11/22/63

“Yessir, I will. Saturdays I’m open until noon. Then I go home and watch the Game of the Week on TV. Looks like it could be a heck of a Series this year.”

“Yes,” I said. “It certainly does.”

Quinlan extended his hand. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Amberson. I bet you’d like Jodie. We’re good people around here. Hope it works out for you.”

I shook with him. “So do I.”

Like the man said, a little hope never hurt anybody.

16

That evening I returned to Al’s Diner and introduced myself to the principal of Denholm Consolidated and his librarian lady-friend. They invited me to join them.

Deke Simmons was tall, bald, and sixtyish. Mimi Corcoran was bespectacled and tanned. The blue eyes behind her bifocals were sharp, looking me up and down for clues. She walked with the aid of a cane, handling it with the careless (almost contemptuous) dexterity of long use. Both of them, I was amused to see, were carrying Denholm pennants and wearing gold buttons that read WE’VE GOT JIM POWER! It was Friday night in Texas.

Simmons asked me how I was liking Jodie (a lot), how long I’d been in Dallas (since August), and if I enjoyed high school football (yes indeed). The closest he got to anything substantive was asking me if I felt confident in my ability to make kids “mind.” Because, he said, a lot of substitutes had a problem with that.

“These young teachers send em to us in the office like we didn’t have anything better to do,” he said, and then chomped his Pronghorn Burger.

“Sauce, Deke,” Mimi said, and he obediently wiped the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin from the dispenser.

She, meanwhile, was continuing her inventory of me: sport coat, tie, haircut. The shoes she’d taken a good look at as I crossed to their booth. “Do you have references, Mr. Amberson?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did quite a bit of substitute teaching in Sarasota County.”

“And in Maine?”

“Not so much there, although I taught for three years in Wisconsin on a regular basis before quitting to work full-time on my book. Or as much full-time as my finances would allow.” I did have a reference from St. Vincent’s High School, in Madison. It was a good reference; I had written it myself. Of course, if anyone checked back, I’d be hung. Deke Simmons wouldn’t do it, but sharp-eyed Mimi with the leathery cowboy skin might.

“And what is your novel about?”

This might also hang me, but I decided to be honest. As honest as possible, anyway, given my peculiar circumstances. “A series of murders, and their effect on the community where they happen.”

“Oh my goodness,” Deke said.

She tapped his wrist. “Hush. Go on, Mr. Amberson.”

“My original setting was a fictional Maine city — I called it Dawson — but then I decided it might be more realistic if I set it in an actual city. A bigger one. I thought Tampa, at first, but it was wrong, somehow—”

She waved Tampa away. “Too pastel. Too many tourists. You were looking for something a little more insular, I suspect.”

A very sharp lady. She knew more about my book than I did.

“That’s right. So I decided to try Dallas. I think it’s the right place, but…”

“But you wouldn’t want to live there?”

“Exactly.”

“I see.” She picked at her piece of deep-fried fish. Deke was looking at her with a mildly poleaxed expression. Whatever it was he wanted as he went cantering down the backstretch of life, she appeared to have it. Not so strange; everybody loves somebody sometime, as Dean Martin would so wisely point out. But not for another few years. “And when you’re not writing, what do you like to read, Mr. Amberson?”

“Oh, just about everything.”

“Have you read The Catcher in the Rye?”

Uh-oh, I thought.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked impatient at this. “Oh, call me Mimi. Even the kids call me Mimi, although I insist they put a Miz with it for propriety’s sake. What do you think of Mr. Salinger’s cri de coeur?”

Lie, or tell the truth? But it wasn’t a serious question. This woman would read a lie the way I could read… well… an IMPEACH EARL WARREN billboard.

“I think it says a lot about how lousy the fifties were, and a lot about how good the sixties can be. If the Holden Caulfields of America don’t lose their outrage, that is. And their courage.”

“Um. Hum.” Picking plenty at her fish, but not eating any that I could see. No wonder she looked like you could staple a string to the back of her dress and fly her like a kite. “Do you believe it should be in the school library?”

I sighed, thinking how much I would have enjoyed living and teaching part-time in the town of Jodie, Texas. “Actually, ma’am — Mimi — I do. Although I believe it should be checked out only to certain students, and at the librarian’s discretion.”

“The librarian’s? Not the parents’?”

“No, ma’am. That’s a slippery slope.”

Mimi Corcoran burst into a wide smile and turned to her beau. “Deke, this fellow doesn’t belong on the substitute list. He should be full-time.”

“Mimi—”