This Time It's For Real!

 

There are reports that the guy we were in business with is set to come back on the 16th. In the years before the accident, his parents had a habit of loading up our wagon in the hopes of making a sanctioned 'sympathy play' to induce our foreign born neighbors into your garden variety fight-flight-or-freeze response. Little did they know that each of the body parts upon which they'd counted for so long was sitting pretty at the DA's office, courtesy of Mordecai Zimmler Associates LLC. It had always been assumed that a bracing jeremiad from a tongue-tied neonatal oncologist would do the trick to get them seated ringside at a highwire free-for-all which only one person in three has any right to feel comfortable about. No one expects this more than a coterie of missing relations on our side of the Lumberton Causeway. That's why they make them that way.

I can no longer hope to sell my share of this byzantine arrangement without getting the go-ahead from my partner before he quits the scene with an expectation of going straight. He's a guy who everybody thinks goes for the improvised dragnet even though people of his size and weight have always had trouble getting their heft to swing at just the right angle of distension. Some of us are convinced that when he wears my vest in public, any suspicions he arouses will bounce back on me for all the wrong reasons. I don't know anyone here in town who doesn't have at least one story of him leaning near one of our famous windows, all the while plotting to hide freely in just about any setting you can imagine. The one who gave us the most grief liked the alternative spelling of his first name (with an 'e' in place of the 'a') so much that he could be counted upon to always play the part of the 'wet towel' when the rest of us decided that deciphering peripatetic hand signals would give us a new outlook on cabins in the rain. He stuck to his guns and now we have nothing to show for all our years in a brightly lit Novitiate's wheelhouse. You get the picture. But now I've sold even that. So where am I? You know. Or you would if I didn't have to tell you. That's it.

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