“Clean or dirty, that’s not the point. If standing up needs to be done, I’ll do it. I—we—don’t need you to play Sir Galahad. For one thing, you’re a little too old for the part.” Her eyes flicked down his shirt front. “For another, you’re a little too overweight.”
Given Scott’s current condition, this jab entirely missed the mark, but he felt a certain sour amusement at her employment of it; she would have been infuriated to hear a man say some woman was a little too old and a little too overweight to play the part of Guinevere.
“I hear you,” he said. “Point taken.”
She seemed momentarily disconcerted by the mildness of his reply—as if she had swung at an easy target and somehow missed entirely.
“Are we done, Ms. McComb?”
“One other thing. I want you to stay away from my wife.”
So she knew he and Donaldson had talked, and now it was Scott’s turn to hesitate. Had Missy told McComb that she had gone to Scott, or had she, perhaps in order to keep the peace, told McComb that Scott had come to her? If he asked, he might get her in trouble, and he didn’t want to do that. He was no marriage expert—his own being a fine case in point—but he thought the problems with the restaurant were already putting the couple’s relationship under enough strain.
“All right,” he said. “Now are we done?”
“Yes.” And, as she had at the end of their first meeting, before closing the door in his face: “Good discussion.”
He watched her mount the steps, slim and quick in her black pants and white shirt. He could see her running up and down the bandstand steps, much faster than he could manage even after dropping forty pounds, and as light on her feet as a ballerina. What was it Mike Badalamente had said? I can’t wait to run with her, not that I’ll be running with her long.
God had given her a beautiful body for running, and Scott wished to God she was enjoying it more. He guessed that, behind the superior smile, Deirdre McComb wasn’t enjoying much these days.
“Ms. McComb?”
She turned. Waited.
“It really was a fine meal.”
No smile for this, superior or otherwise. “Good. I suppose you’ve already passed that on to Missy by way of Gina, but I’m happy to pass it on again. And now that you’ve been here, and shown yourself to be on the side of the politically correct angels, why don’t you stick to Patsy’s? I think we’ll all be more comfortable that way.”
She went inside. Scott stood on the sidewalk for a moment, feeling… what? It was such a weird mix of emotions that he guessed there was no single word for it. Chastened, yes. Slightly amused, check. A bit pissed off. But most of all, sad. Here was a woman who didn’t want an olive branch, and he had believed—naively, it seemed—that everyone wanted one of those.
Probably Doctor Bob’s right and I’m still a child, he thought. Hell, I don’t even know who Milburn Stone was.
The street was too quiet for him to feel okay about even a short honk, so he went across the street and stood beside Ellis at the window of the Book Nook.
“Get it straightened out?” Doctor Bob asked.
“Not exactly. She told me to leave her wife alone.”
Doctor Bob turned to him. “Then I suggest you do that.”
He drove Ellis home, and mercifully, Doctor Bob didn’t spend any of the trip importuning Scott to check into Mass General, the Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic, or NASA. Instead, as he got out, he thanked Scott for an interesting evening and told him to stay in touch.
“Of course I will,” Scott said. “We’re sort of in this together now.”
“That being the case, I wonder if you’d come over, perhaps Sunday. Myra won’t be back and we could watch the Patriots upstairs instead of in my poor excuse for a man-cave. Also, I’d like to take some measurements. Start keeping a record. Would you allow that much?”
“Yes to the football, no to the measurements,” Scott said. “At least for now. Okay?”
“I accept your decision,” Doctor Bob said. “That really was a fine meal. I didn’t miss the meat at all.”
“Neither did I,” Scott said, but this wasn’t precisely true. When he got home, he made himself a salami sandwich with brown mustard. Then he stripped and stepped on the bathroom scale. He had declined the measurements because he was sure Doctor Bob would also want a weigh-in each time he checked Scott’s muscle density, and he had an intuition—or perhaps it was some deep physical self-knowledge—which now proved to be correct. He had been at a little over 201 that morning. Now, after a big dinner followed by a hefty snack, he was at 199.
The process was speeding up.
CHAPTER 3
The Wager
That was a gorgeous late October in Castle Rock, with day after day of cloudless blue skies and warm temperatures. The politically progressive minority spoke of global warming; the more conservative majority called it an especially fine Indian summer that would soon be followed by a typical Maine winter; everyone enjoyed it. Pumpkins came out on stoops, black cats and skeletons danced in the windows of houses, trick-or-treaters were duly warned at an elementary school assembly to stay on the sidewalks when the big night came, and only take wrapped treats. The high schoolers went in costume to the annual Halloween dance in the gym, for which a local garage band, Big Top, renamed themselves Pennywise and the Clowns.
In the two weeks or so since his dinner with Ellis, Scott continued to lose weight at a slowly accelerating pace. He was down to 180, a total drop of sixty pounds, but he continued to feel fine, tip-top, in the pink. On Halloween afternoon he drove to the CVS drugstore in Castle Rock’s new strip mall, and bought more Halloween candy than he would probably need. Residents of the View didn’t get a lot of costumed customers these days (there had been more before the collapse of the Suicide Stairs a few years earlier), but whatever the little beggars didn’t take, he would eat himself. One of the benefits of his peculiar condition, aside from all the extra energy, was how he could eat as much as he wanted without turning into a podge. He supposed all the fats might be playing hell with his cholesterol, but he had an idea they weren’t. He was in the best shape of his life, despite the deceptive roll hanging over his belt, and his frame of mind was better than it had been since the days when his courtship of Nora Kenner had been in full flower.
In addition to all that, his department store clients were delighted with his work, convinced (fallaciously, Scott was afraid) that the multiple websites he had crafted would turn their bricks-and-mortar business around. He had recently received a check for $582,674.50. Before banking it, he photographed it. He was sitting here in a little Maine town, working from his home study, and he was next door to rich.
He had seen Deirdre and Missy only twice, and from a distance. Running in the park, Dee and Dum on long leashes and not looking happy about it.
When Scott got back from his drugstore errand, he started up his walk, then diverted to the elm tree in his front yard. The leaves had turned, but thanks to the warmth of that fall season, most of them were still on the tree, rustling gently. The lowest branch was six feet over his head, and it looked inviting. He dropped the bag with the candy in it, raised his arms, flexed his knees, and jumped. He caught the branch easily, a thing he couldn’t have come close to doing a year ago. No wasting in his muscles; they still thought they were supporting a man who weighed 240. It made him think of old TV footage, showing the astronauts who’d landed on the moon taking ginormous leaps.
He dropped to the lawn, picked up the bag, and went to the porch steps. Instead of walking up them, he flexed again and jumped all the way to the stoop.