Some sort of midday apocalypse draws the bugs down and ice cream cones are dropped in stationary stores, sidewalks littered with coupons for baby powder, car antennas stretching against gravity’s cruel fate. Spatial distances were distorted by the strange shadows of a late afternoon hailstorm. A certain Merkur was found spread across a lawn on Dagwood Street, the axle snapped in half and the floor littered with beer cans.

Gray had reinforced the dying sycamore in his yard, a victim of a virulent strain of arboreal disease in the early 90s; he has fashioned a wooden crutch to support its weight. Dana pointed out that the tree was only there for sentimentality. “The kids,” she would say, and then Gray would make vampire teeth with his fingers and contort his face in a way that she found distasteful. She constantly scrutinized the expressions of others for moments without tact. Gray’s sister once made a face that caused Dana to ward off her phone calls for over three years.

Gray had spent four years in therapy for a dislocated knee gained in a tennis match with a junior executive of the firm. He often exaggerated his injury. His trick knee could now go out when faced with situations as disparate as re-shingling the roof, cleaning the rain gutters, mowing the lawn (before the Jimson 4000 power mower), and dancing at the city’s annual Second Chance Prom.

Gray surveys the damage from the hailstorm, calculating the risk of venturing outside. Dana had been on the phone immediately to the local news. She was intent on getting one of their t-shirts for the noble task of spreading neighborhood gossip, reporting suspicious individuals after the police had hung up on her, and any abnormal weather conditions. She had the local network affiliates on speed dial because on occasion the temperature gauge posted right outside the window above the sink in the kitchen showed two degrees less than what was reported at the airport.

Gray continues staring at the fallen sycamore, the crutch now a useless jumble of boards buried beneath its weight, and the new Infiniti imprisoned by the tangled branches. As he calculated the damage that he could see (mostly just abstract clawmarks of paint scraped off the rear), he was doing his normal routine of revising The Speech in his head. He has only this name for it and can not even imagine any situation that will ever require the use of this speech. It is a detailed explanation of who Gray is as a person, where he fits into life and why he is a useful and essential member of society. Gray often spends hours each day calculating the proper wording for this speech, constantly modifying by adding or deleting, constantly re-wording his own jumbled thoughts to fit some kind of rhythm that Kerouac would be proud of. Gray believes that if he ever needs to use this speech, he will have the edge and be able to deftly retrieve himself from the slight that is bound to precipitate it.

Dana has now placed the cordless phone in its pudding-colored cradle and she calls out, “Jerry Vail may do a bit on the hailstorm. It looks like only a five block radius.”

Dana named their second son Jerry after the local news anchor. It took Gray eight years to draw this out of her. Jerry Vail was a composed man that looked down on smokers. He had a membership to the country club and Gray often saw him there, carefully polishing the heads of his golf clubs, avoiding contact with the black grounds crew, and petitioning in private to ban them from transit through the clubhouse. Jerry Danslinger, Gray and Dana’s son, was different from his namesake in several key areas. For one, he had a stuttering problem that had been misdiagnosed in his youth as the onset of autism. Jerry was just so embarrassed by his inability to formulate his thoughts that he did a deaf/mute routine and was thought to be in his own solipsistic universe. This diagnosis so frightened Dana that she demanded Gray have a vasectomy, which was his first introduction to painkillers. It was just a three day supply of small-dose Vicodin, but Gray immediately found himself able to more easily access The Speech in his mind. It became the difference between editing on a typewritten manuscript and sitting before a word processor. He would strike whole lines at a time and rearrange the flow so that the part about his service in the Peace Corps (which he had only joined to impress a girl in college) preceded his annual charity proceeds (he participated in the annual 5k walk against diabetes, causing a minor rift with Dana because obviously his trick knee didn’t act up on these outings).

Also unlike Jerry Vail, Jerry Danslinger was incapable of composing himself and would often touch himself in public, particularly when he was nervous. Not sure if it was a comfort issue, the cupping of genitals, Gray had allowed the practice to flourish well into adolescence and by then it was too hard to wean him off the habit. Things were further complicated by Gray’s inability to point out the problem vocally. Instead, when it occurred, he made a face. Dana found this face distasteful and would retreat from the room to call the news station and report a sudden upswing in the number of birds on the power lines.

Gray had carefully trained the family to be model consumers. He had indulged his wife’s shopping habits, but only so far as insuring that what she purchased was useful. The longest argument they had ever had in their eighteen years of marriage was over a quartz coffee table with a marble overlay. Gray stubbornly refused to allow the purchase for his own reasons. He’d once injured his toe on a wooden bookcase in the dark and was so frightened by the incident that he was struck impotent for almost three months. There is some kind of correlation here but Gray is distracted by The Speech. He has just coined his own personal favorite bit: “A man of means and reach. I am a self-made man and I have constructed a tolerably propitious relationship with the world.”

The neighbors, a family with separate last names, have come over to inspect the damage of the storm. Gray can not remember the man’s name. His wife is named Betsy, which always makes Gray think of Busty despite the fact she is not particularly endowed, but the man’s name escapes Gray. In the last year, Gray has met six Bob’s, two Jim’s, three Tony’s, an Anthony, and at least five Paul’s. He can’t tell a single one apart, they all seem to have the same fashion: A business suit during the week and then casual Dockers and a polo shirt on the weekends. Gray’s tactic for dealing with the inability to distinguish between them is to quickly probe them for occupational anecdotes. From here, he can say, for example, “Oh, I happen to need a good butcher for my mother in the city. As a distributor, can you give me some advice? You know what, why don’t you just give me your card? No sense talking business over a grill, right?” Just as often, they’re sharing a beer in some manicured backyard while the children attempt to splash each other in the pool. Gray finds this activity unbelievably hostile and will punish his sons for participating in it, often to their detriment in the pool. Gray thinks the whole thing is a learning experience and they will benefit from forbearance.

Gray is incredibly embarrassed about the collapse of the tree. He sees its demise as a personal failure and is interrupted in his attempt to incorporate it into The Speech (Gray has always believed that a decent man will own up to his mistakes, no matter how minor) by the neighbors. The man has a beer in his hand. Gray immediately wants to punch him but the whole neighborhood is out inspecting each other’s damage.

“Didn’t get you too bad,” the man says after a swallow. “I hear the Radio Shack lost their whole battery stock on the back dock.”

