“Thanks, but let’s just assume you told me all about those, okay? I’ll be there.” I made shooing gestures at his car. I felt deeply disgusted… and I felt inter, red with. I had never been served with a process before, and I didn’t care for it. He went back to his car, started to swing in, then stopped with one hairy arm hung over the top of the open door. His Rolex gleamed in the hazy sunlight. “Let me give you a piece of advice,” he said, and that was enough to tell me anything else I needed to know about the guy. “Don’t fuck with Mr. Devore.”

“Or he’ll squash me like a bug,” I said. “Huh?”

“Your actual lines are, “Let me give you a piece of advice—don’t fuck with Mr. Devore or he’ll squash you like a bug.’” I could see by his expression—half past perplexed, going on angry—that he had meant to say something very much like that. Obviously we’d seen the same movies, including all those in which Robert De Niro plays a psycho. Then his face cleared. “Oh sure, you’re the writer,” he said. “That’s what they tell me.”

“You can say stuff like that ’cause you’re a writer.”

“Well, it’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“Ain’t you a smartass, now.”

“How long have you been working for Max Devore, Deputy? And does the County Sheriffs office know you’re moonlighting?”

“They know. It’s not a problem. Ybu’re the one that might have the problem, Mr. Smartass Writer.” I decided it was time to quit this before we descended to the kaka-poopie stage of name-calling. “Get out of my driveway, please, Deputy.” He looked at me a moment longer, obviously searching for that perfect capper line and not finding it. He needed a Mr. Smartass Writer to help him, that was all. “I’ll be looking for you on Friday,” he said. “Does that mean you’re going to buy me lunch? Don’t worry, I’m a fairly cheap date.”

His reddish cheeks darkened a degree further, and I could see what they were going to look like when he was sixty, if he didn’t lay off the firewater in the meantime. He got back into his Ford and reversed up my driveway hard enough to make his tires holler. I stood where I was, watching him go. Once he was headed back out Lane Forty-two to the highway, I went into the house. It occurred to me that Deputy Footman’s extracurricular job must pay well, if he could afford a Rolex. On the other hand, maybe it was a knockoff. Settle down, Michael, Jo’s voice advised. The red rag is gone now, no one’s waving anything in front of you, so just settle-I shut her voice out. I didn’t want to settle down;

I wanted to settle up. I had been interjred with. I walked over to the hall desk where Jo and I had always kept our pending documents (and our desk calendars, now that I thought about it), and tacked the summons to the bulletin board by one corner of its buff-colored jacket. With that much accomplished, I raised my fist in front of my eyes, looked at the wedding ring on it for a moment, then slammed it against the wall beside the bookcase. I did it hard enough to make an entire row of paperbacks jump. I thought about Mattie Devore’s baggy shorts and Kmart smock, then about her father-in-law paying four and a quarter million dollars for Warrington’s. Writing a personal goddamned check. I thought about Bill Dean saying that one way or another, that little girl was going to grow up in California. I walked back and forth through the house, still simmering, and finally ended up in front of the fridge. The circle of magnets was the same, but the letters inside had changed. Instead of hell o they now read help r “Helper?” I said, and as soon as I heard the word out loud, I understood. The letters on the fridge consisted of only a single alphabet (no, not even that, I saw; g and x had been lost someplace), and I’d have to get more. If the front of my Kenmore was going to become a Ouija board, I’d need a good supply of letters. Especially vowels. In the meantime, I moved the hand the e in front of the r. Now the message read Ip her I scattered the circle of fruit and vegetable magnets with my palm, spread the letters, and resumed pacing. I had made a decision not to get between Devore and his daughter-in-law, but I’d wound up between them anyway. A deputy in Cleveland clothing had shown up in my driveway, complicating a life that already had its problems… and scaring me a little in the bargain. But at least it was a fear of something I could see and understand. All at once I decided I wanted to do more with the summer than worry about ghosts, crying kids, and what my wife had been up to four or five years ago. . if, in fact, she had been up to anything. I couldn’t write books, but that didn’t mean I had to pick scabs.

Help her.

I decided I would at least try.

“Harold Oblowski Literary Agency.”

“Come to Belize with me, Nola,” I said. “I need you. We’ll make beautiful love at midnight, when the full moon turns the beach to a bone.”

“Hello, Mr. Noonan,” she said. No sense of humor had Nola. No sense of romance, either. In some ways that made her perfect for the Oblowski Agency. “Would you like to speak to Harold?”

“If he’s in.”

“He is. Please hold.”

One nice thing about being a best selling author—even one whose books only appear, as a general rule, on lists that go to fifteen—is that your agent almost always happens to be in. Another is if he’s vacationing on Nantucket, he’ll be in to you there. A third is that the time you spend on hold is usually quite short.

“Mike!” he cried. “How’s the lake? I thought about you all weekend!”

I3ah, I thought, and pigs will whistle.

“Things are fine in general but shitty in one particular, Harold. I need to talk to a lawyer. I thought first about calling Ward Hankins for a recommendation, but then I decided I wanted somebody a little more high-powered than Ward was likely to know. Someone with filed teeth and a taste for human flesh would be nice.”

This time Harold didn’t bother with the long-pause routine. “What’s up, Mike? Are you in trouble?”

Thump once r yes, twice jr no, I thought, and for one wild moment thought of actually doing just that. I remembered finishing Christy Brown’s memoir, Down All the Days, and wondering what it would be like to write an entire book with the pen grasped between the toes of your left foot. Now I wondered what it would be like to go through eternity with no way to communicate but rapping on the cellar wall. And even then only certain people would be able to hear and understand you… and only those certain people at certain times.

Jo, was it you? And if it was, why did you answer both ways?

“Mike? Are you there?”

“Yes. This isn’t really my trouble, Harold, so cool your jets. I do have a problem, though. Your main guy is Goldacre, right?”

“Right. I’ll call him right aw—”

“But he deals primarily with contracts law.” I was thinking out loud now, and when I paused, Harold didn’t fill it. Sometimes he’s an all-right guy. Most times, really. “Call him for me anyway, would you?

Tell him I need to talk to an attorney with a good working knowledge of child-custody law. Have him put me in touch with the best one who’s free to take a case immediately. One who can be in court with me Friday, if that’s necessary.”

“Is it paternity?” he asked, sounding both respectful and afraid. “No, custody.” I thought about telling him to get the whole story from the Lawyer to Be Named Later, but Harold deserved better… and would demand to hear my version sooner or later anyway, no matter what the lawyer told him. I gave him an account of my Fourth of July morning and its aftermath. I stuck with the Devores, mentioning nothing about voices, crying children, or thumps in the dark. Harold only interrupted once, and that was when he realized who the villain of the piece was.

“You’re asking for trouble,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I’m in for a certain measure of it in any case,” I said. “I’ve decided I want to dish out a little as well, that’s all.”