Mr. Hibma took out the garbage and replaced the bag, then he began dusting. He shoved several rags in his pockets and carried a can of Pledge. In high corners he found cobwebs. He dusted every flat surface he could find, working up a light sweat, then returned to the kitchen and threw out all the rags, clean or dirty. He dug out butter, flour, milk, sugar, eggs. He banged around in his drawers until he found a yellow sheet of paper on which was written a recipe for rugelachs. It was the old man’s recipe, the man who’d given him the inheritance, the man whose inheritance he had blown. Incredibly, Mr. Hibma had all the ingredients he needed.
Preparing the rugelachs did not help. Mr. Hibma got them into the oven, set the timer for twenty-five minutes, and began pacing laps around the inside of his villa. Everything he looked at annoyed him. He fetched a garbage bag from the kitchen and took it to his CD rack. He dropped new wave CD after new wave CD in the bag, until the plastic began to tear. He got another bag for rock, another for classical. He tied the bags and rested them near the door, then advanced to the bedroom and dealt with his wardrobe. His socks had holes in them, T-shirts had pit-stains. He stuffed two more garbage bags. He went to the kitchen, where the rugelachs were almost ready, and disposed of old vitamins and spice bottles and coupons, musty macaroni boxes. He took the rugelachs out of the oven and placed them on a platter to cool. He grabbed all the trash bags he’d filled, heaving them over his shoulders, and lugged them in one load out to the dumpsters.
On the way back, he stopped at the mailboxes. There was a letter, forwarded from Clermont. D. Register. Mr. Hibma rubbed his thumb over the return address. His ears began to buzz. Holy shit, Dale had written him back. Mr. Hibma’s forehead tingled. He had no idea who he was. He was in the middle of Florida, at a bank of mailboxes. He sniffed the envelope and it smelled salty. He wasn’t going to fumble ripping it open. He was going to tear it evenly across the top.
Mr. H,
I have decided to respond to you even with the risk that your plan is not in earnest, because if you fail to do what you propose, your letters themselves may constitute some sort of art. I understand that this is probably a hoax, but the world needs all kinds of people, even perpetrators of hoaxes.
Mr. Hibma didn’t feel stoned anymore. When a stranger from another continent challenges the validity of your very self, you are no longer stoned. Dale had written him back. His letter hadn’t been redirected by handlers. Dale was interested in Mr. Hibma. She wanted to believe he could kill someone. She wouldn’t say that, but Mr. Hibma knew. Inside, she was rooting for him. She believed in his old self, the self from before he’d started trying to change. She wasn’t a stranger. Mr. Hibma had something like a friend. For him, this was what a friend was.
Mr. Hibma felt like a con man and he felt gullible. He’d conned himself with this plan to mold himself into a real middle school teacher, a monitor, a mentor, and he’d fallen for it. What was he trying to do to himself — hosting wing meetings and buying greeting cards and forcing his smile on everyone and carrying his burritos across the hall to the lounge to sit in there with the rest of them? He’d seen this as his future and it was coming apart in a matter of moments. He was ashamed. He’d been trying to make things easier on himself, as if they ever could be.
Mr. Hibma went inside and gorged himself on the rugelachs, stopping every couple minutes to read Dale’s letter again. It was handwritten. Mr. Hibma had Dale’s handwriting and she had his. He was getting grease smudges all over the paper. He didn’t care. He had no idea what Dale looked like, and he wished he could picture her at her desk, overlooking Reykjavik, a begrudged grin on her face as she wrote Mr. Hibma’s reply. He had no idea if he was conning Dale as he’d conned himself. He had no idea if he could follow through on his proposal, and he didn’t expect to know. It wasn’t something you guessed at. Mr. Hibma was going to find out if he was indeed a perpetrator of hoaxes. He was going to find out if he could change the basic fabric of his life. He was going to call his own bluff.
PART THREE
His evening free, Toby took a walk with Shelby after track practice. The days were getting longer. The woods were producing that ticking sound that came with heat. They walked alongside a straight country road on a trail beaten into the weeds. They neared the post office and could hear that something was happening on the other side. It was a fundraiser. Toby and Shelby listened to some people talking and understood what it was for. The last train that would ever push itself through Citrus County was scheduled for next Thursday, and after that the tracks would have no use. These people had gathered with the intention of turning the tracks into a bike trail. They looked like bikers, most of them. Toby could imagine them wearing fingerless gloves and bright helmets.
“I don’t know how I feel about this,” Shelby said. “Walking along train tracks is important for little kids.”
“I used to do it,” said Toby.
They did a lap around the gathering. There were T-shirts, bumper stickers. Someone from a bike shop had a table set up. Everyone was united.
“I’m not going to worry about it,” Shelby said. “I’m going to support this.” She took a five-dollar bill out of one of her pockets and dropped it in a big jar. “It’s not my job to protest things.”
“We’re entitled to a hot dog,” Toby said.
They moved to the refreshment table and picked up hot dogs and cans of soda. There was a backhoe sitting on the edge of the post office lawn, and Toby and Shelby went and sat in the yellow scoop, in the shade. The backhoe was enormous. It was hard to say if its presence was related to the fundraiser.
Toby sipped his soda. He unwrapped his hot dog from many layers of limp tin foil. He felt comfortable with all the people around. He liked being with Shelby when there was no chance of them making out. He watched her open ketchup packets and mustard packets and squeeze them.
“My mom used to take these from places,” she said.
Toby didn’t really want his hot dog, now that he smelled it. The soda was enough.
“Fast food places,” Shelby said. “Even something like this. She’d clean them out. We had buckets of sweetener.”
“Were you poor?” Toby asked.
“Not really. She was, growing up.”
“I don’t consider that stealing,” Toby said.
“To this day, when I use a big ketchup bottle it feels like a treat.”
Shelby stacked the empty packets in the tin foil and balled the foil up. She took a bite of her hot dog. Dusk was coming on, but there were no crickets out or anything. People were still showing up to the gathering, hardly anywhere to park.
“Look at that little thing,” Shelby said.
Toby craned his neck. It was a tree frog, right next to Shelby’s leg. It looked frightened. It didn’t belong in the scoop of the backhoe, shady spot or not.
“I used to have one of those as a pet,” Toby said.
“Did you catch it and keep it in a jar?”