Gray has no idea what the man is saying. He suspects some kind of vague threat issued toward him. He prepares to go on the defensive but Dana interrupts to call from the house again, “I think the tool shed lost a window.”

The neighbor quickly says, “I know a good glass man.”

Gray also interprets this as a vague threat.

Dana has been absent for a large part of the last month. She has escaped from the house and into the carefully groomed parking lots of the neighborhood. She can be found having her oil changed one day (ignoring the catcalls of uncouth teenage mechanics), grocery shopping the next day (ignoring the patronizing look of the elderly cashier who considers anyone under the age of 60 to have the life experience of a small child), and perhaps dropping their oldest, Robert, at soccer practice in the afternoon. She has met and been rejected by the other mothers at soccer practice. She quietly sips her Starbucks mochaccino at the far right edge of the metal seating apparatus, a sweater’s sleeves knotted around her neck, and patiently lays out the list of harassment in her head.

First on the list is the mailman. One summer day, he knocked on the door and, apologizing that he had no packages to deliver that day, asked if he could possibly use the bathroom and have a drink of water. Dana felt his eyes all over her, drinking in the fit body of an older woman, and noticed a rather obscene smirk on his face when she stopped to consider his query.

Secondly, there is the man at the meat counter of the grocery store. He seems to cheat her in every way he can, whether it’s tipping the scales when weighing the deli meats or skimping on the wrapping paper when packaging her purchase.

The list goes on and on like this. It often lasts through the soccer practice and she is still mentally composing the list on the drive home. As much as possible, she feels that she has to be out of the house. Dana has come to believe that the house has an evil presence. She fears the furnace will explode. She fears the batteries in the smoke detector are being driven defective. She fears that the garbage disposal will accumulate an amazing suction capacity and draw her or, worse, one of the boys, into it. She cares little about Gray’s safety in the house and sometimes considers him a kind of intruder. Dana sleeps as far on her side of the bed as gravity will allow. To compensate, Gray rolls out of bed in the night, while she is supposedly asleep, and she will hear him pacing the kitchen floor. Then she hears his mumbling. Every night it is the same essential mumbling but in different order, with different words now and then. He seems to be attempting to justify his position in the marriage and why she needs him. Dana is afraid to approach him in the middle of this speech, like waking a sleepwalker. She fears for her safety.

Robert has taken to shaving carrots and slipping the slivers into the pasta sauce when Dana is distracted. He uses a very small razor, pried from the hands of Beverly Anglio. Beverly is not what you would call Robert’s girlfriend but she does have a misguided attraction to him. Robert challenges her to races, he wrestles with her and kisses her on the side of the lips. Robert has convinced himself that a kiss means nothing if it is not dead-on.

At school, there are certain days where you can purchase a flower for another student, all proceeds benefiting the student council. Robert buys a flower for Suzy Graham but does not sign his name to it. Suzy Graham receives six flowers, four of them unsigned. Beverly Anglio buys Robert a flower and does sign her own name. Jerry Danslinger buys Beverly a flower and signs only his last name. Beverly pins the flower to her shirt until she gets home, where she immediately calls the Danslinger house to thank Robert, but is intercepted by Dana, who says, simply, “The boys are busy with their studies and are not taking calls.” Dana likes to believe that the boys choose not to take calls when studying.

After the failed attempt to call Robert, Beverly begins to stab herself with the pin. She uses the blood to make pacts with herself, that she will always love Robert. She often gouges deep into her veins and was once taken to the hospital for a suture. She denies everything when asked and often lets her hair hang in her face to avoid eye contact.

Robert believes that carrots are vital in the pursuit of reproduction. Robert thinks it is imperative that Dana and Gray have another child as soon as possible. He’s learned in health class that soon Dana will be entering menopause and she will have no eggs left. Robert has no idea about his father’s vasectomy. He does not understand that his parents do not want another child. Robert learned to make deviled eggs, his father’s favorite, just so that he could slip slivers of carrots into the filling.

Gray spots the paint damage on the trunk and makes a silent plea to the creator. He often feels the creator and he work hand in hand, guiding the daily pursuits of those in the neighborhood. This is why Gray often becomes silently enraged when Tommy Dobson, the neighborhood’s deaf/mute half-cripple, stumbles blindly into the street as though he intends to direct traffic. Gray feels especially strongly about that last part, sensing that it is he, Gray, that should guide the traffic in this neighborhood.

Gray secretly wishes that he would be elected block leader so that he could issue his own personal fatwah demanding the removal of the Dobson family. He has made a case, a subordinate to The Speech, in which he details the incongruity of the Dobson presence. The quibbles range from the mundane (sometimes the Dobson’s have a barbecue and invite no one from the neighborhood) to the egregious (the time the Dobson’s went to Martha’s Vineyard for three weeks in July and did not make arrangements to have the yard taken care of).

Gray also would reinitiate the milk delivery from the local dairy, just as an opportunity to piss in the Dobson’s bottles. He would wake at the crack of dawn to do this.

But the creator’s not answering today. Somehow Gray has come up empty on some kind of karmic bingo card. He manages to make the house payments, to keep the cars in good condition (when not being rained on by hail and a fallen tree), he always has enough for groceries. But something has gone wrong. Something inside him has broken and he must fill the hole left. He must make some kind of change in his life, he must keep this whole thing hidden. Feeling as he does, that he may eventually be called upon to perform extraordinary action, Gray senses an imminent collapse of the life he knows. At 44 years old, Gray is ready to run away and join the circus, he is ready to enlist in the military and participate in a great campaign. But that crushing, nagging, deep-seeded need. Responsibility. So he spends his time putting up wallpaper within himself. Whitewashing cracks so that he can continue. More and more, lately, Gray has been turning to his doctor.

His doctor is very nearly insane. He has managed to scrape together enough good will from years of service, and kept his appointments short to avoid embarrassment, but the hard truth is that Chad Fillmore is slowly entering dementia. Or, was once slowly entering, for now he is nearly ensconced in it. That the small practice he has, catering to the breakneck pace of this suburban group, has flourished despite his almost unavoidable public madness, is one of the rare beauties of this world. If nothing else, this is a man who has won far more than he’s lost and, now in a position to lose everything, goes on winning.

