“Hey, man,” Freddi Linklatter said with unaccustomed shyness. “How’re you doing?”

This opened all sorts of possibilities.

Brady did his best to smile.

Badconcert.com

BADCONCERT.COM

1

Cora Babineau wipes the back of her neck with a monogrammed towel and frowns at the monitor in the basement exercise room. She has done only four of her six miles on the treadmill, she hates to be interrupted, and the weirdo is back.

Cling-clong goes the doorbell and she listens for her husband’s footsteps above her, but there’s nothing. On the monitor, the old man in the ratty parka—he looks like one of those bums you see standing at intersections, holding up signs that say things like HUNGRY, NO JOB, ARMY VETERAN, PLEASE HELP—just stands there.

“Dammit,” she mutters, and pauses the treadmill. She climbs the stairs, opens the door to the back hallway, and shouts, “Felix! It’s your weirdo friend! That Al!”

No response. He’s in his study again, possibly looking at the game-thing he seems to have fallen in love with. The first few times she mentioned Felix’s strange new obsession to her friends at the country club, it was a joke. It doesn’t seem so funny now. He’s sixty-three, too old for kids’ computer games and too young to have gotten so forgetful, and she’s begun to wonder if he might not be suffering early-onset Alzheimer’s. It has also crossed her mind that Felix’s weirdo friend is some kind of drug pusher, but isn’t the guy awfully old for that? And if her husband wants drugs, he can certainly supply himself; according to him, half the doctors at Kiner are high at least half the time.

Cling-clong goes the doorbell.

“Jesus on a pony,” she says, and goes to the door herself, growing more irritated with each long stride. She’s a tall, gaunt woman whose female shape has been exercised nearly to oblivion. Her golf tan remains even in the depths of winter, only turning a pale shade of yellow that makes her look as if she’s suffering chronic liver disease.

She opens the door. The January night rushes in, chilling her sweaty face and arms. “I think I would like to know who you are,” she says, “and what you and my husband are up to together. Would that be too much to ask?”

“Not at all, Mrs. Babineau,” he says. “Sometimes I’m Al. Sometimes I’m Z-Boy. Tonight I’m Brady, and boy oh boy, it’s nice to be out, even on such a cold night.”

She looks down at his hand. “What’s in that jar?”

“The end of all your troubles,” says the man in the mended parka, and there’s a muffled bang. The bottom of the soda bottle blows out in shards, along with scorched threads from the steel wool. They float in the air like milkweed fluff.