“Well, it ain’t rocket science, that’s for sure. You know, ma’am, you don’t mind my saying this, but you do not look well.”
“I know. It’s a medical condition. Looks worse than it is. Nothing life-threatening.” ,
“Okay. You leave that application with me. We are really shorthanded on the late shift right now. Round here we call it the zombie shift. You do it too long, that’s how you feel. Well now ... is that LamaT
“Laura.”
“Laura. Okay. Well, I hope you don’t mind dealing with weirdos. Because they come out at night.”
“I’m sure they do. I can cope.”
Chapter Thirteen
Hey, old friend.
What do you say, old friend?
Make it okay, old friend,
Give an old friendship a break.
Why so grim?
We’re going on forever.
You, me, him—
Too many lives are at stake ...
—Stephen Sondheim, “Old Friends”
It was Saturday morning. Shadow answered the door.
Marguerite Olsen was there. She did hof come in, just stood in the sunlight, looking serious. “Mister Ainsel ... ?”
“Mike, please,” said Shadow.
“Mike, yes. Would you like to come over for dinner tonight? About sixish? It won’t be anything exciting, just spaghetti and meatballs.”
“I like spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Obviously, if you have any other plans ...”
“I have no other plans.”
“Six o’clock.”
“Should I bring flowers?”
“If you must. But this is a social gesture. Not a romantic one.”
He showered. He went for a short walk, down to the bridge and back. The sun was up, a tarnished quarter in the sky, and he was sweating in his coat by the time he got home. He drove the 4-Runner down to Dave’s Finest Food and bought a bottle of wine. It was a twenty-dollar bottle, which seemed to Shadow like some kind of guarantee of quality. He didn’t know wines, so he bought a Californian cabernet, because Shadow had once seen a bumper-sticker, back when he was younger and people still had bumper stickers on their cars, which said LIFE is A CABERNET and it had made him laugh.
He bought a plant in a pot as a gift. Green leaves, no flowers. Nothing remotely romantic about that.
He bought a carton of milk, which he would never drink, and a selection of fruit, which he would never eat.
Then he drove over to Mabel’s and bought a single lunchtime pasty. Mabel’s face lit up when she saw him. “Did Hinzelmann catch up with you?”
“I didn’t know he was looking for me.”
“Yup. Wants to take you ice fishing. And Chad Mulligan wanted to know if I’d seen you around. His cousin’s here from out of state. His second cousin, what we used to call kissing cousins. Such a sweetheart. You’ll love her,” and she dropped the pasty into a brown paper bag, twisted the top over to keep the pasty warm.
Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the pastry crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4-Runner. He passed the library on the south shore of the lake. It was a black-and-white town in the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and the snowmobile tracks.
He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the birdfeeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.
There was a lot of time to kill until six. Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him. Do you want to see Lucy’s tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.
He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other people—normal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreams—since he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.
He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly! Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six.
Shadow’s telephone rang.
“Yeah?” he said.
‘That’s no way to answer the phone,” growled Wednesday.
“When I get my telephone connected I’ll answer it politely,” said Shadow. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t know,” said Wednesday. There fas a pause. Then he said, “Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.” There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday’s voice that Shadow had never heard before.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s hard. It’s too fucking hard. I don’t know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats.”
“You mustn’t talk like that.”