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“I thought about coming over to talk to you after the service,” said Spider. “I just wasn’t certain that it would be a good idea.”
“I wish you had.” Fat Charlie thought of something. He said, “I would have thought you’d have been at Dad’s funeral.”
Spider said, “What?”
“His funeral. It was in Florida. Couple of days ago.”
Spider shook his head. “He’s not dead,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I’d know if he were dead.”
“He’s dead. I buried him. Well, I filled the grave. Ask Mrs. Higgler.”
Spider said, “How’d he die?”
“Heart failure.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. That just means he died.”
“Well, yes. He did.”
Spider had stopped smiling. Now he was staring down into his coffee as if he suspected he was going to be able to find an answer in there. “I ought to check this out,” said Spider. “It’s not that I don’t believe you. But when it’s your old man. Even when your old man is my old man.” And he made a face. Fat Charlie knew what that face meant. He had made it himself, from the inside, enough times, when the subject of his father came up. “Is she still living in the same place? Next door to where we grew up?”
“Mrs. Higgler? Yes. Still there.”
“You don’t have anything from there, do you? A picture? Maybe a photograph?”
“I brought home a box of them.” Fat Charlie had not opened the large cardboard box yet. It was still sitting in the hall. He carried the box into the kitchen and put it down on the table. He took a kitchen knife and cut the packing tape that surrounded it; Spider reached into the box with his thin fingers, riffling through the photographs like playing cards, until he pulled out one of their mother and Mrs. Higgler, sitting on Mrs. Higgler’s porch, twenty-five years earlier.
“Is that porch still there?”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. “I think so,” he said.
Later, he was unable to remember whether the picture grew very big, or Spider grew very small. He could have sworn that neither of those things had actually happened; nevertheless, it was unarguable that Spider had walked into the photograph, and it had shimmered and rippled and swallowed him up.
Fat Charlie rubbed his eyes. He was alone in the kitchen at six in the morning. There was a box filled with photographs and papers on the kitchen table, along with an empty mug, which he placed in the sink. He walked along the hall to his bedroom, lay down on his bed and slept until the alarm went off at seven fifteen.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHICH CONCLUDES WITH AN EVENING OF WINE, WOMEN AND SONG
FAT CHARLIE WOKE UP.
Memories of dreams of a meeting with some film-star brother mingled with a dream in which President Taft had come to stay, bringing with him the entire cast of the cartoon. Tom and Jerry. He showered, and he took the tube to work.
All through the workday something was nagging at the back of his head, and he didn’t know what it was. He misplaced things. He forgot things. At one point, he started singing at his desk, not because he was happy, but because he forgot not to. He only realized he was doing it when Grahame Coats himself put his head around the door of Fat Charlie’s closet to chide him. “No radios, Walkmans, MP3 players or similar instruments of music at the office,” said Grahame Coats, with a ferrety glare. “It bespeaks a lackadaisical attitude, of the kind one abhors in the workaday world.”
“It wasn’t the radio,” admitted Fat Charlie, his ears burning.
“No? Then what, pray tell, was it?”
“It was me,” said Fat Charlie.
“You?”
“Yes. I was singing. I’m sorry—”
“I could have sworn it was the radio. And yet I was wrong. Good Lord. Well, with such a wealth of talents at your disposal, with such remarkable skills, perhaps you should leave us to tread the boards, entertain the multitudes, possibly do an end-of-the-pier show, rather than cluttering up a desk in an office where other people are trying to work. Eh? A place where people’s careers are being managed.”
“No,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t want to leave. I just wasn’t thinking.”
