“I don’t know,” Jeremiah said. “Maybe I take after my father.”

“Was he an uptight asshole, too?”

“Beats me,” Jeremiah told him. “He took off when I was a kid. Up and left. Walked out on us and never came back. He was probably an asshole, though. He was probably king of the assholes.”

“That’s harsh,” Brent said, his voice laced with a barely concealed yawn.

“Damn right it’s harsh. I mean, what kind of father does that?”

“Maybe he had his reasons,” Brent said. “I mean, who knows, maybe your mother was cheating on him.”

“Fuck you.”

“Sorry. That came out wrong. I just mean, well, with Diana and all. When you found out she was cheating on you, did it make you want to leave?”

“I thought about it, sure, but I’d never actually do it.”

“If you think about it, you did actually do it. You never talked to her about it. You never faced it. You left. You walked out. It just took you a little longer. And you did it in a way that would leave you blameless.”

The truth in the words stung.

Jeremiah got himself up off the couch to pee. He continued the discussion, turning his head and bellowing out the open bathroom door.

“I don’t know what happened to me. When did I become such a wimp? I wasn’t always like this, you know. Things are going to change. You hear me?” He waited, but Brent said nothing.

“No wonder I didn’t have any friends,” he said as he stumbled back into the room. “Don’t ever let yourself get weak, Brent. Don’t ever forget that you have to face things like a man. Stand up and just face it. Problems don’t just go away on their own. You have to do something.”

He was slightly annoyed to see Brent was completely passed out on the couch and had missed out on all of his sage advice. He considered for one minute trying to locate a green magic marker. Instead, he just went into the bedroom and slept, fully clothed, but soundly, for the first time in what felt like months.

Chapter 36

Days 167-168

The next morning, while Brent still snored on the living room couch, Jeremiah went into the bathroom and made a ritual of shaving off the scruff of the beard he’d been working on again, first carefully trimming and then pulling the razor over it twice. He wanted to look as much his clone’s double as possible when he finally confronted him. It would add a certain drama to the moment, he thought, and he’d certainly earned a dramatic moment.

Once they were both moving, fed and sufficiently caffeinated, he and Brent spent the whole of Monday afternoon and much of the evening in careful, deliberate preparation for the task ahead. Over breakfast, with the otherwise empty blender pulverizing the rest of the ice from the freezer, Brent asked Jeremiah to repeat the cell phone number he was to call when the deed had been done. Jeremiah told him it would have been far easier to just program the number into the burner phone he’d secured for him.