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sure one of them will be more than happy to collaborate on the final Fiddle book,” said Bayard.
    I was beginning to feel introspective and morose. If this was a movie, I’m sure the poignant, haunting, minimalist piano score would have started playing around the time I had walked up to the car.
    “No,” I said, “I think this is something I have to do on my own. My dad did it alone.”
    All alone, I thought, gazing out at the scenery, the aging country storefronts, the gas stations, the mom-and-pop restaurants, the dead and dying commercial vestiges of yesteryear—drugstores, craft knick-knack shops, local-owned department stores—and seeing none of it.
     
    _______
     
    I sat in my motel room, watching the darkness gather between the curtains, until the only light I could see by was the ferocious glow of my laptop screen. I felt as if I were floating in a black void without end or beginning, my last remaining anchor the blinding empty-white rectangle in front of me, like some window in the wall of reality that opened onto the featureless wasteland of my brain. I wanted to reach through, pull the words out by the neck, and shake them until a story came out.
    I turned on the lamp. On the table next to the laptop was one of three boxes of my father’s notes on the Fiddle series.
    I had been looking through them in the hour since I’d gotten back from the funeral, but nothing was registering. All I could think of was the sight of my father in the coffin and how old he’d looked. That was the point in which it had struck me just how long it had been since I’d seen him last.
    I’d never even gotten the chance to say goodbye, and what dug even deeper than that was the epiphany that until now, I had always had the opportunity, I hadn’t cared about taking it.
    “Why didn’t you call?” I asked the box.
    I got up and went out, putting on my shoes as I fled the question.
     
    _______
     
    A few minutes’ walk from the motel was a burger joint named Jackson’s, staffed by local college kids. Blackfield is a school town, so just about everywhere you went your transactions were handled by children, the vast majority of them as slender and attractive as the cast of your average cable TV teen drama. It was like living in Neverland.
    When I walked in (pulling open a door that had a baseball bat for a handle), it felt as if I’d walked into some sort of cave overgrown with a strange green fungus.
    Once my eyes acclimated to the dim interior of the dive, I realized that the walls and ceiling were wallpapered with dollar bills. They were taped, glued, and stapled to every structural surface in eyesight, and signed with everything from Sharpies to ink pens.
    I took a booth in the very back of the L-shaped restaurant, by the restroom, out of sight of both the front door and the bar, where a television was touting a football game at top volume. After a few minutes of ogling the dollars on the walls and wondering what the insurance policy on the place could possibly be, a waitress approached me and took my order.
    As soon as she left, I opened my laptop on the table and stared at the blank word processor. The icon in the corner told me that there was wireless internet coming from somewhere, and lo and behold, it was unlocked. According to the name—”Cap’n Pacino’s”—it belonged to the coffee shop two doors down. I logged on and busied myself reading the news.
    The media’s half-assed coverage of the funeral was on a few lesser-known aggregators and social news sites. Fark, with a “Sad” tag and a comments section full of thugs and geeks flinging epithets and threats at each other. Reddit’s literature communities.
    They were replete with apoplectic debates over the quality of The Fire and the Fiddle and comparisons with Tolkien, Saberhagen, King’s Dark Tower series, G. R. R. Martin, outrage at my outrage, outrage at my initial refusal to pick up my father’s mantle and please the masses, threats and promises