On his last visit, Gray was privy to one of Fillmore’s more flighty moments. This was about two weeks before the hailstorm, before life fell apart completely. Gray has been deluding himself for two years now. Rejecting psychiatric care, but still convinced he needs some kind of therapy, Gray has convinced himself that his frequent trips to Fillmore are for peace of mind, not the pills. Fillmore, for his part, is aware that his mental stability has been shaken by fifty years of difficult overuse. He understands that the unexplained fire in his summer home, in which his wife suffocated and then burned, and the resulting strain of the investigation by the insurance company, all this has made something go off track. At the same time, Fillmore is convinced that he must go on with his practice. He has convinced himself that he is the final word on all matters medical and that his patients would founder in the face of lesser medical knowledge.

Dana refuses to visit Fillmore after a face he made while looking over an x-ray. Dana often projects her own problems onto others. If Dana had her way, most of the population would disappear overnight. She would not miss them. Gray would not remain.

The reality is that Gray would no longer visit Fillmore if Fillmore would not give out the pills so easily, despite what either of them believes. Locked in this weird relationship of need, with Gray believing Fillmore is treating him and Fillmore believe Gray requires his treatment, there is some kind of gravity, wheels in motion. Gray often coughs too hard. He coughs so hard that a blue-gray grid fills his vision. He gives himself nosebleeds. The pills cure everything and he credits Fillmore’s psychiatric care (suggestions of cheating to get ahead at work are the norm of the day).

Gray’s hands are full. Both hands in his pockets, his right is wrapped around the keys to the damaged car. His left is fingering a bottle of mixed pills, Percocets and Percodans and Vicodin and Klonopin. Dana puts a hand on his shoulder and he jumps. She quickly withdraws it and winces, embarrassed. She catches this face in the window of the car and immediately regrets everything. She regrets her marriage and her children. She regrets once throwing Robert against the wall of his playpen because he would not stop crying. But, more than anything, she regrets letting herself be swept under by the tide of Gray’s promise. She opens her mouth to tell Gray this but what comes out is, “We should take a ride.”

Gray agrees immediately, gladly removing his right hand from his pocket. “We’ll check the damage,” he says to the neighbors. “We’ll let you know how it drives.”

The neighbors, Busty and whoever, helped scoot the tree out of the way and then Gray and Dana entered the car casually. They backed up quickly. They could have been fairytale characters setting off into the deep dark woods. They wouldn’t realize how deep they’d gotten into those scary woods until they were lost. And surrounded. And completely without help.

Robert was in the bathroom touching himself. He spent so much time doing this that he had to claim persistent diarrhea. The weather forecast that day had promised slight cloud cover and a pleasant breeze coming in from the coast. Up in Canada, the odds were stacked against an American serial killer’s plea for mercy, his pleading to not be extradited back to the scene of his crimes. Jerry was following the story avidly. Serial killers became a hobby for Jerry when he was a boy and saw a movie that led him to believe outwitting the police was a noble and heroic undertaking.

Sometimes Jerry buys firecrackers from another boy at school, Eric Dobson (Tommy’s non-crippled brother), and uses rubber bands to attach them to his army men. They are not even proper GI Joe action figures, they are some Price Club reject brand that bear significant value if un-tampered with. Jerry is oblivious to the private gold mine in his collection, having never played with them much as a child, and delights in destroying the figures when Gray and Dana leave the house.

At this moment, Jerry has managed to lynch one of the figures, an amazingly intense looking figure with a shock of red plastic hair, from the railing of the second floor deck. He’s learned to partake in this activity anytime that Dana and Gray are both absent because this is when Robert is likely to be in the bathroom “cleaning the pipes”, as he says. Jerry calls it flogging the bishop, walking the trousersnake, or stamping the meat. Jerry is ashamed to feel such lust for his brother and can’t even equate what he feels with lust. He has seen girls naked, both in movies and magazines and one time when a girl’s top fell off at the public swimming pool. He finds himself excited by these incidents, but he feels a different kind of excitement watching Robert clean the pipes.

It might be the thrill of being unobserved, spying on such a private act. But he could never imagine being thrilled watching someone use the toilet. He has become fixated on the act of masturbation while actively avoiding engaging in it. His first attempt was three years ago and he found that he could not ejaculate seminal fluid. What happened instead was an overpowering rush, a sensation of losing all control. It so surprised and frightened him that Jerry jumped off the edge of the bathtub where he had been reclining and positioned his penis over the toilet bowl, afraid that his intestines were about to come out of his small hole. He then urinated profusely, threads of jizzum saturating the stream. It was an oddly pleasurable and painful experience. He tried it three times more with equivalent results before giving it up for fear that the pain was hinting that he was injuring himself in some way.

Now he pretended to be engrossed by the hung soldier but his eyes had a habit of glancing too often at the window to his right. He was nervously pawing at his own crotch by this point. His bowels felt locked, his eyes were wide and sweat was pooling on the back of his neck. Sometimes Jerry thought of buying enough firecrackers to destroy the house and forcing them to move somewhere else. Perhaps to even split up and try things on an individual basis. He could tell this fantasy no more than he could tell anyone that he watched Robert clean the pipes in secret. It became a secret wish he stored in his heart. He harbored no ill will toward his parents, not in particular. As with most parents, they were gone as much as they were there. They could be overbearing or take no interest. They offered little support for what was really needed but thought they were saints for attending every little league game.

Sometimes Jerry would lay on the floor outside his parents’ bedroom to watch the late movies on cable. These movies often had titles that summed up the movie: Cheerleader Squad Days, perhaps, or Stuffin’ It. He did not believe these movies offered sexual excitement to his parents, not like they did to him; no, these were merely watched for entertainment purposes. He had worked this out over many nights of clandestine viewing, factoring in his parents’ shared laughter over jokes that even he thought were childish. Sometimes they would talk about him and Robert. He heard words like “incorrigible”. He would puzzle over these utterances for many hours at school.

It had never been a secret to Jerry that he was not the child his parents had hoped for. Robert was obviously the favorite of the pair, being athletic and dependable, smart and humble and honest about the necessary things. Jerry, on the other hand, often threw tantrums and did his best to avoid any contact with his parents. He found Dana to be a busybody, a disapproving matriarch that bullied more than guided. Gray was a bit of a cipher, a non-entity. Aside from reprimanding him when Dana felt the need to escalate punishment for an infraction, Gray took no interest in his son. Jerry attributed this to a failure on his part to meet expectations.

