Duma Key(7)

"Tom, what's the matter?" I asked.

He tried to speak and produced only a watery croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Boss, I can't get used to seeing you this way, with just the one arm. I'm so sorry."

It was artless, unrehearsed, and sweet: a straight shot to the heart. I think there was a moment when we were both close to bawling, like a couple of Sensitive Guys on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

That idea helped me get myself under control again. "I'm sorry, too," I said, "but I'm getting along. Really. Now drink your damn beer before it goes flat."

He laughed and poured the rest of his Grain Belt into the glass.

"I'm going to give you an offer to take back to her," I said. "If she likes it, we can hammer out the details. Do-it-yourself deal. No lawyers needed."

"Are you serious, Eddie?"

"I am. You do a comprehensive accounting so we have a bottom-line figure to work with. We divide the swag into four shares. She takes three - seventy-five per cent - for her and the girls. I take the rest. The divorce itself... hey, Minnesota's a no-fault state, after lunch we can go out to Borders and buy Divorce for Dummies."

He looked dazed. "Is there such a book?"

"I haven't researched it, but if there isn't, I'll eat your shirts."

"I think the saying's 'eat my shorts.'"

"Isn't that what I said?"

"Never mind. Eddie, that kind of deal is going to trash the estate."

"Ask me if I give a shit. Or a shirt, for that matter. I still care about the company, and the company is fine, intact and being run by people who know what they're doing. As for the estate, all I'm proposing is that we dispense with the ego that usually allows the lawyers to swallow the cream. There's plenty for all of us, if we're reasonable."

He finished his beer, never taking his eyes off me. "Sometimes I wonder if you're the same man I used to work for," he said.

"That man died in his pickup," I said.

vii

Pam took the deal, and I think she might have taken me again instead of the deal if I'd offered - it was a look that came and went on her face like sunshine through clouds when we had our lunch to discuss the details - but I didn't offer. I had Florida on my mind, that refuge of the newly wed and the nearly dead. And I think in her heart of hearts, even Pam knew it was for the best - knew that the man who had been pulled out of his ruined Dodge Ram with his steel hardhat crushed around his ears like a crumpled pet-food can wasn't the same guy who'd gotten in. The life with Pam and the girls and the construction company was over; there were no other rooms in it to explore. There were, however, doors. The one marked SUICIDE was currently a bad option, as Dr. Kamen had pointed out. That left the one marked DUMA KEY.

One other thing occurred in my other life before I slipped through that door, though. It was what happened to Monica Goldstein's Jack Russell Terrier, Gandalf.

viii

If you've been picturing my convalescent retreat as a lakeside cottage standing in splendid isolation at the end of a lonely dirt road in the north woods, you better think again - we're talking your basic suburbia. Our place by the lake stood at the end of Aster Lane, a paved street running from East Hoyt Avenue to the water. Our closest neighbors were the Goldsteins.

In the middle of October, I finally took Kathi Green's advice and began to walk. These were not the Great Beach Walks I took later, and I came back from even these short outings with my bad hip crying for mercy (and more than once with tears standing in my eyes), but they were steps in the right direction. I was returning from one of these walks when Mrs. Fevereau hit Monica's dog.

I was three-quarters of the way home when the Fevereau woman went past me in her ridiculous mustard-colored Hummer. As always, she had her cell phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other; as always she was going too fast. I barely noticed, and I certainly didn't see Gandalf dash into the street up ahead, concentrating only on Monica, coming down the other side of the street in Full Girl Scout. I was concentrating on my reconstructed hip. As always near the end of my short strolls, this so-called medical marvel felt packed with roughly ten thousand tiny points of broken glass.

Then tires yowled, and a little girl's scream joined them: "GANDALF, NO!"

For a moment I had a clear and unearthly vision of the crane that had almost killed me, the world I'd always lived in suddenly eaten up by a yellow much brighter than Mrs. Fevereau's Hummer, and black letters floating in it, swelling, getting larger: LINK-BELT.

Then Gandalf began to scream, too, and the flashback - what Dr. Kamen would have called a recovered memory, I suppose - was gone. Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

I broke into a lurching, crabwise run, pounding the sidewalk with my red crutch. I'm sure it would have appeared ludicrous to an onlooker, but no one was paying any attention to me. Monica Goldstein was kneeling in the middle of the street beside her dog, which lay in front of the Hummer's high, boxy grille. Her face was white above her forest-green uniform, from which a sash of badges and medals hung. The end of this sash was soaking in a spreading pool of Gandalf's blood.

Mrs. Fevereau half-jumped and half-fell from the Hummer's ridiculously high driver's seat. Ava Goldstein came running from the front door of the Goldstein house, crying her daughter's name. Mrs. Goldstein's blouse was half-buttoned. Her feet were bare.