Three

Fry’s father was the only man that Honey Santana had ever married, and they astonished themselves by staying together seventeen years. The sea change took place after Fry was born. He spent two weeks in the hospital, fighting to breathe, and it was during that wrenching time that Honey began hearing musical static in her head; battling uncontrollable spells of apprehension and dread; overreacting, sometimes radically, to the bad behavior of total strangers.

From the day she brought Fry home, Honey was gripped with a fear of losing him to a random act of nature, an incurable illness, or the criminal recklessness of some genetically deficient numskull. The fright sometimes manifested itself in unacceptable ways. Once, when Honey had seen a car speeding down her street, she’d dashed out and hurled a forty-gallon garbage can in its path. Brandishing the demolished receptacle, she’d then accosted the stunned driver. “This could’ve been my kid you flattened!” she’d screamed. “You could’ve killed my little boy!” Another time, when Fry was in the fourth grade, she’d watched a motorcycle blow through the school zone and nearly strike one of his classmates. Honey had hopped into her husband’s truck and trailed the biker to a tourist bar on Chokoloskee. When the man emerged two hours later, his motorcycle was missing. The next day, a purple plume of smoke led park rangers to a high-end Kawasaki crotch rocket, burned to scrap on a gravel road near the Shark River Slough.

Honey understood that every dickhead she encountered was not necessarily a menace to her son, yet still she struggled with a rabid intolerance of callousness and folly, both of which abounded in South Florida. It exasperated Fry and his father, who couldn’t understand how she’d turned out that way.

Honey had tried many doctors and many prescriptions, with imperceptible results. Eventually she came to believe that her condition was one that couldn’t be treated medically; she was doomed to demand more decency and consideration from her fellow humans than they demanded of themselves. What her husband wrote off as loony obsessiveness, Honey Santana defended as spells of intense and controlled focus. While denying she was mentally unsteady, she never claimed to be normal, either. She was alert to the uncommon impulses that took hold of her like a bewitchment.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m trying to reach a Mr. Boyd Eisenhower.” Honey held the receiver in her left hand. In her right was a ballpoint pen, poised over a paper napkin.

“What was the last name?”

“Eisenhower,” Honey said, “spelled just like the president.”

“I’m sorry, there’s no employee here with that name.”

“This is RTR, correct? In Fort Worth, Texas?”

“That’s right. I show an Elizabeth Eisenberg in Accounting, but no Boyd Eisenhower.”

“He’s in the telephone solicitations department,” Honey said.

“That would be our call center at Relentless, but there’s still no Eisenhower listed. Sorry.”

Honey hung up. The guy who’d tried to sell her a ranchette on the Suwannee River had apparently given a fake name, or at least a fake surname. It occurred to Honey that Boyd wasn’t something that a man would make up for himself.

So she waited ten minutes and tried again. As she’d hoped, a different switchboard operator answered. Honey identified herself as an investigator with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. There’d been a bad rollover in Denton, she said, involving a man who claimed to work for RTR.

“Unfortunately, his driver’s license melted in the fire,” Honey said. “We’re just trying to confirm an ID.”

“What name do you have?” the operator asked.

“Well, that’s the problem. Right now the poor guy can’t remember anything except his first name-Boyd,” Honey said. “He was doin’ about eighty on the interstate when he swerved to miss a rabbit and flipped his car like seven times. Gonged his melon pretty bad, but he finally came out of the coma.”

“Did you say ‘Boyd’?”

“That’s correct.” Honey spelled it for the operator. “Is it possible to do an employee search by first name only? If not, we can send an officer over to look through your payroll records.”

“Hold on, I’m scanning the directory,” the operator said.

“I sure appreciate this.” Honey laid on a touch of what she imagined to be a mild Laura Bush accent. “I tell ya, the guy must have a real soft spot for bunnies-”

“I found only one Boyd,” the operator said. “Last name is Shreave. S-h-r-e-a-v-e.”

Honey Santana scribbled it on the napkin.

“But the thing is, he doesn’t seem to work here anymore,” the operator added. “Says here on my screen that he left the company as of today.”

“What a weird coincidence. Did he resign, or get fired?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have any additional information. You say he’s gonna be all right?”

“The doctors are hopeful.” Honey tried to sound encouraging.

“Well, I’ll say a little prayer for him.”

“That’s probably not a bad idea.”

Honey hung up and did a dance through the trailer.

Boyd Shreave saw no reason to inform his wife that he’d been canned. His plan was to persuade Eugenie Fonda to quit the call center and find a day job. That way they could hook up after work and cavort at the apartment until midnight, Lily assuming that he was still pounding the phones at Relentless. He figured it would take weeks for her to notice that he was no longer depositing a paycheck, so paltry was his contribution to the family finances.

At breakfast Lily surprised him by asking, “So, what’s on the schedule today?”

Boyd Shreave had no schedule, as his wife well knew; no hobbies, interests or intellectual appetites. To ingratiate himself with certain bosses and large-account customers, he had over the years taken up (and soon abandoned) tennis, rollerblading, skeet shooting, dry-fly tying, backgammon, contract bridge and even bonsai cultivation. In truth, nothing filled his spare hours more pleasingly than daytime television, which never failed to make him feel superior. In particular he was enthralled by the many talk shows that featured dysfunctional cretins debating the paternity of unplanned offspring. To Shreave, their raucous misery was more than idle entertainment; it reaffirmed his own higher place in the natural order. Comfortably stationed with a snack tray in front of the plasma screen, he drew hope from the cavalcade of cursing, frothing idiots-these were the prey, and one day Boyd Shreave would find his niche among the predators. He was sure of it.

“I haven’t got much planned,” he told his wife. “Just hang out and watch TV, I guess.”

“You want to meet for lunch?”

Shreave was rattled by the offer. “Um, I’m supposed to get the oil changed in the car. I just remembered.”

“What time?”

“Noon sharp,” he said.

Lily smiled a smile that Boyd Shreave hadn’t seen in a long time. She said, “Excellent. That leaves us the whole morning.”

“For what?” Shreave croaked.

“Guess.” Lily reached under the table and squeezed him. “You know how long it’s been?”

Shreave plucked her hand from his crotch and edged out of reach.

Gravely his wife said, “One hundred and fifty-six days.”

“Really?” Shreave was confused. In all that time Lily hadn’t once complained about his lack of attention, so he’d assumed that the disinterest was mutual.

“That’s more than five months,” she added.

“Wow,” Shreave said.

“Too long, Boyd. Way too long.”

“Yeah.” Already the back of his neck was moist and clammy.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Lily leaned forward, letting her robe fall open. Shreave couldn’t help but observe that her breasts seemed larger than Eugenie Fonda’s. He wondered if he’d somehow forgotten what they looked like, or if his wife had secretly been to a plastic surgeon.