Blaze

He sighed as a man does before saying something he may regret. “At least a year.” He studied my face. “It seems a very long time to you. The way you are now.”

“Yes,” I said. “Time’s different for me now.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “Pain-time is different. Alone-time is different. Put them together and you have something very different. So pretend you’re an alcoholic and do it as they do.”

“A day at a time.”

He nodded. “A day at a time.”

“Kamen, you are so full of bullshit.”

He looked at me from the depths of the old couch, not smiling. He’d never get out of there without help.

“Maybe si, maybe no,” he said. “In the meantime — Edgar, does anything make you happy?”

“I don’t know — I used to sketch.”

“When?”

I realized I hadn’t done more than doodle while taking telephone calls since an art class for extra credit in high school. I considered lying about this — I was ashamed to seem like such a fixated drudge — and then told the truth. One-armed men should tell the truth whenever possible. Kamen doesn’t say that; I do.

“Take it up again,” Kamen said. “You need hedges.”

“Hedges,” I said, bemused.

“Yes, Edgar.” He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. “Hedges against the night.”

It might have been a week after Kamen’s visit that Tom Riley came to see me. The leaves had started to turn color, and I remember the clerks putting up Halloween posters in the Wal-Mart where I bought sketchpads and various drawing implements a few days before my former accountant’s visit; that’s the best I can do.

What I remember most clearly about that visit is how embarrassed and ill-at-ease Tom seemed. He was on an errand he didn’t want to run.

I offered him a Coke and he took me up on it. When I came back from the kitchen, he was looking at a pen- and-ink I’d done — three palm trees silhouetted against an expanse of water, a bit of tiled roof jutting into the left foreground. “This is pretty good,” he said. “You do this?”

“Nah, the elves,” I said. “They come in the night. Cobble my shoes and draw the occasional picture.”

He laughed too hard and set the picture back down on the desk. “Don’t look much like Minnesota, dere,” he said, doing a Swedish accent.

“I copied it out of a book,” I said. “What can I do for you, Tom? If it’s about the business—”

“Actually, Pam asked me to come out.” He ducked his head. “I didn’t much want to, but I didn’t feel I could say no.”

“Tom,” I said, “go on and spit it out. I’m not going to bite you.”

“She’s got herself a lawyer. She’s going ahead with this divorce business.”

“I never thought she wouldn’t.” It was the truth. I still didn’t remember choking her, but I remembered the look in her eyes when she told me I had. I remembered telling her she was a quitting birch and feeling that if she dropped dead at that moment, right there at the foot of the cellar stairs, that would be all right with me. Fine, in fact. And setting aside how I’d felt then, once Pam started down a road, she rarely turned around.

“She wants to know if you’re going to be using Bozie.”

I had to smile at that. William Bozeman III was the wheel-dog of the Minneapolis law-firm the company used, and if he knew Tom and I had been calling him Bozie for the last twenty years, he would probably have a hemorrhage.

“I hadn’t thought about it. What’s the deal, Tom? What exactly does she want?”

He drank off half his Coke, put the glass on a bookshelf beside my half-assed sketch, and looked at his shoes. “She said she hopes it doesn’t have to be mean. She said, ?I don’t want to be rich, and I don’t want a fight. I just want him to be fair to me and the girls, the way he always was, will you tell him that?’ So I am.” He shrugged, still looking down at his shoes.

I got up, went to the big window between the living room and the porch, and looked out at the lake. When I turned back, Tom Riley didn’t look himself at all. At first I thought he was sick to his stomach. Then I realized he was struggling not to cry.

“Tom, what’s the matter?” I asked.

He shook his head, 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 with just the one arm. I’m so sorry.”

It was artless, unrehearsed, and sweet. A straight shot to the heart, in other words. I think there was a moment when we were both close to bawling, like a couple of Sensitive Guys on The Oprah Winfrey Show. All we needed was Dr. Phil, nodding avuncular approval.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said, “but I’m getting along. Really. And I’m going to give you an offer to take back to her. If she likes the shape of it, we can hammer out the details. No lawyers needed. Do-it-yourself deal.”

“Are you serious, Eddie?”

“I am. You do a comprehensive accounting so we have a bottom-line figure to work with. Nothing hidden. Then 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, she and I can go to lunch and then buy Divorce for Dummies at Borders.”

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. 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 drank some of his Coke, 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 truck,” I said.

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 — this is suburban St. Paul we’re talking about. Our place by the lake stands at the end of Aster Lane, a paved street running from East Hoyt Avenue to the water. In the middle of October I finally took Kathi Green’s advice and began walking. They were only short outings up to East Hoyt Avenue, but I always came back with my bad hip crying for mercy and often with tears standing in my eyes. Yet I also almost always came back feeling like a conquering hero — I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit it. I was returning from one of these walks when Mrs. Fevereau hit Gandalf, the pleasant Jack Russell terrier who belonged to the little girl next door.

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 Goldstein, coming down the other side of the street in full Girl Scout uniform. I was concentrating on my reconstructed hip. As always near the end of these short strolls, this so-called medical marvel felt packed with roughly ten thousand tiny points of broken glass. My clearest memory before the scream of the Hummer’s tires was thinking that the Mrs. Fevereaus of the world now lived in a different universe than the one I inhabited, one where all sensations were turned down to half-strength.

Then the 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 filling the right window of my pickup truck, 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.

Then Gandalf began to scream, too, and the flashback — what Dr. Kamen would no doubt have called a recovered memory — was gone. Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn’t