Jerry very often hated who he was. He had enough self-awareness to see how his peculiarities upset his parents. He saw some severe bullying at school and the kids there only knew the half of his freakness. Jerry had learned, through careful social programming at the hand of mocking accusers, that the best way to enjoy his life was to build a wall around himself, behind which he could do the things that gave him pleasure without exposing him to the harsh critics of youth. He found the adult world to be no better in this regard and was lucky to still slip under the radar of most adults. Jerry was at the right age for a triumphant crowd or a lynching.

The car cruised gracefully past tree stumps, lawnmower revolution talk, a certain house where a reclusive genius was rumored to be continuing the work of Dr. Frankenstein. The light had gotten very stale. The neighborhood had a feeling of being used up. Gray was scanning for conversation. Dana was fingering a loose thread on her cardigan sweater. The car’s heater would not turn off.

“What are we doing here?” Gray asked. “Are we finding a dog, or what?”

“We’re testing.”

“Testing for what? Is there a contaminated water alert?”

Dana sighed and said, “We’ve never had to boil our water here.”

“So what is it? Lost dog?”

Dana became unsure of their motives and began running the window up and down. Gray had clearly been self-medicating again. He probably shouldn’t even be driving. Dana resented his little addictions. While Robert was slipping carrots into his father’s food, Dana had been slipping ground powder from his pills in. She had bought a pestle and mortar to grind the pills, sometimes as many as eight at a time. She did not know if she was trying to kill him, there was no conscious thought attached to the act. She was often left with no other choice, she felt. Maintaining a family meant sacrifices by all involved.

Dana’s daydream began to intrude. She sat behind the Action 8 anchor desk with Jerry Vail and recited the day’s events in a sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes pained voice. She pictured walking hand in hand with Vail through a crowd of eager fans outside the studio every night. Then they would drive slowly through the perfectly kept housing developments, finally arriving at a large mansion with a crystal chandelier lighting the spacious entryway. The children are already fast asleep and the servants are slowly filing out through the side exit. Jerry takes her in his arms and says, “We made it, baby. We made it.”

Then a silence. A pregnant silence, suggesting all sorts of danger. Gray had asked a question but she hadn’t heard it. He was now waiting for a response. She hated to ask him to repeat anything. She hated that he expected a response to every question. She raised the window and said, “What was that?”

“I said I think we should split up,” Gray said calmly.

She balled her fists and breathed hard. She could not look at him, his face might do something weird. Finally she said, “I want the kids. I don’t trust them with you.” Then she grew angry and shouted, “You’d better get the best damn lawyer you can because I’ve got a lot of pain and suffering!”

There was an uncomfortable silence and Gray broke it to say, “I meant we should split up to find the dog.”

Another uncomfortable silence. Dana finally said, “We’re not looking for a-“

But that was as far as she got before the car lurched upward, bouncing as if a speed-bump had appeared in the road. There was only a flash of what had been hit, some kind of small figure moving in the instant before impact. Neither Gray nor Dana could have placed it by that glimpse.

“Oh, Christ,” Gray said slowly, the car now completely stopped. He checked the rearview mirror to confirm that a small figure was pinned to their back trail by gravity’s cruel logic. “I think I hit the dog,” Gray said.

Dana disliked his expression. It was some kind of grimace, a pained look of retention. She looked away, out the window, right at the casually inconspicuous Dobson house. The yard is freshly mowed, there are some toys littering the yard. A bird sits on one corner of the peaked roof and lets out a low call that mixes with the sobbing from the figure in the road.

Gray makes Dana sit in the driver’s seat while he checks what they hit. He doesn’t consciously think this, he feels he has noble reasons, but the true motive is that if a police car happens along, Dana will be pegged as the driver. He tells her that he wants her in the driver’s seat to put the brakes on so he can see what he’s hit. The red glow of the lights reveals a crippled form, a mewling ball of tears with a small pool of blood. Gray is frightened immediately when it makes a noise that could not come from a dog.

“Oh, Christ,” he whispers to himself and then skulks back to the car sheepishly. He motions Dana back to the passenger seat and then climbs in and takes a deep breath and says, “It’s the kid. The cripple.”

Dana looks toward the Dobson house and then turns back to Gray and asks, “Should we tell them?”

Gray considers carefully, one foot still outside the car door, before saying, “Let’s take him to the hospital. We can call them from there.”

Dana becomes agitated and argues, “They’re right there.”

“Fine,” Gray says, utterly perturbed by her stubbornness. “I’ll take him and you go tell them.”

Dana’s heart sinks. She does not want to be in the spotlight. Gray is the provider, loathe as she is to admit it, and while she has no problem managing the affairs of the house, she feels it is his duty to deal with the difficult tasks. Also, she has a suspicion that life insurance will not pay off if he is executed by the state for vehicular manslaughter, as he surely will. She changes her mind about everything.

“You were right,” she tells him. “We should split up. We’re going nowhere.”

Gray is distracted by the increasing volume of Tommy Dobson’s moans and ignores what Dana is saying. “If you’re going, then go. But I’m putting him in the trunk.”

Gray leaps from the car, his trick knee easily taking the maneuver, and marches resolutely toward the prostrate boy. He grows more angry with each step. He’s veered from reciting The Speech (for surely THIS is the time when he will have to use it) and is now jabbering in his head a hateful rant. It soon spills over to actual speaking and he is mumbling, “God damn Dobson trash stinking up our neighborhood with white on white tennis attire at some kind of pool party where nobody else is invited. Keep your cripple out of the street because I might run the brat down and then I’ll go to jail when this is clearly all your fault. Irresponsible Ivy League prep assholes…”

By the time he’s reached Tommy, Gray’s face has turned red and the sweat rolls down his face in beads. His fists are clenched, the knuckles white with tension. The last fifteen years have all piled up on him and he resents his job for killing him a minute at a time. He hates his wife for adding more crust to his bread. He hates his children for being the problem to deal with when things are good. And he hates this little crippled shit in front of him because he should have been shipped off to some facility to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

Without thinking, Gray hisses at the boy, “What are you doing in the road, you fuckhead?” and kicks him hard in the side. Tommy moans loudly and half-rolls away from Gray’s loafer.

