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appointments tomorrow. Plus we already got one call from someone whose truck roof was caved in by a tree falling on it.”
    “Okay, I’ll tell him.”
    Back in the showroom, Hack could hear Rae’s long fingers flying over her computer keyboard. She had the most beautiful hands he’d ever seen. She was always writing something, poems or stories and shit. She’d shown him a few, and he’d pretended to like them so he wouldn’t look unsophisticated. One was something about a bird with a broken wing, and another had some kind of chorus that kept repeating,
We’re a mystery about to unfold
/ We’re a morality play about to be told
. Whatever the hell that meant. Maybe she’d write about him one day. Now, to keep her spirits up, he winked at her as he walked by her cubicle, but his heart wasn’t in it. Where his peripheral vision was supposed to be, there was nothing but wavy lines. It was his third migraine in a month.
    He picked up the phone on his desk and speed-dialed Bob over in Hubbard. Anita picked up.
    “He get lit again last night?” Hack said.
    “Yeah. He spent twelve dollars on beer, and all I’ve got in the refrigerator are two eggs and a bottle of olives.”
    “At least it’s nutritious, though.” He absently flipped the pages of his fancy daybook. He’d never use a thing like that, a foo-foo thing, but it was nice of Rae to give it to him. She’d given him a few other things too: a letter opener Bunny hadn’t noticed, a fancy pen he’d already lost but was hoping to find before Rae asked him about it. Actually, he wished she’d stop giving him things unless they were edible. What was he supposed to do with them? It wasn’t as if he could bring them home. Come the day Bunny really got suspicious, he was going to have to make one hell of a dash to the nearest Dumpster.
    “Yeah, right,” Anita was saying.
    “Look, I’ll talk to him tomorrow; just make sure he gets here.” Bob usually drank himself under the table for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, but he always popped out of it sooner or later. Hack liked to drink too, but he didn’t get blind drunk like Bob. He didn’t disappear like Bob either. Bob would just pick up and go. He never told anyone where he went, not even Hack, but he always came home after a couple or three days, and it had been like that for years. Anita told Bunny once that as long as he came home alone, she was beyond asking questions except whether he’d be leaving her permanently or not. And Bob always said,
Darlin’, I love you. Only way I’ll leave you is if you ask me to
. So far Anita hadn’t asked him to. Hack didn’t expect she ever would. Anita was like that: all blow and no rain. That was one of the things he liked best about her. Hack and Anita had had their differences over the years, but he gave her full credit for sticking by Bob the way she did. Not that he really understood why, but it was a generous act just the same.
    “Look, the old man’s not coming in today,” Hack told Anita now over the phone. “I’ll punch the time clock for him. That’ll give him five hours anyway.”
    He picked a dead aphid off one of the dead leaves on his plant, ivy or whatever. He guessed he hadn’t watered it enough. He wondered if he’d ever watered it. Bunny and Vinny were good at stuff like that, but Hack never remembered until it was too late.
    After he got off the phone with Anita, he looked out the showroom window from his office. There was hardly any traffic now; no one was going to buy a car with the weather like this. He stood up, fished his truck keys out of his jacket pocket, and told Rae he was going out to the bank. It wasn’t true, but he said it anyway so she wouldn’t want to go with him. Lowering his head and leading with his shoulder, he pressed through the rain and wind and made it into his truck without too much damage to his hair, which was thinning more than he liked to admit. Every morning he arranged it carefully and sprayed it with