The period of time we've been waiting so long for is nearly at hand. The grainy photograph of a whip-smart Maffew Barngkling in dockers holding a lost pencil has disappeared from its pride of place midway up the wall at the foot of my bed. A warrant for truancy, never a good thing, keeps company with a stolen deed in the top right drawer of my wife's desk. My wife, though, is missing. My son and I gave up looking for her about three years ago. If I think about it in a hard way, I can clearly recall her eyebrows reading me the riot act, as it were, while we drove into town that last fateful Sunday after church. However what bothers me even more than her disappearance is that our son, Jerbik, can't seem to tell the difference, verbally speaking, between a rare steak and staring at a rake. Also, he was unforgivably non-cooperative when the police searched his fishing tackle box for bone fragments last fall. That crossed a line.
In the years since my bloodline confirmation treaty things have only grown more implacable. And by that I mean something very specific, something that I'd be happy to reveal right here and now if only I could remember it. But that won't stop the neighbors from weighing in on what seems to be an hourly basis with all manner of hare-brained conspiracy theories and flat-out damnably puny assessments, fact-wise. This is where I'm forced to leap into action, action-wise, and defend our family's honor like the two-bit phony I've always insisted on being. It's not easy being a hard case but there's just no choice. If I had my way, each and every high and mighty upstanding community thought-leader would head for the hills and make a beeline for the pit of the abyss. Then, I believe, we could all sleep soundly at night, and in the daytime too for that matter.
What if I told you, or even someone who vaguely resembles a person you once knew, that I keep an elderly hospital patient on retainer for just this purpose? What if I proposed an action plan to renovate the Kresley Park baseball diamond in the time it takes to enforce a bonding experiment among a disparate group of unmotivated strangers-in-waiting, all the while hiding my insecurities behind a façade of febrile fastidiousness in the name of halting the hideous humbuggery that passes for passive partiality in this neck of the forest? You'd be pissed, right? Well, so am I! In spades!
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