“Silas,” said Teri, pausing in her white sneakers and shadowy stockings, “I do declare I’ve never seen you ask for a third cup.”
“So you’ve turned into Scarlett O’Hara?” he said.
Teri smiled and refilled his cup and returned to the kitchen. The Times-Standard weighed in at twenty-four pages—depressingly small for the county’s largest newspaper. Silas read an article congratulating four county natives for running the Boston Marathon, although none had placed even in the top one thousand; an editorial explaining why the paper would discontinue its Public Safety Log, listing significant arrests (no longer had the space); and an Associated Press article about America’s zany love of meatless hot dogs. He skimmed local sports stories that had larger headlines than bodies, wedding announcements and syndicated comic strips and a company-profile “Who’s Who.”
He read more carefully when he got to the obituaries. These he appreciated. These were a chance for Silas, age seventy-five, to see what others were dying of and how and when and where. The details of death were increasingly interesting to him, and not just because it was less “later when I’m old” and more “any day now,” but because they seemed to come in two extreme varieties: the mundane and the horrific. Either “peacefully asleep in the arms of her husband of sixty years” or “shot in the head by a carjacker at the corner of H Street and Buhne,” provoking a “she was a fine lady” or “what the hell is wrong with this world?” Silas wondered how frequently there was a correlation between one’s death and one’s life, whether the old woman’s peaceful stroke ended a life of bone-deep righteousness or fantastic dissipation. And the carjack victim: choir boy or Hell’s Angel? Did karma play any part in our end? Was poetic justice mere poetry?
Silas’s life hadn’t been exemplary by certain standards, yet neither had it been unforgivable. There were things of which he was proud: raising his former wife’s diabetic son when she died and the boy’s father looked to be a slipshod guardian; refusing Shell Oil’s filthy lucre in exchange for his approval of their offshore oil drilling plan near Samoa; walking two miles in the middle of the night to a suicidal friend’s house and convincing her that depression, like happiness, was only temporary. As there was behavior of which he was ashamed: sleeping with his best friends’ wives (three best friends, five wives); knocking out a guy’s front teeth over a disputed game of pool; lying (to everyone, all the time, with and without reason). Silas wondered how, if at all, these things would affect his death.
He was a retired bike shop owner and former city councilman and often lonely. His outspoken criticisms of Eureka’s budgetary priorities and the state of America’s forests, which for many years had identified him in the community as someone who thought about big issues, now made him a curmudgeon.
He was tall and skinny and had bad posture from years of hunching over desks and trying not to be conspicuous around shorter people. Thick white hair shocked out of his head like a woodpecker’s, giving his bony features an avian quality. He wore sturdy black-framed glasses and black turtleneck sweaters like some funky old beatnik Rip Van Winkling in the twenty-first century doing his best Samuel Beckett impression and staring down the combined forces of illness, fatigue, and moral collapse. Yet nobody noticed him these days as he walked around Old Town and sat in coffee shops and listened and tried to eke out a meaning to his days. He blended into the background as someone you’d seen a thousand times but could never place from where. The social life now open to him centered on his niece Rebecca’s family—he’d once been close to his great-nieces Lillith and Maria—and chance encounters with people old enough to remember him. Very few occasions for him to forget names, altogether too few.
His death would make these people sad, and the other obituary readers out there would take note of it—perhaps like him they would speculate on its justice—and it would bring his family together for a day or two of discussing him fondly and resolving that life goes on. Silas’s sound and fury would be like the other sounds and furies that had signified nothing. He would disappear.
He looked across the diner at two mustachioed truck drivers—noted the grossly obtruding bellies over scrawny legs and the padded nylon vests and the feet that knew how to maintain 65 mph for several uninterrupted weeks—who hit each other lightly on the shoulder with the backs of their hands to emphasize a point or command a laugh-along. Touching someone makes them your friend. Silas recognized one of the men and miraculously remembered his name, Shannon Koslowski, whose father, Pete, had led the move to price-fix dairy products in the area thirty years earlier. Pete died two weeks ago. Aneurysm. Making an omelet.
Glancing down at the paper, Silas noticed a small box beneath the obituaries that said “MISSING: Leon Meed, of 427 Neeland Dr. Last seen on December 1. Age 54, medium height, curly brown hair. Any information, please call 555/2471.”
I’d rather go missing than die, Silas thought to himself. When you’re missing you still have a chance.
Later that morning at McDonald’s, Silas’s great-niece Lillith Fielding stood in front of an enormous griddle range with her manager, Ron. Heightened-senses Ron who saw everything and forbade—he was honor-bound not to allow—sloppiness and unprofessionalism. She sniffled and he wordlessly, reproachfully gave her a tissue. Her starched uniform rubbed against her armpits—the blisters were a matter of time and patience—and her face was breaking out despite her abstinence from eating at work. As though mere proximity to grease could ruin one’s complexion. She’d been on shift for five hours with only a single fifteen-minute break spent alone because no one else was on her schedule. In the women’s bathroom she’d filed her nails and written a limerick about the weediness of Ron, brushed her shoulder-length brown hair and separated it into two pigtails, and translated the amount of her first paycheck into Wiccan supplies it would buy. Then the break was over.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Ron asked, not looking at her, having eyes only for the range, where three small beef patties curled up slightly around their edges. It was hot in the cooking area and the milkshake machine behind them ground its way through a hundred pounds of frozen soybean crystals and strawberry extract in a successful cold fusion. Everything was equally delicious and nauseating.
“I don’t know,” said Lillith.
“You don’t.”
“No.”
“And you’ve had how many training days so far?”
“Four. But I wasn’t hired as a cook. I’m supposed to take drive-thru orders and then start at the cash register. Ambrose said those were going to be my only two shifts.”
“Ambrose is the assistant manager. I’m the general manager, and I thought I made it clear to you that we’re a team. If Latifa, say, has a problem and needs to leave the range then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to watch over her section while she’s gone. If I ever see you ignoring a problem because it’s not in your so-called section, I’ll deal with the result and you won’t like that deal.”
Lillith looked at the little concave burgers, at the staid runnels of grease scraped to the range’s corners, at the forearm-length spatula upside down beside three salt canisters. “Is the problem that the burgers are overcooked and should have been taken off sooner?”
“The problem,” Ron said, reaching across Lillith to grab a roll of paper towels, “is that this paper product was only a foot from the range, posing a fire hazard. It could have burned the restaurant down. Then how would you have felt about not taking responsibility for it?”
Ron motioned for Latifa, who’d been standing back during this interrogation, to return to the range, and walked away before Lillith could answer, leaving her alone with the feeling that she was a professional failure, and that she’d been cruelly bullied, and that she wasn’t observant enough, and that Ron was an idiot, and that she might lose her job, and that she hated her job and wanted to quit. But her feelings, she knew, were beside the point. This was about