The Man in the Window by Jon Cohen, Nancy Pearl Page B

drops foamed out of a hole and dripped on his knee. Iris would be getting home pretty soon. He figured he’d wait up for her. What a shitty job, working evenings and getting home after eleven. How’d she stand shift work? He took another sip of beer and watched all the fireflies that had escaped Duke’s jaws of death. LuLu had liked the fireflies. In a summer long ago, they had sat together on a front porch holding hands and kissing, and watching fireflies. Holding hands. He lifted his arm and stared at the dull silver hook on the end of it. The hand that had touched LuLu was gone. They take your hand, they take your wife—Jesus, what a world.
    The lady today in the backseat of the Lincoln, who’d they take from her? Mrs. Malone, Jim Rose called her. And the strange-looking guy in the hat and scarf beside her, her son probably. He looked young around the eyes. It had to be Mr. Malone who’ddied, her husband. Welcome to the club, Mrs. Malone. Arnie raised his beer in a salute, then downed a big gulp. Poor lady. She had quite a smile. Even under those circumstances, she managed to smile and thank him for fixing the car. She was a hell of a lot more gracious than that stiff, Jim Rose.
    LuLu had a smile on her, too. She didn’t smile so much the last couple of years before she died, though, because of her dentures. She was terrified they’d fall out of her mouth. She must have gone through a tube of Dentu-Grip a week—you couldn’t have pulled the damn things loose with a pair of pliers. She never let him see her without them. At night, she’d work on herself in the bathroom, then scurry across the room in the dark to bed.
    “You’re going to kill yourself, running around in the dark like that,” he’d say to her.
    “If I do,” she whispered, her words mushy and toothless, “don’t you dare look at me until they get my dentures in.”
    “Hell, LuLu. What you so sensitive about your teeth for? I got a hook! I’m missing my entire hand! I’m the one who should be sensitive.”
    “But you’re a man, Arnie. It doesn’t matter to you in the same way. I was pretty once,” she said softly.
    Arnie reached out to touch her, with his hook he realized at the last moment, so he shifted around and reached again with his good hand. “Not once. Still. You’re pretty, still.”
    “Sure. In the dark.”
    “In the dark I got my hand again, you got your teeth. There’s nothing wrong with the dark. You’re pretty, I’m handsome. We get to do it all over again.”
    “I’d like to do it all over again, Arnie.”
    “All of it?”
    “Most of it,” said LuLu. “The parts with you. The parts with you when my teeth were good.”
    Arnie sat on the porch steps, Duke at his side, remembering LuLu as she wanted to be remembered: young, her smile bright, her teeth good.
    He jumped when an apparition in white suddenly appeared before him.
    “Iris girl, don’t be creeping around this late at night. You want your old man to piss himself?”
    “You’d just be joining the club,” said Iris. “Most all the old men I took care of tonight pissed themselves. And worse, let me tell you.”
    Arnie raised his hand. “No, don’t tell me. You’re always wanting to tell me. How come is it you health people got to be so quick with the bad news? I never saw a group of people so eager to give all the nasty details.”
    Iris stood before Arnie and looked him in the eye, which she could manage only because he was sitting on the porch steps. “All the details? You’d piss yourself for sure if I ever gave you all the details.”
    “So, good. You keep your details, and I’ll keep my pants dry.”
    “Well, you’re certainly in a feisty mood. What are you and that ratty dog of yours doing up so late?”
    Arnie looked past her to the dark and the fireflies. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t seem like much of a night for sleeping. Thought I’d wait up for you. You know.”
    Iris put her pocketbook down and sat on a step