He piled it all back up again. Then, after a moment’s thought, he slid the lot into a waste bin. He took a box of matches, lit a match and dropped it in. His career took flame (for the first time, Todd thought wryly) and Todd sat there, bathed in the hot glow of his own failure.

After a while, the fire went out. Todd stuck the bin under a faucet and tipped the contents into the yard. Then he fetched a bottle of whiskey and Janis’s sleeping pills into his study and set them down next to his yellow legal pad. He set the whiskey and the pill bottle on his left and the pad and the pen on his right, then took a dime from his packet

“Okay,” he said to the dime. “Heads for my right hand, tails for my left.”

Todd flipped the dime into the air. It leapt toward him and went down the top of his shirt.

“Motherfucker,” said Todd, and fished the dime out.

He flipped it again, this time slapping it down onto the back of his other hand. He looked at it. Tails.

Todd wasn’t a brave man. “Best of three,” he said. “And I’m saying the first one was heads.”

He flipped again. He looked. Heads.

“Dame Fate is a kind mistress,” said Todd, inaccurately. He pushed the whiskey and the pills to one side, thought again, grabbed the whiskey and took a swig from the bottle. Then he picked up his pen and—for the first and only time in his life—wrote from the heart.

I have no money and no talent, Todd scribbled. He looked at what he’d written. It was harsh, but fair. He wrote again.

I need money. This was true. He wrote again but I have no talent. I can’t write.

Todd had never looked into his own soul. It was exciting, like looking over Niagara Falls. He examined every nook and cranny of his being, seeing himself naked on a wheel like the Leonardo da Vinci drawing of the cross-looking guy. Todd inspected his soul from every angle, and it wasn’t good. He stole a glance at the pill bottle again.

Todd Milstead, who had an opinion for every occasion and an occasion for every opinion, found that he had nothing. Now what? he wrote and put the pen down. He looked at the pill bottle. He swiveled in his swivel chair and looked at the Steinbeck portrait dedicated to Beverley. He gazed at the window, through which the sun, improbably, was now coming up.

“A new day for some is a new beginning,” he intoned. “But for others it is the appearance of the jailer, bringing bread and water and fresh hurt.”