Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

“Yeah, that happened to me, too,” Charlie said. But he was still disturbed by the whole “great battle” revelation. “Vern, would you mind if I took a look at your Great Big Book ?”

“I don’t think so, Charlie. In fact, I think we’d better say goodbye. I mean, if the Great Big Book is right, and I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not, then we shouldn’t even be talking.”

“But it’s a different version than I have.”

“You don’t think there’s a reason for that?” Vern said. His eyes magnified in his big glasses made him look like a madman for a second.

“Okay, then,” Charlie said. “But e-mail me, okay? That shouldn’t hurt.”

Vern looked in his coffee cup like he was thinking, as if by telling the story of the shadow that came down out of the mountains, he’d frightened himself. Finally he looked up and smiled. “You know, I’d like that. I could use some pointers, and if something weird starts to happen, we’ll stop.”

“Deal,” Charlie said. He drove Vern back to his car, which was parked around the block from his mother’s house, and they said good-bye.

Jane met Charlie at the door. “Where have you been? I need the car to go get her floss.”

“I brought doughnuts,” Charlie said, holding up the box, maybe a little too proud.

“Well, that’s not the same, is it?”

“As floss?”

“Dental floss. Can you believe it? Charlie, if I’m still flossing on my deathbed, you have my permission to garrote me with it. No, I’m leaving you instructions to garrote me with it.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “So other than that, she’s okay?”

Jane was digging in her purse, had found her cigarettes and was looking for her lighter. “Like gum disease is the big danger at this point. Goddammit! Did they take my lighter at the airport?”

“You still don’t smoke, Jane,” Charlie said.

She looked up. “So what’s your point?”

“Nothing.” He handed her the keys to the rental car. “Can you grab me some toothpaste while you’re out?”

She gave up searching for the lighter and threw the cigarettes back into her purse. “What is it with this family and the compulsive dental hygiene?”

“I forgot to bring any.”

“Okay.” Jane braced the keys in her hand, ready to go in the ignition, and tucked her purse under her arm like a football. She dropped into a crouch and pulled down her mirrored, wraparound sunglasses that, with her short platinum blond hair and Charlie’s black pinstripe suit, made her look a little like a cyborg assassin from the future getting ready to dash out into the poisonous atmosphere of planet Duran Duran. “It’s fucking hot out there, isn’t it?”

Charlie nodded and held up the doughnut box again. “The glazed have suffered.”

“Oh,” Jane said, lifting her glasses again. “Cassandra called. After you called this morning she noticed your date book on the nightstand. Well actually, she said that Alvin and Mohammed dragged her in there and pushed it at her. She wondered if you needed it.”

“What about Sophie, is she okay?”

“No, she’s been abducted by aliens, but I wanted you to digest the bad news about forgetting your date book first.”

“You know, that right there is why Mom is ashamed of you,” Charlie said.

Jane laughed. “Guess what? She’s not.”

“She’s not?”

“No, this morning. She told me that she always knew who I was, always knew what I was, and that she has always loved me, just the way I am.”

“Did you card her? There’s an impostor in our mom’s bed.”

“Shut up, it was nice. Important.”

“She was probably just saying that because she’s dying.”

“She did say that she wished I wouldn’t wear men’s suits all the time.”

“She’s not alone on that one,” Charlie said.

Jane fell back into assault mode. “I’m off on the floss mission. Call Cassandra.”

“Done,” Charlie said.

“And Buddy needs a doughnut.” Jane threw open the door and ran out into the heat screaming like a berserker charging the enemy.

Charlie closed the door behind her so as not to let the air-conditioning out, and watched through the glass as his sister ran across the zero-scaped yard like she was on fire. He looked beyond her to the red rock mesa rising out of the desert. There seemed to be a deep crevasse in it that he hadn’t seen there before. He looked again, and saw that it wasn’t a crevasse at all, just a long, sharp shadow.

Then he ran out into the driveway and looked at the position of the sun, then at the shadow. It was on the wrong side of the mesa. There couldn’t be a shadow on this side—the sun was also on this side. He shaded his eyes and watched the shadow until he thought his brains were cooking in the sun. It was moving, slowly, but moving, and not the way a shadow moves. It was moving with purpose, against the sun, toward his mother’s house.

“My date book,” he said to himself. “Oh, shit.”

On her last day, Lois Asher rallied. After not having even been able to get up to go to the breakfast table, or into the living room to sit and watch TV for three weeks, got up and danced with Buddy to an old Ink Spots song. She was playful and full of laughter, she teased her children and hugged them, she ate a chocolate-marshmallow sundae, and she brushed and flossed afterward. She put on her favorite silver jewelry and wore it to the dinner table, and when she couldn’t find her squash-blossom necklace she shrugged it off like it was a minor thing—she must have misplaced it. Oh, well.

Charlie knew what was happening because he had seen it before, and Buddy and Jane knew because Grace, the hospice nurse, explained it to them. “It happens again and again. I’ve seen people come out of a coma and sing their favorite songs, and all I can tell you is to enjoy it. People see the light come back into eyes that have been dull for months, and they start to place hope on it. It’s not a sign of getting well, it’s an opportunity to say good-bye. It’s a gift.”

Charlie had also learned by observing that it really helped everyone to let go if they were at least mildly medicated, so he and Jane took some antianxiety pills that Jane’s therapist had prescribed and Buddy washed down a time-released morphine pill with some scotch. Medication and forgiveness can make for joyous moments with the dying—it’s like they get to return to childhood—and because nothing in the future matters, because you don’t have to train them for life, teach lessons, forge applicable and practical memories, all the joy can be wicked from those last moments and stored in the heart. It was the best and closest time Charlie had ever had with his mother and his sister, and Buddy, in the sharing, became family as well.

Lois Asher went to bed at nine and died at midnight.

Ican’t stay for the funeral,” Charlie said to his sister the next morning.

“What do you mean you can’t stay for the funeral?”

Charlie looked out the window at the giant ice pick of a shadow that had made its way down the mountain toward his mother’s house. Charlie could see it churning at the edges, like flocks of birds or swarming insects. The point was less than a half mile away.

“I have something I have to do at home, Jane. I mean, I forgot to do it and I really, really can’t stay.”

“Don’t be mysterious. What the hell do you need to do that you can’t attend your own mother’s funeral?”

Charlie was pressing his Beta Male imagination to the breaking point to come up with something credible on the spot. Then a light went on. “The other night, when you sent me out to get laid?”