Bag of Bones by Stephen King

didn’t forget a thing, and although you’ll have to get it all upstairs yourself (straining your poor old back in the process, more often than not), that’s okay. The important thing is that the delivery was complete.
    This time I thought—hoped—the delivery truck had brought the stuff I needed for the back forty: the years I might have to spend in a No Writing Zone. To the cellar door they had come, and they had knocked politely, and when after several months there was still no answer, they had finally fetched a battering ram. HEY BUDDY, HOPE THE NOISE DIDN’T SCARE YOU TOO BAD, SORRY ABOUT THE DOOR!
    I didn’t care about the door; I cared about the furniture. Any pieces broken or missing? I didn’t think so. I thought all I had to do was get it upstairs, pull off the furniture pads, and put it where it belonged.
    On my way back home, I passed The Shade, Derry’s charming little revival movie house, which has prospered in spite of (or perhaps because of) the video revolution. This month they were showing classic SF from the fifties, but April was dedicated toHumphrey Bogart, Jo’s all-time favorite. I stood under the marquee for several moments, studying one of the Coming Attractions posters. Then I went home, picked a travel agent pretty much at random from the phone book, and told the guy I wanted to go to Key Largo. Key West, you mean, the guy said. No, I told him, I mean Key Largo, just like in the movie with Bogie and Bacall. Three weeks. Then I rethought that. I was wealthy, I was on my own, and I was retired. What was this “three weeks” shit? Make it six, I said. Find me a cottage or something. Going to be expensive, he said. I told him I didn’t care. When I came back to Derry, it would be spring.
    In the meantime, I had some furniture to unwrap.
    *   *   *
    I was enchanted with Key Largo for the first month and bored out of my mind for the last two weeks. I stayed, though, because boredom is good. People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done. I ate about a billion shrimp, drank about a thousand margaritas, and read twenty-three John D. MacDonald novels by actual count. I burned, peeled, and finally tanned. I bought a long-billed cap with PARROTHEAD printed on it in bright green thread. I walked the same stretch of beach until I knew everybody by first name. And I unwrapped furniture. A lot of it I didn’t like, but there was no doubt that it all fit the house.
    I thought about Jo and our life together. I thought about saying to her that no one was ever going to confuse Being Two with Look Homeward, Angel. “You aren’t going to pull a lot of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you, Noonan? ” she had replied . . . and during my timeon Key Largo, those words kept coming back, always in Jo’s voice: crap, frustrated-artist crap, all that fucking schoolboy frustrated-artist crap.
    I thought about Jo in her long red woods apron, coming to me with a hatful of black trumpet mushrooms, laughing and triumphant: “Nobody on the TR eats better than the Noonans tonight!” she’d cried. I thought of her painting her toenails, bent over between her own thighs in the way only women doing that particular piece of business can manage. I thought of her throwing a book at me because I laughed at some new haircut. I thought of her trying to learn how to play a breakdown on her banjo and of how she looked braless in a thin sweater. I thought of her crying and laughing and angry. I thought of her telling me it was crap, all that frustrated-artist crap.
    And I thought about the dreams, especially the culminating dream. I could do that easily, because it never faded as the more ordinary ones do. The final Sara Laughs dream and my very first wet dream (coming upon a girl lying naked in a hammock and eating a plum) are the only two that remain perfectly clear to me, year after year; the rest are either