Dana exits the car and runs as middle-aged housewives do. As she approaches Gray she says, “We could just leave him here. What could he say?”

Gray turns on her, ready to dole out another kick. But her face stops him. For once, her face is full of compassion towards him. There is fear, sure, but there is concern. She does not want her husband to go to jail.

“Say?” Gray asks and then has a nervous, private laugh of fear and anxiety. “Nothing. He’s deaf and dumb and he’s retarded anyway. Even if he talked, he couldn’t say anything that anyone would listen to.”

Gray turns and presses a foot onto Tommy’s chest, pushing down a bit. “What do you say there, champ? You gonna rat us out?” And then Gray lets out another of those low, eerie, nervous laughs.

And Tommy whispers.

Gray’s blood runs cold. He senses things about to go wrong again.

“I thought you said he couldn’t talk,” Dana worries, this new warp in the plan discomforting her.

Gray drops to his knees and says over his shoulder, “Everyone says he can’t. I just thought-“

And at this point, Gray’s plan falls apart because of something that Sheila Dobson, the youngest daughter of the clan, has spent months working on.

Sheila is a precocious child with a hand in every affair of the neighborhood. She often pictures herself being courted by a strange prince. The prince inevitably turns out to be a force of evil behind his flowing blonde hair and she must best him with her cunning. Tommy is, in many ways, Sheila’s best friend. He joins her at her tea parties and will attempt to put a protective arm around her shoulders when she’s scared. Eric will pull her hair and push her down the stairs but Tommy is always there to hold her hand and try to put an arm around her.

For several months, Sheila has been making flash cards out of cardboard with numbers and letters on them. With a remarkable innate skill, likely borne from her desire to help Tommy at all costs, she has drilled the information into his head.

So now, for the first time outside of Sheila’s room, Tommy reveals his secret speech abilities and the knowledge he has learned. He whispers, in a hoarse and pained voice, “6D4 1138.”

Gray falls backwards onto his ass, the wind taken out of him. He is measuring everything that he has to lose at this point, every single thing he owns and then the things that really mean anything to him. More than reworking The Speech, Gray enjoys spending most of his time locked in the basement workshop. He has crafted and assembled a wooden version of Fenway Park, he has built countless model airplanes, and sometimes he just sands a block of wood until nothing remains. He refuses to even think of The Speech at this time, even though he considers that the most important component of his life. This is his time. Pictures of the family from five years ago are framed and in a perfect row across all walls. This is Gray’s pleasure.

And now it’s gone.

“He talked,” Dana whispers loudly, suddenly spooked by how rapidly the sun has left the sky. “You said he couldn’t.”

There is an intense pause while Gray stares into the abyss.

“What’s he saying?” Dana whispers.

This question pulls Gray from his reverie and, still staring at Tommy, he responds, “Our license plate.”

Jerry had been calling Beverly Anglio’s house and hanging up. He started this about four months ago and does it whenever his parents aren’t home. Robert is supposed to be watching him, but Robert considers Jerry to be a bit of a growth on his life, best dealt with by ignoring and avoiding. Usually Jerry’s phone call will be intercepted by Beverly’s asshole dad, the neighborhood drunk. The Anglio’s only tangentially lived in the neighborhood. On the far north side, right by the border, was an expensive mansion owned by old money. Patrick Anglio, Beverly’s father, was the handyman for this residence and he and his small family occupied the small guest house.

Jerry loathed Patrick Anglio for answering the phone when he was trying to reach Beverly. The end result was the same, Jerry would simply hang up. But he preferred to hang up after hearing Beverly’s croaking voice. One afternoon stands out in his memory and he always hopes to recreate it.

Beverly answered the phone and immediately coughed. After this small fit was finished she demanded, “Who is this?”

Jerry remained silent, feeling a slow bulge rising in his pants.

“I’m in a bath towel here,” she said. “Or can you see that?”

Jerry remained silent, listening intently.

“Are you outside my window? Can you see me standing up right now?”

Although there was no sound, Beverly casually stated, “I dropped the towel.”

Jerry hung up immediately, his heart beating too fast and his breath struggling for purchase. It was the most erotic moment of his life.

Robert’s most erotic moment had involved a watermelon with a hole in it and a fantasy about Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage. Despite how much time Robert invested in cleaning the pipes, his real secret addiction was stealing. He had made a four-mile bike ride to the nearest thrift store to buy the largest pants he could find. Dana dismissed this with regret, just assuming it was part of hip hop culture spreading to the suburbs, even though Robert’s musical tastes leaned towards Green Day and Rage Against the Machine rather than Tupac.

Robert’s stealing was an unknown activity, completely unknown. Robert looked as proper and upstanding as a teenager can possibly look, minus the baggy pants with hidden pockets, and came from a financially stable family. There was simply no reason, other than his age, to suspect that Robert might be stealing. The fact that he only operated in stores nearby, and therefore was known as a member of the Danslinger family, facilitated his passion.

Robert had escalated his heists. It was no longer just shoplifting, now he was pilfering open lockers at school and breaking into cars. Like any addiction, Robert had to go further each time to get the same high. No one suspected him and Robert felt this was the one thing he could never tell anyone. When Robert thought of the future, having a wife and children, he never once thought that he would not be stealing. He envisioned a life of crime, robbing banks in the dead of night, daring robberies at warehouses. He could imagine no better life than as a professional thief, it would satisfy him on every level. Everything else he did, sports and getting good grades, doing chores when asked, it was all just so that he could put up a front of being an honest and responsible person. Thieves work best under the cover of honesty.

Robert began to judge people by how open they left themselves to burglary. Anyone foolish enough to trust him alone for three minutes in their bedroom ended up losing some usually minor pieces, just out of habit for Robert. Sometimes he felt guilty about stealing from friends, mostly he felt that he was superior because he would never allow someone to steal from him.

Now Robert was carefully rifling through his father’s closet. He had promised himself that he would never steal from his parents. But Robert found himself breaking most promises these days.

Jerry dialed the number again, thankful that the drunk couldn’t afford Caller ID. He was touching himself absently, same as anytime he was nervous. The phone calls wrecked his nerves, he found himself shaking after he had done the deed each time. He sometimes had to take a minute afterwards just to recover himself lest his voice have a quiver. This time the phone went unanswered. A dog barked outside.

