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Chapters (22)
  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Contents
  4. Introduction
  5. Throttle
  6. Dark Carousel
  7. Wolverton Station
  8. By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
  9. Faun
  10. Late Returns
  11. All I Care About Is You
  12. Thumbprint
  13. The Devil on the Staircase
  14. Twittering from the Circus of the Dead
  15. Mums
  16. In the Tall Grass
  17. You Are Released
  18. Story Notes and Acknowledgments
  19. About the Author
  20. Also by Joe Hill
  21. Copyright
  22. About the Publisher

I have the gun, and I have tested the feel of the barrel in my mouth, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I go for a walk every day. Sometimes I walk down to the park, where the Bookmobile stops on Thursday mornings. A little part of me is hanging on to see if we may yet have a word with each other. Also, I would like to know what Philip Roth is going to publish after my death. Isn’t that what keeps so many of us hanging on past our Return-By date? We can’t help wishing for one more lovely story.

I hope you are well. I wish you a lifetime of happy reading, free from guilt. See you around sometime?

Best,

Brad Dolan

ON A DRY AFTERNOON in midsummer, with the insects producing a drowsy, throbbing hum in the trees, I opened the side door to the garage and then wrestled with the locks on the automatic door until at last I was finally able to set them free and roll the door up. The air that blew into the concrete-floored room smelled sweetly of fresh-cut grass and my mother’s roses, and I had a happy, quiet afternoon of sweeping and bagging up garbage. I connected my phone to a Bluetooth speaker and played Joan Baez. A strong, sweet, hopeful voice from the past kept me company in the garage, 1965 echoing into the twenty-first century. The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.

I found some boxes I thought I could send on to the library—a crate of my dad’s old Rolling Stones, a box of Danny Dunn young-adult novels I had loved as a boy—and it came to me I ought to grab my mother’s overdue Laurie Colwin and return that, too. Only when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it. I tossed the whole house, hunting for it, but it’s not there. It has vanished to elsewhere.

It made me think maybe my mother will return it sometime soon. I am ready to see her. I have a couple books I think she’d like. I have a couple Philip Roths set aside, too, just in case. You never know who will turn up at the Bookmobile. I’m always ready to see Another Marvelous Thing.

Are you?

All I Care About Is You

Limitation makes for power. The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.

—RICHARD WILBUR

1.

She grabs the brake and power-drifts the Monowheel to a stop for a red light, just before the overpass that spans the distance between bad and worse.