—or what is pornographic, you know? Every year some schoolchildren would pop up with questions for a history project and he gave them just enough for a story, just what they needed. The cold and the filthy conditions, the way that battle hit them worst just when they thought they were almost out of the woods.
The ground was still covered in snow though the days were just enough longer that it felt like spring was coming. One wife noted that he always said he loved this time of year when everything was thawing and muddy, the plants starting to stir and break the soil. He said he felt so sexy in the spring. “He told you that, too?” another wife asked, the youngest of the three, though they all looked about the same age and could have been sisters, and they all laughed.
“How can you not love him?” the other wife said. “Who wouldn’t fall for him? Sweet as sugar, aren’t you?”
“Easy to fall, but hard to keep him,” another said. They all were remarried, and though he had girlfriends, two who had brought casseroles, only the wives were present that day at dusk. It was his favorite time of day, they said. He liked dusk and he liked well-made shoes and he loved Angie Dickinson especially as Pepper the Police Woman; he liked Martini and Rossi, which Angie advertised and of course she was the reason he also started eating avocados, which were often not easy to find in New Hampshire. All three wives said—at different private times—how they had wanted life with him to work but that he was stuck there, not even willing to take a vacation. Not willing for his wife to work and be gone all day. In the summer he might venture out a little bit, eat out locally, go to the occasional movie, but once the snow fell, that was it, he stayed put. “And,” the third of the three had said, sadly shaking her head, “there is a lot of snow in New Hampshire in the winter.”
The only photograph in the room is one of himself as a child, his mother and father on either side lifting him by the arms up and over a mound of snow as tall as he was. When asked about his parents, he said they were wonderful to him. His mother once told him that everyone loved him so much, all the girls in town loved him, how would