Gray wordlessly emptied items from the trunk to make room for the boy’s body. A roadside emergency kit, a tent from camping two years ago, a moldy package of hot dog buns that had fallen out of a grocery bag some time ago, the spare tire, a jack, a tire iron, typical suburban auto gear. Gray was focused on the task, praying that there was time to get it all done. If another car happened along at this moment…

Dana was carefully dabbing at Tommy’s face with a glove from her purse. She whispers to him.

“Baby, don’t cry,” she whispers. “You can be on the news after we go to the hospital. Maybe you’ll even get to meet Jerry Vail. It’s nothing, there’s no problem. Gray can take care of everything.”

Tommy just moans softly, blood flowing from a puncture in his side.

Gray approaches and casually moves Dana aside. She begins to protest but he hisses at her to remain quiet. With effort, he hoists the child into the air and carelessly tosses him into the trunk.

“I’m walking back,” Dana tells him.

“You’re not coming with?”

“I want a walk. That leather…I stick to it in this humidity.”

Gray considers and then asks, “Are you saying to take him to the hospital or…?”

“I trust you,” Dana replies. “You’ll do the right thing.”

Then she turns around and walks down the street, quickly disappearing as the light from the streetlight dissolves around her.

Gray circles the hospital parking lot three times before actually pulling into it. His mind is occupied with calculating the most appropriate move. He’s already decided that he can’t just walk in there with the boy because that would lead to questions and that would lead to a legal battle. He’s almost decided to just leave the boy on the sidewalk outside the emergency room when the idea of security cameras occurs. His options this limited, Gray decides it is best to return the boy to the neighborhood, particularly the ditch that runs alongside the scrap of forest known as the Wasteland to the local children.

Floating somewhere in the back of his mind is the certainty that the boy will divulge the license plate if he survives. Without actually thinking about it, Gray has made up his mind to make sure the boy doesn’t talk. That is why he does not turn right to head back to the neighborhood, instead he takes a left and continues for miles before turning several times in an effort to lose his way. If Gray can’t find his way, he figures he is not accountable for being in that area. He pulls to a stop in the breakdown lane not long after passing a Dairy Queen. He’s dying for some ice cream but knows it would be the height of stupidity to be seen there. He is contemplating the tire iron laying across his lap.

Gray practically leaps from the car, feeling renewed passion now that his course of action is an inevitability. He paces behind the car, counting the minutes between cars. After twelve minutes, he decides there is no traffic imminent, or at least he hopes so. His father used to say, “As one tiger said to the other: Eat often. And if you can’t eat, shit.”

Gray opens the trunk and drags the boy out. He appears to be unconscious and Gray hopes this will make things easier. Struggling to drag the boy with one arm and to hold the tire iron with the other is not easy and Gray abandons the idea of dragging the body into the woods. Instead, he drops Tommy right by the road and, with one last glance around for headlights, goes to work.

The neighbors have given up on waiting for Dana and Gray’s return, so Dana slips inside the house without any hassle. She immediately begins to cut a cucumber for her eyes and then go upstairs to draw a bath. Robert sticks his head out of his room to ask her where Gray is.

“He’s playing golf,” Dana says unenthusiastically.

“At night?” Robert asks, confused.

“The balls glow,” Dana says, continuing to her room.

“Is something wrong?” Robert asks.

She walks on without answering.

Gray makes a point of not driving down the Dobson‘s street, even though it means circling his street and coming at it from the opposite end. Because of this, Gray does not see the police marking off the area and containing the crime scene. Had it just been a matter of the missing person report or the abandoned tire, this would not be necessary. But those two combined with the blood on the asphalt has already led the police to some pretty grim conclusions.

Patty Dobson is only capable of tears. John Dobson’s icy, contained demeanor serves to antagonize her. The police don’t say a lot to them and they both know that this is a bad sign.

Dana picked at her eggs. She had heard someone at the farmer’s market call eggs “a chicken’s period” and had been unable to digest them ever since. Unfortunately, her grocery store had the best prices on eggs in the county.

Gray looked like a submarine captain in a WWII movie. He had not shaved in two days and his eyes were crusted with sleep residue. His hair was reaching Einstein proportions. His gut masked itself behind a sparse bed of hair. He looked grayer, more withered. He looked like a fleet of Nazi troop transports had appeared on the other end of the radar. With two battleships and a U-boat in between.

“Did you tell the kids?” Gray asks, his hand fumbling to open the fridge. He knows his orange juice is locked in there.

“I said you’d pick them up from practice.”

“Do they both practice?” Gray wondered.

Dana instantly felt the gap between the life Gray lived and her own. They were like parts of a machine that functioned together, depended on each other, but were never ever to touch. She picked at her eggs.

“Christ, Dana, should we hide the car? Are there witnesses?” Gray asked.

“Hide the car from whom?”

“The boys are old enough to read the papers. They’ll know what’s happened. Christ, it’ll be all over school.”

Dana sighed, pushed the plate of eggs aside and re-positioned the grapefruit, and then said, “Don’t take our Lord’s name in vain, please.”

Gray was beside himself for a second. The way she said that, not as a commanding mother of a child, but more like a resigned mother of a teenager that still has final say on such matters. Gray immediately felt the urge to apologize. To her or to God was uncertain. Instead, he opened the knife drawer and removed a small steak knife. “Why do they make them this small?” he pondered, cleaning his nails with the blade.

“For children,” Dana said, poking into her grapefruit. A bit of the juice squirted her in the face and she recoiled. Gray missed this because he was now measuring the blade against the handle of the oven.

“Why would you give a child a steak knife?” Gray asked. “It’s preposterous. Children don’t even like steak, they like hotdogs. You give a kid a knife, it’s like giving him a…”

“A baseball bat? Or a Boy Scout knife? Or a hockey stick?” Dana poked, wiping the grapefruit juice from her face. She thought, under the circumstances, her skin must look amazing. Way better than any of the other famous murderers she’d seen. Well…maybe not Ted Bundy.

Gray managed to get the fridge open and he began his rummaging. “Fine, fine,” he said with resignation, “kids play with dangerous things all the time. I just think the chances of serious injury during dinner should be kept to a minimum. I don’t think men should let women have knives at dinner if they’re drinking.”

