Bob's Greatest Mistake

by M. L. S. Weech

  “I’m sure you meant to say that you don’t have children, but the present is for me,” she said. Bob took a moment to review what he’d said in his mind. Sure, a grammar teacher might take away points for how he’d said it, but anyone should get the meaning. He was about to say just that when he noticed her smile again.

  “You’re still teasing me,” he said, a bit defeated.

  “And enjoying it, to be honest,” she said.

  He slid the festively wrapped present across the round table and watched as she opened it. The look on her face was worth all the embarrassment in the world.

  The 1865 first edition of War and Peace wouldn’t have been too difficult for her to find, but then she opened the cover and looked inside. The autograph made this a bit more special. It was special to Bob, at least: Leo signed it about three years before he died. He had the note memorized.

  It read, “To My Fellow Traveler: A man can only live so long and gain so much, but love is something you can never collect too much of. May you find it someday, Leo.”

  “Where ...” she said. At last, I have the upper hand.

  “I’ve been collecting first editions for as long as I can remember,” Bob said honestly. “I thought this was the least I could do to replace the one I ruined.”

  “That book cost me about nine dollars,” she said with something between a gasp and a chuckle. He knew he’d picked the right gift.

  “Consider it an apology.”

  “This is an expensive apology.”

  “You paid more for your copy than I did for that one.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t make a habit of lying.”

  “You may not lie habitually, but I don’t believe you got this for less than nine dollars,” Patience said, closing the leather cover to run a hand along the gold illumination.

  “It was a gift from a friend,” Bob said with a smile.

  “Then I’m sure he paid a lot for it. I can’t take this, especially if someone else gave it to you.”

  “He would tell me giving is what matters. The one who gave me that book would be proud I gave it to you. He believed in doing for others.”

  “A real Tolstoyan,” she said with a smile.

  “I think so, but he disagreed,” Bob said honestly. Leo had made a joke or two at his own expense regarding the Tolstoyan movement.

  “Thank you,” she said. Bob sat quietly for few moments. She chuckled again and he wanted to ask her why, but she interrupted. “This is the part where you ask to know more about me.”

  “What about you?” he said, kicking himself for the dumbest question ever asked.

  “What would you like to know?” she asked.

  “What’s the camera for?”

  “Taking pictures.”

  Bob finished his cup of hot chocolate and ordered another. It gave him time to collect his thoughts. Stacy, the teenage girl behind the counter, brought Bob his drink and put another in front of Patience.

  “They really do think highly of you around here,” she said half mockingly.

  “I think I’m a pretty good customer.”

  “How often do you come here?”

  “Every day after work,” Bob answered. “I teach third grade here in Liverpool. What about you?”

  “I already passed third grade.”

  “Are you always this sarcastic?”

  “Yes,” she said sarcastically. He let out a guffaw that had the other seven people in the coffee shop staring at him.

  She laughed and smiled. Bob found himself staring at her.

  “I’m a photographer,” she told him. “I’m on staff at the Post-Standard.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Whatever they happen to pay money for, but I like feature photography best. I look for the stories no one else wants to look for.”

  “The sad stories no one pays attention to?” Bob asked, trying to sound serious.

  “The happy stories no one looks for because they’re caught up looking for some heartbreaking angle,” she answered. There wasn’t any anger in her voice for his assumption. She sounded genuinely proud of herself.

  She took a drink of her coffee and he a sip of his hot chocolate as a pleasant silence followed. They each took a few more sips of their drinks before Bob asked, “How long have you been at the paper?”

  “A few years now, but I shot for them on a freelance basis for ten years. How long have you been teaching?”

  “Feels like a few hundred years,” he said. Mostly because he’d been teaching for more than two hundred.

  “Are the students that bad?”

  “The job is that rewarding. Especially this last year.”

  “Oh? Did they change something in the school system?”

  “No, I just found a better way to do my job. I focus on the individual, not what I have to do for him.”

  “Sounds like a good plan.”

  “It’s worked for me so far,” Bob said honestly.

  They shared a second cup of coffee. She talked about some of her projects, and he told her about substituting in Phoenix. They clinked their paper cups together in a toast to warm winters. She started to smile again. Every time he felt comfortable, she seemed to recognize that as a moment to strike. The most frustrating part of it was how much he enjoyed it. She kept him guessing.

  “Bob,” she said with that grin of hers.

  “Yes?” he asked, expecting to hear he had hot chocolate on his tie.

  “This is the part where you ask for my number.” He did.

  10

  What Headaches Mean

  November 10, 2006

  I woke up today with a headache. My skull feels like it wants to crack open.

  The pain is pretty bad right now. Headaches are the worst thing a Journeyman can suffer. They don’t mean something terrible for me; they mean something terrible for the world.

