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him speaking.
    There were days he remembered his wife had been dead for over thirty years. Days he recognized the attractive young woman moving around the house as his daughter, Anne, and days when he could summon up his granddaughter’s name, Paige, which sounded like something you opened a book to.
    Most days, though, he fought against a different type of silence from the one he’d been taught spoke louder and truer than words, a silence that did not shadow what he felt and thought but rather stole them from him, an immense silence into which things disappeared.
    It had been that way with the verbs.
    Jack Carson had been standing in the kitchen of the house he shared with his daughter and granddaughter, and his daughter had been turning the faucet over the sink on and off and pointing out a persistent leak, and he had nodded to her and said, “I can...,” and that’s when it had started, the verb suddenly deserting him, the main verb breaking off from its helper and spinning and falling away into that new silence, and Jack Carson had stood there and started the sentence, “I can...,” over and over again, but had not been able to summon up “fix.”
    Like many men of his generation, Jack Carson had had an English teacher who had forever marked him. In his case, a Mrs. Allen in the seventh grade who’d taught him the parts of speech, and Jack Carson had learned how to build a sentence and appreciate the fit and function of its parts just as, years later working as a contractor, he could see a quiet and pervasive beauty in the precise lines and proportion in a set of blueprints.
    He knew, for example, that verbs expressed an action, occurrence, or state of being.
    Verbs told time.
    And time, like the verb fix, which had deserted his tongue and gone spinning off into an immense silence when he’d faced the leaky faucet and asked for his tools, was something that Jack Carson had come to suspect he’d lost the blueprint for.

TEN
    JAMES RESTAN had the kind of mustache you saw on aging gunfighters in old black and white Westerns, a Palm Springs tan, and clear, hawk-like eyes that never seemed to blink. His hair was carefully cut and was a half shade lighter than his charcoal-gray polo shirt. Corrine judged him to be in his mid to late fifties.
    They were sitting in a quiet section of the restaurant in the Marriott near the regional airport. Most of the east wall was a bank of windows softly refracting the pale rays of a noon sun. Restan had a scotch and soda in front of him. Corrine ordered an iced tea.
    “I appreciate you agreeing to meet,” she said.
    “Unexpected, but still a pleasure. I have a late connecting flight and nothing pressing. I figured to get in a round of golf. Try out that new course the mayor and tourist bureau’s so proud of.”
    “In that case, I appreciate it even more.” Corrine tore open a packet of artificial sweetener and sifted it into her tea. “I wanted to talk to you about the buy-out offer.”
    James Restan cocked his head and smiled. Corrine saw that the mustache was a decoy, a front for a thin-lipped smile that held no warmth. She could easily imagine Restan in bed, knew the type, a lover who prided himself on technique, confident that he knew just what to do with his hands, mouth, and cock. He would be a lover whose self-regard masqueraded as generosity, sexual passion always something he negotiated, a transaction that would leave him secure in his belief that he’d earned his orgasm.
    “I’m not sure how much we have to talk about,” Restan said. “Stanley Tedros did not strike me as being open to any further discussions. And frankly, right now, I feel the same way.” Restan paused and squared his scotch and soda in the center of his napkin. “So why exactly are you here, Ms. Tedros?”
    “I want you to consider an extension on the buy-out offer.”
    Restan cupped his chin with his left hand and waited, watching Corrine, before he responded. “The American public has a