Читать книгу Fallout - Mark Ethridge - Страница 19

The night brought Josh no peace.

He thrashed in bed, his mind caroming crazily and unproductively between trying to recall details of the day’s meeting with Dr. Pepper and reviewing things Katie needed for camp. At 1 a.m., he gave up on sleep and opened Sharon’s closet, still full of her clothes.

Her scent enveloped him, as if Sharon herself had breezed into the room. He hugged her robe, burying his face in its soft folds. For a moment, she was with him, not just the aromas of her shampoos, lotions and perfumes.

He found a pain pill in the pocket. How like her! Wanting to be present for every possible moment with their daughter, Sharon had resisted taking them because they knocked her out. But in the end, the agony had been overwhelming. With Josh and Katie at her bedside, she’d slid imperceptibly from sleep to eternity aided by a powerful morphine drip.

Josh rummaged around the closet until he found Sharon’s sewing basket. He settled at the kitchen table, threaded a needle with considerable difficulty and set out attaching name tags to every stitch of clothing, towel and sheet Katie had laid out to pack.

When he was done with the nametags, he double-checked her non-clothing items against a list Camp Kanawha had provided: Bug spray. Tennis racquet. Flashlight. Water bottle. Sunscreen.

He had added a few items of his own. Disposable camera. Journal. Stamps. Things so that I can know what it’s like for you even though we’re apart, he thought.

He fell into a fitful sleep but was beset by a recurring nightmare in which it was past deadline and the Winston News printing press would not start.

He was grateful for Tuesday, a day closer to answers about Katie.

He looked in on his daughter at 7a.m., still asleep amidst a zoo-full of stuffed animals, each at one time indispensable, all now observers from her bookcase except for the favored koala that sat on her pillow; glittering soccer trophies, each one taller and more elaborate than the next, crowding for space on a section of her dresser with tubes of lip gloss and mascara (had he been right to allow it?); a wall of soccer team pictures and posters of boy bands. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley lay open by her bed. On her bedside table sat the team picture of the fifth-grade Black Ravens with the “13-0” sign held by Katie. The team had insisted she hold it. Even the other parents knew she was the best player. And the best kid, too, at least by his thinking. Katie could score all the goals in a 5-0 shutout and she’d credit her team. But if the opponent scored, Katie usually took the blame for allowing the goal. A gorgeous woman stood in the back row of the photo. Sharon. The team mom. Gibbs bent over and woke his daughter with a kiss and a whisper.

She sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Only four more days, Dad! I’m soooo excited about camp!”

After microwaving a packet of oatmeal and toasting a bagel for her, he sent her off to school.

A familiar feeling washed over him—a hollow, empty, pit-of-the-stomach feeling, a true heartache—and after a moment he identified it. He felt homesick. No parents. No wife. No soul mate. One child and she would soon be gone. Maybe just to camp, but it was the beginning. In recent years the focus of his life had been fulfilling his promise to Sharon that he would take care of their daughter. Now she was going away and he was the one who was homesick. Or perhaps, it was more than that, he acknowledged to himself. Perhaps the feeling was fear, fear that he would be left alone once again.

He did his best to pull himself out his funk. The Winston News needed to print its next edition whatever his mental state. The masthead boasted that the paper had been publishing since 1896 and it would not do to break the string. And he needed to get busy selling for the Old Fashioned River Days special edition which would be distributed at the festival’s opening ceremonies and which carried so many ads it often determined whether the newspaper made or lost money for the entire year. The News literally couldn’t afford to fall short there, not with the prospective new buyers in the midst of due diligence checking every dollar of revenue and dime of expense. If it was usually the difference between profit and loss, this year the section was the difference between selling for a reasonable amount and being forced to unload the News at a fire-sale price.

It hit him that Katie’s diagnosis could change everything. If she did face a year of treatment and rehabilitation, then not being a one-armed paperhanger at the weekly newspaper was a very good thing. On the other hand, a move would mean changing Katie’s doctors mid-treatment. And what about health insurance? His head spun.

Josh found his voice mail light blinking and a note from a carrier and a misprinted copy of the News pinned to his desk chair when he arrived at the office.

Mr. Gibbs, this is what they give me to deliver to my customers. Can you talk with someone about it? This is just terrible to have to deliver this type of paper to my customers. I been with the News for the last ten years off and on and this is the worst I seen.

Josh sighed. Checking voice mail could wait. Too soon to hear from Pepper and any other calls were almost guaranteed to mean another distraction. He assumed the misprint problem wasn’t widespread and he had until Thursday to smooth the feathers of the carrier before the next edition. Sales for the River Days special section, on the other hand, could not wait.

He started with his most likely prospects—the businesses that had advertised in the section the previous year. The bank which held the mortgage on the newspaper building renewed for page three. The Recovery Metals plant reserved its usual full-page ad. A metal recycling facility and foundry, the plant bought plenty of classified employment advertising in the Winston News but since it sold nothing directly to the public, this was the only display ad it ran all year, its purpose simply to generate goodwill by showing support for a very popular local event. The car dealerships quickly fell into place, as did the furniture store. The Cotter Funeral Home, a regular, tried to pull out on the grounds that a funeral wasn’t an impulse buy but Gibbs reminded owner Mark Cotter that the River Days issue was a keepsake in many households, sure to be close at hand year-round.

He ran into unexpected resistance from Woody Conroy, this year’s Chamber of Commerce head whose River City Appliance store had taken the back cover—the most expensive piece of real estate in the section because of its high visibility—for as long as anyone could remember. “Okay,” Conroy said when he finally relented. “But this ad really needs to pay off for us.”

“It worked last time. I bought a refrigerator from you.”

At the end of the day Tuesday, Josh dealt with the nagging voice mail light. It was Allison, asking for an update on Katie. He’d call her tomorrow when, hopefully, there would be news to pass on.