“More crazy than cute, I’d say. Look at those eyes. Those teeth.”
Joy stared into that strange face a moment, before lifting its head from its plump body and peering at the emptiness inside. She put the head back on and looked up at Charlie. “Let’s take him home.”
“Okay, but you better feed him and walk him and deal with the neighbors when they complain about him oinking all the time.”
She smiled and brought the cookie jar to the counter, letting the clerk know they’d carry it home in the car rather than have it delivered with the table. That’s when Charlie thought to ask, “Do people who aren’t allowed to eat cookies even need a cookie jar?”
“Oh, I allow you to eat cookies, Charlie,” she replied in the same teasing tone of voice that he had asked the question.
“Right,” he said. “One cookie. Once a year. At Christmas.”
“What are you talking about? You just had those Mallomars when we stopped in Tennessee on the way down from Providence a few weeks ago.”
“Mallomars? I don’t remember any Mallomars.”
“Probably because you ate them so fast.”
Back and forth, they kept ribbing each other while the clerk wrapped the head of the pig in newspaper, then wrapped the body. Once they were rung up and finished with their business, Joy carried the bag with her new find out to the Oldsmobile, where she strapped it in the backseat with a seat belt rather than risk it rolling around and breaking in the trunk. When she climbed into the passenger seat and strapped herself in, she said, “I was just thinking, Charlie. You know those golf balls you keep bringing home from your walks the last few weeks?”
He started the car. “I do.”
“Well, maybe you can put them inside the cookie jar instead of lining them up on the counter the way you’ve been doing?”
That is how The Pig found a home in Charlie and Joy’s apartment in Fort Lauderdale. And that is how the golf balls found a home in The Pig.
So many years later, after Tünde brought it crashing down upon Charlie’s head, then slammed the door and left him for dead, some part of the man’s conscious kept flickering over that memory. All the while, his body lay still on the floor, surrounded by jagged pieces of ceramic and those golf balls brought home during the first winter of his retirement, which filled The Pig in no time, so he switched to tossing them in a drawer instead. Slowly, the light in the kitchen shifted, brightening with the high sun, then dimming as the sun went down. At some point, there came a distant knocking that grew more rapid-fire, before fading away. The memory of that store on Highway 1 faded too, as Charlie’s mind moved from flashes of his past to a conjuring of his future. If he had indeed lived through the violence of that morning, he would need to make a new plan for his life without Joy. First, he would call his brother in Detroit, since there was no one else left for him to reach out to. He would explain that his mind was slipping away, not slowly as he hoped, but quite quickly, much to his dismay. Then he would sell the house in Providence, sell the apartment in Florida too. And if it came to it, which he knew it would, he’d allow himself to be put in some sort of home for people in his situation, where he would live out his final days in a lonely bed, staring out a window while waiting for the last of his mind to become one with that blank blue sky above.
Charlie thought about all of those things for some time, before accepting that the end had arrived for him in all the ways that really matter. Once he accepted that, at last there came the sound of a door opening somewhere in the house, then the sound of footsteps, familiar ones. He opened his eyes and lifted his head to see her standing before him. She had snapped on a light and, after all the darkness, it was so bright that it hurt his eyes. He squinted against it.
“Charlie,” she said and came to him, kneeling on the floor.
“I killed you,” he told her.
“No,” she said.
“I killed you,” Charlie repeated. “I pushed you from the terrace. And you fell. I lied to the police and to the people in our building. I told them it was an accident. I had your body cremated, and I came home.”