Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over his computer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he’d moved into the house, he’d felt the shape of that story. All the while that he’d sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below the surface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples.
But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him, fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening sentence,
I suspect that my father is dead
and deleted it. Then undid the delete.
He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb, paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his sentence.
My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue’s roof for God knows how long.
The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted to write a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabited it. He hit the delete key.
The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, because she could always while away the hours looking up the rental histories of the popular girls who’d shunned her in high school.
That’s when Link rang his doorbell and he startled guiltily and quit the text editor, saving the opening sentence. Which had a lot of promise, he thought.
“Link!” he said. “Come in!”