Now that the idea has been brought fully to her attention, she supposes she is. Anyone who would threaten to twist the testicles of a brain-damaged man must be awful. What was she thinking?

“Say it.” He leans forward, smiling.

The fish swim. The blue light flashes. The tune plays.

“Say it, you worthless bitch.”

“I’m awful,” Ruth Scapelli says in her living room, which is empty except for her. She stares down at the screen of the ­Zappit Commander.

“Now say it like you mean it.”

“I’m awful. I’m an awful worthless bitch.”

“And what is Dr. Babineau going to do?”

“Put it on YouTube. Put it on Facebook. Put it on Bad Medicine dot-com. Tell everyone.”

“You’ll be arrested.”

“I’ll be arrested.”

“They’ll put your picture in the paper.”

“Of course they will.”

“You’ll go to jail.”

“I’ll go to jail.”

“Who will stand up for you?”

“No one.”

17

Sitting in Room 217 of the Bucket, Brady stares down at the Fishin’ Hole demo. His face is fully awake and aware. It’s the face he hides from everyone except Felix Babineau, and Dr. Babineau no longer matters. Dr. Babineau hardly exists. These days he’s mostly Dr. Z.

“Nurse Scapelli,” Brady says. “Let’s go into the kitchen.”

She resists, but not for long.

18

Hodges tries to swim below the pain and stay asleep, but it pulls him up steadily until he breaks the surface and opens his eyes. He fumbles for the bedside clock and sees it’s two AM. A bad time to be awake, maybe the worst time. When he suffered insomnia after his retirement, he thought of two AM as the suicide hour and now he thinks, That’s probably when Mrs. Ellerton did it. Two in the morning. The hour when it seems daylight will never come.

He gets out of bed, walks slowly to the bathroom, and takes the giant economy-sized bottle of Gelusil out of the medicine cabinet, careful not to look at himself in the mirror. He chugalugs four big swallows, then leans over, waiting to see if his stomach will accept it or hit the ejector button, as it did with the chicken soup.

It stays down and the pain actually begins to recede. Sometimes Gelusil does that. Not always.

He thinks about going back to bed, but he’s afraid that dull throb will return as soon as he’s horizontal. He shuffles into his office instead and turns on his computer. He knows this is the very worst time to start checking out the possible causes for his symptoms, but he can no longer resist. His desktop wallpaper comes up (another picture of Allie as a kid). He mouses down to the bottom of the screen, meaning to open Firefox, then freezes. There’s something new in the dock. Between the balloon icon for text messaging and the camera icon for FaceTime, there’s a blue umbrella with a red 1 sitting above it.

“A message on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella,” he says. “I’ll be damned.”