Without warning, Dana snatched up the grapefruit and hurled it at Gray. It connected with the back of his head and bounced somewhere toward the dining room. Gray turned slowly and then, with no explanation, began to dance a weird jig. This frightened Dana and she immediately regretted the action she had just taken. She tightened her grip on the serrated spoon in her hand. It was fight or flight time.

Instead of advancing on her, Gray turned to the sink and began washing his hands while loudly humming a tune. “What is that?” Gray asked, confused. “What song is that? It’s some song, I’ve heard it. But what the Christ is it?” This was a chancy move on Gray’s part, taking the Lord’s name again. But, he figured she was out of artillery.

Dana was poking the skin under her eyes to determine the severity of sag. She answered, nonchalantly and with total disinterest, “It’s from that video game. The one with all the flashing lights that Jerry plays.”

Gray shuts off the faucet and wipes his hands on a paper towel, still on the roll. Dana seethes.

“He’s a weird kid, isn’t he?” Gray muses.

“He’s got a weird father,” Dana shoots back.

Gray effortlessly lobs the paper towel at the wastebasket and misses by a good two feet.

“He’ll be a weird father,” Gray shoots again, this time hitting closer to home.

“You think he’ll settle down?”

“I think he’d never give up the novelty of hearing people say, over and over, ‘These are Jerry’s kids.’”

“He probably doesn’t even know who Jerry Lewis is,” Dana says.

Gray looks at her and then follows her eyes to the ball of wastepaper on the floor. Walking to retrieve it, he says, “I’ll bet he has some idea. Have you ever heard him sing?”

“Have you?”

“Have you seen him dance?”

“Has anyone?”

Gray tosses the balled up paper towel into the trashcan and then says, “Christ, were we just talking about being grandparents?”

Dana drops the serrated spoon and stands. She turns and starts walking away.

“I’m sorry,” Gray calls after her. “I didn’t mean to! Christ, I- Oh, Christ- I didn’t mean to, I can’t stop!”

He hears her clomping up the stairs, all the silence of a fleet of horses. He shouts toward the ceiling, “Whose practice and what time and where is it?”

Then he hears a door slam.

Jerry rushed into the kitchen and shouted, “Dad, I need twelve bucks for the crappy school food drive!”

Gray is staring at his feet. He is, quite improbably, wearing a protective cover of Wonderbread bags over his regulation white sneakers. Gray does not know whether to correct his language, whether saying “crappy” is allowed in this house. He can not wrap his brain around the words that his son has just yelled.

Jerry looks at Gray and says, “Dad? Do you have twelve dollars?”

Gray continues staring at Jerry’s feet and then glances up to his belt. It is fashioned out of a string of Christmas lights.

Robert enters the kitchen and casually smacks Jerry on the back of the head as he walks past. He opens the fridge and removes, of all things, a cluster of grapes.

“I’m gonna be lean,” Robert says to them and then ties his robe shut. “You look taller if you’re lean.”

“Dad,” Jerry says. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Gray finds he has no pockets to stick his hands in so he makes a show of expanding his waistband and then letting it snap back.

“Are you going into work today?” Robert asks. “Because I could use some things if you’re, like, going to the mall. But if you’re working-“

With no forethought, Gray says, “I don’t work there anymore.”

Jerry laughs hysterically. Robert punches him in the arm and then snaps his fingers. At that same instant, the phone rings. Robert walks to answer it.

“How’d you do that?” Jerry demands of him. “How’d you do that? Did you see, dad? Did you see? He snapped his fingers and the phone rang! How’d you do that?”

Gray was still wrestling with Jerry’s opening statement. What did those words mean? “I need twelve dollars for the school food drive.” What did it mean? He understood each word, but they made no sense when strung together like this. Did they have to buy food from the cafeteria to donate? Did they pay the school to buy food?

Robert turned toward Gray and, talking into the phone, “He says he doesn’t work anymore. Well I don’t know, it’s not like I run the house. I can ask him or I can give him the phone. Yes, he’s standing right here.”

Gray cowered, convinced it was Dana calling from her cell phone from upstairs. He grabbed Jerry and positioned him between himself and Robert. Robert held out the phone.

“Take it, dad,” Robert said.

“We’re not buying anything!” Gray retorted, fear evident in his words.

“They’re not selling,” Robert replied. “It’s the police.”

Gray’s blood ran cold and, rather than walking the five feet to the phone, he went around the kitchen's island and approached the phone from the side. He slowly reached out for the receiver. Robert shoved it into his hand and then limbo’d under the cord to exit the kitchen.

“What’s all this then?” Gray said into the phone, his voice illogically assuming a thick cockney accent.

Jerry was picking at a scab on his elbow. He noticed that one of Gray’s testicles was hanging from the bottom of his too small boxer shorts. The Wonderbread bags were in place to protect him from the fleas that he was sure inhabited the house. They also worked to protect from ticks, as well as surely acting as a flotation device in case of accidental spills into lakes, quarries, oceans, rivers, creeks, and sewage treatment facilities. The string of Christmas lights had no explanation.

Gray quietly accepted the officer’s offer for an interview at home. He did this casually, inwardly sighing relief because he knew that it was Dana that would give the interview. Words were mentioned about an accident in the neighborhood and the officer implored him to remain calm and go on with life as if nothing had happened. Gray wanted to laugh. Nothing had happened? Everything had happened. Everything bad that could happen had happened and he was secretly happy that he would not face the immediate threat of the consequences.

“No,” he explained. “Of course I still work. I was just having fun with my son. I figure he thinks I’m unemployed, he’ll stop pestering me to buy ‘im a car, what what?”

The silence on the other end of the line chilled his blood. Gray continued with, “Look, it’s a madhouse around here. We’ve got a leak in the roof from that hailstorm. Water’s coming down on my head like a fucking sieve. I’d hire some Mexicans to repair it, but where the hell would you find them on a Tuesday?”

Again, an aggressive silence.

“Listen,” Gray says, “T. Boone Pickens just walked in here. I’ve gotta design a parade float for the alumni or something. Just come see my wife and she’ll straighten everything out.” Then he hangs up the phone and begins to weep. Jerry mills around the kitchen’s island, probing drawers for needed supplies. Eventually, he discovers some needle-nose pliers and slides this instrument up his sleeve. Then he wipes his hands on a dishtowel and tugs on his underwear.

Gray cries so quietly that Jerry does not even realize what is transpiring. Jerry slides out of the room gracefully, his Wonderbread-wrapped feet making crinkling noises as he departs.

