‘She wanted a purple kickball for our niece,’ he says. ‘She’s having a birthday. She’ll be eight. Her name is Tallie. She was named for an actress.’

Mr Ghosh takes a purple kickball from the wire rack and holds it out to Ray in both hands. ‘On the house,’ he says.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Ray says.

The woman with the Bugles bursts into tears. ‘Mary Mother of God,’ she says.

They stand around for awhile, talking. Mr Ghosh gets sodas from the cooler. These are also on the house. They drink their sodas and Ray tells them a few things about Mary, steering clear of the arguments. He tells them how she made a quilt that took third prize at the Castle County fair. That was in ’02. Or maybe ’03.

‘That’s so sad,’ the woman with the Bugles says. She has opened them and shared them around. They eat and drink.

‘My wife went in her sleep,’ the old man with the thinning hair says. ‘She just laid down on the sofa and never woke up. We were married thirty-seven years. I always expected I’d go first, but that’s not the way God wanted it. I can still see her laying there on the sofa.’ He shakes his head. ‘I couldn’t believe it.’

Finally Ray runs out of things to tell them, and they run out of things to tell him. Customers are coming in again. Mr Ghosh waits on some, and the woman in the blue smock waits on others. Then the fat woman says she really has to go. She gives Ray a kiss on the cheek before she does.

‘You need to see to your business, Mr Burkett,’ she tells him. Her tone is both reprimanding and flirtatious. Ray thinks she might be another mercy-fuck possibility.

He looks at the clock over the counter. It’s the kind with a beer advertisement on it. Almost two hours have gone by since Mary went sidling between the car and the cinderblock side of the Quik-Pik. And for the first time he thinks of Biz.

When he opens the door, heat rushes out at him, and when he puts his hand on the steering wheel to lean in, he pulls it back with a cry. It’s got to be a hundred and thirty in there. Biz is dead on his back. His eyes are milky. His tongue is protruding from the side of his mouth. Ray can see the wink of his teeth. There are little bits of coconut caught in his whiskers. That shouldn’t be funny, but it is. Not funny enough to laugh, but funny in a way that’s some fancy word he can’t quite think of.

‘Biz, old buddy,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot all about you.’

Great sadness and amusement sweep over him as he looks at the baked Jack Russell. That anything so sad should still be funny is just a crying shame.

‘Well, you’re with her now, ain’t you?’ he says, and this thought is so sad – yet so sweet – that he begins to cry. It’s a hard storm. While he’s crying it comes to him that now he can smoke all he wants, and anywhere in the house. He can smoke right there at her dining room table.

‘You’re with her now, Biz, old buddy,’ he says through his tears. His voice is clogged and thick. It’s a relief to sound just right for the situation. ‘Poor old Mary, poor old Biz. Damn it all!’

Still crying, and with the purple kickball still tucked under his arm, he goes back into the Quik-Pik. He tells Mr Ghosh he forgot to get cigarettes. He thinks maybe Mr Ghosh will give him a pack of Premium Harmonys on the house as well, but Mr Ghosh’s generosity doesn’t stretch that far. Ray smokes all the way to the hospital with the windows shut and Biz in the backseat and the air-conditioning on high.

Thinking of Raymond Carver

Sometimes a story arrives complete – a done thing. Usually, though, they come to me in two parts: first the cup, then the handle. Because the handle may not show up for weeks, months, or even years, I have a little box in the back of my mind full of unfinished cups, each protected in that unique mental packing we call memory. You can’t go looking for a handle, no matter how beautiful the cup may be; you have to wait for it to appear. I realize that metaphor sort of sucks, but when you’re talking about the process we call creative writing, most of them do. I have written fiction all my life, and still have very little understanding of how the process works. Of course, I don’t understand how my liver works, either, but as long as it keeps doing its job, I’m good with that.

About six years ago, I saw a near-miss accident at a busy intersection in Sarasota. A cowboy driver tried to wedge his bigfoot truck – the kind with the huge tires – into a left-turn lane already occupied by another bigfoot truck. The guy whose space was being encroached upon hit his horn, there was a predictable screech of brakes, and the two gas-guzzling behemoths ended up inches apart. The guy in the turn lane unrolled his window and raised one finger to the blue Florida sky in a salute that is as American as baseball. The fellow who had almost hit him returned the greeting, along with a Tarzan chest-thump that presumably meant Do you want a piece of me? Then the light turned green, other drivers began to honk, and they went on their way with no physical confrontation.

The incident got me thinking about what might have happened if the two drivers had emerged from their vehicles and started duking it out right there on the Tamiami Trail. Not an unreasonable imagining; road rage happens all the time. Unfortunately, ‘it happens all the time’ is not a recipe for a good story. Yet that near-accident stuck with me. It was a cup with no handle.

A year or so later, while eating lunch in an Applebee’s with my wife, I saw a man in his fifties cutting up an elderly gent’s chopped steak. He did it carefully, while the elderly gent stared vacantly over his head. At one point the old guy seemed to come around a little, and tried to grab the utensils, presumably so he could attend to his own meal. The younger man smiled and shook his head. The elderly gent let go and resumed his staring. I decided they were father and son, and there it was: the handle for my road rage cup.

Batman and Robin

Have an Altercation

Sanderson sees his father twice a week. On Wednesday evenings, after he closes the jewelry store his parents opened long ago, he drives the three miles to Crackerjack Manor and sees Pop there, usually in the common room. In his ‘suite,’ if Pop is having a bad day. On most Sundays, Sanderson takes him out to lunch. The facility where Pop is living out his final foggy years is actually called the Harvest Hills Special Care Unit, but to Sanderson, Crackerjack Manor seems more accurate.

Their time together isn’t actually so bad, and not just because Sanderson no longer has to change the old man’s bed when he pisses in it or get up in the middle of the night when Pop goes wandering around the house, calling for his wife to make him some scrambled eggs or telling Sanderson those damned Fredericks boys are out in the backyard, drinking and hollering at each other (Dory Sanderson has been dead for fifteen years and the three Fredericks boys, no longer boys, moved away long ago). There’s an old joke about Alzheimer’s: the good news is that you meet new people every day. Sanderson has discovered the real good news is that the script rarely changes. It means you almost never have to improvise.

Applebee’s, for instance. Although they have been having Sunday lunch at the same one for over three years now, Pop almost always says the same thing: ‘This isn’t so bad. We ought to come here again.’ He always has chopped steak, done medium rare, and when the bread pudding comes, he tells Sanderson that his wife’s bread pudding is better. Last year, the pudding was off the menu of the Applebee’s on Commerce Way, so Pop – after having Sanderson read the dessert choices to him four times and thinking it over for an endless two minutes – ordered the apple cobbler. When it came, Pop said that Dory served hers with heavy cream. Then he simply sat, staring out the window at the highway. The next time he made the same observation, but ate the cobbler right down to the china.