Absolute Zero

the window at the parking lot, where Sommer’s Ford Expedition waited, hunched and gleaming against the wilting snow like a black enamel bison.

After about ten seconds of debate he reached for the phone again and called Amy. As soon as she answered, he asked without preamble: “Is it weird that Sommer would be at home so soon after the accident?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I just talked to his wife. He’s at home.”

“Something’s off. He needs a full-care nursing facility at minimum.”

“She said he watches her.”

“C’mon.”

“No bullshit. You interested?”

“Maybe.”

“So, what are you doing?”

“Coming over to your place.”

“I’ll make another pot of coffee,” Broker said.

Chapter Seventeen

Jolene Sommer hung up the phone and paused for a moment with her palm on the plastic receiver where his voice had been.

Broker, the guide.

She sat at the kitchen table, exhausted, taking refuge in a cup of coffee, staring out the window. At the edge of the backyard patio, a red cardinal was inspecting an empty feeder that dangled from a barren tree limb. She knew what Sharon Stone wore to the Academy Awards last year, but she didn’t know what kind of tree it was. She never caught the knack of feeding the birds. She barely remembered to feed the cat.

Hank had. .

She looked away and restarted her thoughts. Broker. She had a notion of him from up north, paddling with Allen through the night in an effort to save Hank.

He was not smooth and all tucked in like Allen. He had a deep-set tongue-and-groove muscularity and he was at home in his body, which was important. He had a quiet voice; simple perhaps, but direct. She tried to remember his weathered face, the light, courteous touch of his hand that day at the hospital.

Jolene was good at first impressions. She was also good at puzzles, the ones with pieces. She wasn’t so good at crossword puzzles-yet-because her vocabulary needed work. She believed you liked a person in the first seconds when you met them or you didn’t. She had liked Phil Broker. He possessed a solid, old-fashioned quality, like he’d been made to last.

Her eyes moved across the spacious kitchen and back out the window past the bird feeder to a jumble of oak rounds strewn on the dead grass by the woodshed behind the garage. A heavy splitting maul was imbedded deep in one of the upright rounds. Rust had formed an orange scab on the wedged blade.

A muffled crash echoed up from the basement and that was Earl dropping his barbells on the carpet. Earl had installed himself downstairs, where, like a bilge pump, he’d siphoned away just enough of the bills to keep the house-and her-afloat.

Earl was a creature of habit. And so, to her regret, was she. When things fell apart, when she realized she was facing this crisis literally broke, with nothing for resources but a couple of credit cards-she’d reached out to Earl.

Which had been a large mistake.

Jolene rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. After all these years about the only thing she could say about Earl was that he’d peaked early and still looked good with his shirt off.

They just couldn’t seem to break the pattern-she’d go off on her own and wind up drinking too much. Earl would step in and pull her back from the brink. Her part of the deal was to manage Earl’s temper so he didn’t go berserk on people.

This dynamic spun in circles for more than thirteen years, since high school; except for the year and a half when Earl went off on his own tangent in the army. That was after the mess out in Washington. He’d signed on to Desert Storm, trekked deep into the Iraqi desert with the 24th Mech, eager to redeem himself. Spent six months battling nothing more serious than sand and fleas, and he came home without any real medals, just one sandy case of the clap. All his life Earl just couldn’t catch a break.

Until now.

Jolene finished her coffee and put the cup in the dishwasher, added detergent, and tapped the start button. Then she paced the kitchen, touching up the table, the island, and the counter with a damp washcloth. Her life had turned into one of those ads from a woman’s magazine at the check-out counter. Be thinner, richer; live in a beautiful house. .

Right.

The first few days she had been stunned and needed Earl to guide her. But now she was over the initial shock and not real sure she wanted Earl back in her life, living in her basement, playing his mind games, waiting for her to lose it and start drinking again so it would be old times again. Him calling the shots.

Well, she wasn’t going to drink today. She had fourteen months of sobriety in the bank. And not a penny more. Hank had tied up every cent he owned in the trust.

Trust had sure turned into a funny word around this house.

Jolene took a deep breath. Earl always started out intending to do it by the rules. Just trying to help, he’d taken Cliff Stovall off for a heart-to-heart, to convince him to open the trust. She didn’t know the details, but she could guess. Earl got mad. So far, no cops had come snooping around.

And the bills. .

Jesus Christ, when she faced the idea of the bills she thought of the scene in Jaws when Roy Scheider first sees the shark and he jerks back-like whoa. Now, like Roy, she needed a bigger boat.

She shook her head and let her eyes drift back out the window to the woodpile. She could not imagine Earl yanking out the maul, splitting the wood, stacking it in tidy rows. He enjoyed watching it burn, all right, in the fireplace but it never occurred to him to go out and split more when it ran out. For all his pampered muscles, Earl refused to sweat outside a gym. He was the future, he’d said. In the future, the third-worlders would do the physical work. Mexicans, probably.

She looked out the window for a few more moments at the hungry cardinal and the brown leaves and the gray sky. The morning was like a moody song from an oldies station: sentimental. Perfect for feeling sorry for herself. Perfect for stinking-thinking.

It was one of her favorite alcoholic fantasies: being rescued. And a lot of men had come to grief on it, walking into a dark barroom and seeing her marooned on a bar stool.

That’s what had been so perfect about meeting Hank. She met him sober. I know I was bad, but just give me this one chance and I promise I’ll be so good. .

Hank had rescued her, all right, but Jolene saw right away that his ex-wife had handled the finances. Hank was lost around money.

The hammer fell about ninety minutes after she got to the intensive care unit at Regions in St. Paul. A neurologist had been called in to evaluate Hank; his workup and consulting was costing hundreds of dollars a minute.

Then this square-shaped lady in a maroon and black business suit had trampled though the blue-garbed medics like a rhino trashing a patch of petunias. She had pointed out that Hank Sommer’s Blue Cross policy had lapsed because of nonpayment of premiums.

Private pay.

Boy, those two words could empty a hospital ward of smiles real fast.

Well, no way could she keep him in the hospital at two, three grand a day. Milt Dane protested, said she couldn’t just take him AMA-against medical advice. Jolene, mad, said, “Watch me.” Hank had already had a feeding tube inserted, so Earl borrowed a wheelchair and they brought Hank home in Earl’s van.