Dana sits in front of the television without receiving any of the information it conveys. The thing might as well be off. As it turns from talk shows to soap operas and finally to tabloid news, she merely sees in herself a reflection of time as it was. She senses that girl, just 20 years old, convinced she is in love and ready to kill or die for it. Now she had more empty wine bottles in her bedroom than room in her heart to feel anything but pity for that poor girl.

Was she stupid? Had she made some rookie mistake, marrying the first man she ever felt she could love? And now, all these years later, she was weighing her virtues and the options she had turned down. Why could she not fall in love with a man that was a success? Why was she doomed to play nurse/mother to a mumbling fuck up that had killed a boy and covered it up? She would engage in this type of reverie at least once a month, but this was worse than all the previous sessions combined. It wasn’t that she felt trapped by the life she lived, she could easily leave at any moment. No court would give him the kids and she would certainly have a generous alimony payment every month. Leaving did not appeal to her and it was not what bothered her. What she considered at these times, rather, was the options that had been closed because of her choices.

Maybe she would have gone to Spain and met a fiery lover that also fought bulls. Or had a memorable run in with a Congressman’s promising son on the slopes of Aspen. She could have written that television show she had always dreamed of, in which the protagonist finds life incompatible with love and quickly commits suicide only to discover that the world of the dead is as much about politics and hurt feelings as the life she sought to escape.

Dana would look at that twenty years young girl, moving away from the drama major in college to something a bit more practical. She would see her entranced by the dashing tennis player who was on the debate team. A man that despised golf and corporate yes men. She looked at this girl from the future, from a lifetime of following that girl’s purest wants and desires. And she would silently wish that she could scream at the girl. “Go live!” she would shout. “Love means nothing with one person. Love is an illusion we create so that we don’t have to face being alone.”

She would die alone. She would end up in a car crash that would cost her mobility. Her children would put her in a shady nursing home, as surely as they would struggle to come to terms with the economy that her generation had given them. She wanted to tell her own children to buy land because God wouldn’t be making more of it. She wanted to apologize for bringing them up in a world where life dies slowly if you’re lucky.

There was a pain somewhere between her shoulder blades. Dana imagined it was her heart, trying to escape out the back. She figured it only fair, she had been taxing it so much in the last day.

“It seems to me,” she tells herself, “that we’re in this together and, for the first time in a long time, we can only rely on each other. And that’s why I hate him now more than ever. I could have left. I could have started over and disappeared and dropped out and just been someone else. Now I have to stay here forever to deal with what we’ve done here.”

She wants to cry but instead she sleeps. She has swallowed a whole bottle of Tylenol PM and hopes that she will still wake up so she can apologize for even thinking of disappearing after it is too late to disappear openly. This is not a suicide attempt, it is a necessary cleansing ritual. She wants to escape into dreams, where Jerry Vail is the champion of all that is right in the world. So she dreams.

She is the weather girl on Channel 12 and she was having a very secret affair with Jerry Vail. She wears low-cut tops and a lot of black skirts. She feels her fashion is tasteful and that Jerry loves her for who she is more than for how she looks. Regardless, in her dreams Dana looks more fantastic than she did even as a young college girl.

Jerry says, into the camera, “And now Dana will give us the weekend outlook. Dana, are these storms here to stay?”

The red light comes on and Dana knows that the whole world is watching. She stretches her calves and smiles big and says, “Those hail storms sure are here to stay, Jerry. We have word that there’s been breaches of the dams as far south as Brixton. You know that means that we’re in for heavy times for a while.”

She has improvised these lines and everyone in the studio is staring at her. She meekly apologizes and follows up with, “It’ll never be too late to get that garden going again this year.”

“Sounds amazing,” Jerry says, the camera returning to the anchor desk. “But we’ve had reports of a heinous crime on the city’s southeast side. Criminals have destroyed a family’s life for no apparent reason. I’d like to go now to our man on the scene, Gray Danslinger.”

Dana recoils. She emphatically shouts, “No!”

“That’s right, Jerry,” Gray says. “Not only are we married, we are stuck together. There is no escape now because I might have to kill her just to keep her quiet. I’m looking at a hard life sentence for Dana because of what we did together. She may not tell anyone, but I’m sure everyone will know. Her best bet is to turn me in and testify against me. She might lose the kids or even go to jail herself, but she will be forever linked with me after this.”

“That sounds like a rough turn of events,” Jerry says with a smile. “I’d like to ask Dana what she forecasts for the upcoming years?”

The red light comes on again and Dana freezes. Her smile is locked in a grimace, she would hate knowing she looks like this. The show’s producer is making frantic motions with his arms, indicating that she has to speak.

“No,” Dana finally says. “I’m going to have to disagree with Gray. This hasn’t locked us together, it’s made me realize what freedom is.”

There is a laugh from Gray, on location at a tire fire, and he chimes in with, “There’s no freedom. Your freedom is picking a suitable pattern for the bathroom. You may like to think about moving on, but what you’re looking at is another 20 years of not being there at all.”

“No,” Dana says again.

“That’s right,” Jerry Vail enthuses. “She’s got workmen to call for everything from building a fence in case the boys want a dog to cutting tree growth away from overhead lines.”

“You said it, Jerry,” Gray says. “I’m going to come home every night after work and we’ll sit down as a family and not talk about anything. We’ll pretend we care about our kids, but really they’re someone else’s problem, we just live with them. We’ll argue over bills and she’ll scan the cell phone statement every month to see if I’ve made any unusual calls. We don’t love each other and we don’t hate each other because, after twenty years of this, I’m not sure we’ve even met each other. And we don’t want to. We don’t want to know each other. Because we’ve got another twenty years to look at the big picture.”

“Then you die,” Dana says, shocked at her own words.

Alarm bells sound in the studio and Jerry Vail waves his arms shouting, “She said the word of the day! That means a ham goes to the parents of the poor little deaf-mute boy that could have continued to drain the money and time and attention of his poor, put upon parents. And if they don’t get that ham, YOU win a free pizza, delivered by Dana herself in a Rocky Raccoon costume.”

“That’s right, Jerry” Gray says with a laugh, now standing in front of city hall. “We’re all rooting for her down here because we know that she can never leave. She’ll never be happy again and she can never leave.”