He scanned her face and then nodded tiredly. 'No, I guess not.'
Heidi nagged him upstairs, where he finally ended up in the bathroom, naked except for the towel around his waist. He was struck by a strong sense of deja vu - the temporal dislocation was so complete that he felt a mild physical nausea. It was an almost exact replay of the day he had stood on this same scale with a towel from this same powder-blue set wrapped around his waist. All that was lacking was the good smell of frying bacon coming up from downstairs. Everything else was exactly the same.
No. No, it wasn't. One other thing was remarkably different.
That other day he had craned over in order to read the bad news on the dial. He had to do that because his bay window was in the way.
The bay window was there, but it was smaller. There could be no question about it, because now he could look straight down and still read the numbers.
The digital readout said 229.
'That settles it,' Heidi said flatly. 'I'm making you an appointment with Dr Houston.'
'This scale weighs light,' Halleck said weakly. 'It always has. That's why I like it.'
She looked at him coldly. 'Enough bullshit is enough bullshit, my friend. You've spent the last five years bitching about how it weighs heavy, and we both know it.' In the harsh white bathroom light he could see how honestly anxious she was. The skin was drawn shinily tight across her cheekbones.
'Stay right there,' she said at last, and left the bathroom.
'Heidi?'
'Don't move!' she called back as she went downstairs.
She returned a minute later with an unopened bag of sugar. 'Net wt., 10 lbs.,' the bag announced. She plonked it on the scale. The scale considered for a moment and then printed a big red digital readout: 012.
'That's what I thought,' Heidi said grimly. 'I weigh myself, too, Billy. It doesn't weigh light, and it never has.
It weighs heavy, just like you always said. It wasn't just bitching, and we both knew it. Someone who's overweight likes an inaccurate scale. It makes the actual facts easier to dismiss. If'
'Heidi -'
'If this scale says you weigh two-twenty-nine, that means you're really down to two-twenty-seven. Now, let me
'Heidi -'
'Let me make you an appointment.'
He paused, looking down at his bare feet, and then shook his head.
'Billy!'
'I'll make it myself,' he said.
'When?'
'Wednesday. I'll make it Wednesday. Houston goes out to the country club every Wednesday afternoon and plays nine holes.' Sometimes he plays with the inimitable titgrabbing, wife-kissing Cary Rossington. 'I'll speak to him in person.'
'Why don't you call him tonight? Right now?'
'Heidi,' he said, 'no more.' And something in his face must have convinced her not to push it any further, because she didn't mention it again that night.
Chapter Five
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
Billy purposely kept off the scale upstairs. He ate heartily at meals even though, for one of the few times in his adult life, he was not terribly hungry. He stopped hiding his munchies behind the packages of Lipton Cup o' Soup in the pantry. He ate pepperoni slices and Muenster cheese on Ritz crackers during the Yankees-Red Sox doubleheader on Sunday. A bag of caramel corn at work Monday morning, and a bag of Cheez-Doodles on Monday afternoon - one of them or possibly the combination brought on a rather embarrassing farting spell that lasted from four o'clock until about nine that night. Linda marched out of the TV room halfway through the news, announcing that she would be back if someone passed out gas masks. Billy grinned guiltily, but didn't move. His experience with farts had taught him that leaving the room to pass that sort of gas did very little good. It was as if the rotten things were attached to you with invisible rubber bands. They followed you around.
But later, watching And Justice for All on Home Box Office, he and Heidi ate up most of a Sara Lee cheesecake.
During his commute home on Tuesday, he pulled off the Connecticut Turnpike at Norwalk and picked up a couple of Whoppers with cheese at the Burger King there. He began eating them the way he always ate when he was driving, just working his way through them, mashing them up, swallowing them down bite by bite ...