  Bob tried to stay in bed. The pillows and low light helped with his headache a little. The throb of his head pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. The last headache he’d suffered ended on Oct. 17, 1989, at 5:04 p.m. in San Francisco. More than sixty people died that evening, and Bob had to help Transport every single soul. That was the meaning of headaches for a Journeyman.

  Bob rolled out of bed reluctantly and uselessly swallowed some aspirin—the pain had nothing to do with his biological condition. Journeymen didn’t get sick like mortals. Drisc explained the meaning the first time Bob suffered a headache. It was the first of three disasters in which Bob found himself involved. The Chicago Fires and the World Series Earthquake were bad, but the Night of the Big Wind in Dublin, Ireland, seemed to haunt Bob and his friend ever since. It was the night they became best friends.

  “We get ‘em before great tragedies,” Drisc had told him outside a pub in north Dublin. “Our Death Sense c’n only handle so much at one time, so whene’er a large group ‘o people in ‘er area is about ta die, our power can’t accoun’ fer it. So our heads pound wit the effort of try’n to keep out thirty or so Death Senses.”

  Bob was still a very young Journeyman at the time. Drisc had taught him everything about how to be a Journeyman. He was the only person Bob knew, and therefore, the only friend he had at the time.

  The headache began Dec. 31, 1839, and simply stopped on Jan. 6, 1840.

  Bob rushed over to Drisc’s small fishing boat moored in the Dublin Bay. He noticed the look of disgust on his friend’s face before anything else. “The headache’s gone,” Bob said, confused. “Doesn’t that mean it’s over?”

  “No,” Drisc said sadly, looking at the wall of storm clouds above. “It means it’s begun.”

  It started as a stiff wind. Bob held his line close to his body to keep the tunic from fluttering in the stiff gusts of wind. The rain splattered onto his head, and the temperature dropped. In a matter of minutes, the windstorm grew to speeds beyond one hundred knots. Bob and Drisc were the only two people insane enough to be out during the storm. They had to b
e. They had to collect hundreds of souls in two days.

  Bob watched helplessly as houses were literally blown to pieces. He had no sooner collected one family of souls before a slated roof flew off one home and rained like shrapnel into another house. Bob looked at Drisc. Talking was useless. All Bob could hear was the sound of the wind booming along his ears. Drisc must have had the same problem. He pointed at himself and the house that had lost its roof. Bob knew the meaning. “I’ll go there, you take the other home.”

  Bob couldn’t see very well. He grabbed and pulled himself along any route that took him closer to the slate-peppered house. Journeymen are immortal, not invulnerable. Had any piece of shrapnel found him, he’d bleed and die just like anyone. So long as that didn’t happen, he was fine. It just so happened that shrapnel flew and peppered the area as if whatever power-that-was intended to make an example of Bob’s vulnerability.

  Another group of slate tiles flew at him. Bob ducked behind what turned out to be the hull of a ship. The tiles splattered against the wood, some stabbing into the hull like throwing knives. He wanted to wait out the storm there, but he couldn’t. Drisc had told him there was nothing worse a Journeyman could do than allow a soul to rot.

  Bob tied himself to the hull of the ship, trying not to remember that the bay was more than three hundred yards away. He stayed low and found his way into the house. An old farmer lay dying with a piece of slate roof jammed halfway into his stomach. Bob wanted to comfort the man, but people were dying everywhere. He waited with shameful impatience for the man to die so he could take the soul and move on.

  When he stepped out of the house, the storm had moved past. It was eerie to think that just moments ago, objects had been flying everywhere. He imagined that if the hand of God did exist, a hurricane was as good an analogy as every other. Bob noticed Drisc outside the house next door. His leg looked injured. Bob rushed over to him.

  “It’s all pointless now,” Drisc said. He was weeping. Bob began to use strips of his own clothes to try and stop any bleeding.

  “Drisc, we have to go,” Bob said.

  “She’s gone, Bob,” he said. “She’s gone, and it’s my fault.”

  “Who’s gone?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Drisc answered. Bob had to use a few pieces of wood to splint his mentor’s leg. He tied it off and looked at the Irishman.

  “You’re probably right about that,” Bob replied. “But we have to keep going.”

  “There’s nothing left of me,” Drisc said cryptically. The curious side of Bob wondered what the comment meant.

  “Drisc?” Bob asked.

  “That’s ‘oo I am now,” Drisc said.

  “That’s right,” Bob said with a smile. “You’re Drisc. A lazy bum with too much goodwill to let all the work he doesn’t want to do go undone.”

  “I never wanted to be a member of the Council,” Drisc said quietly.

  “Maybe not, but you’re my friend, and I can’t let them yell at you for not finishing this job.”

  Bob helped Drisc to one area before running to Transport a few souls himself. Drisc worked mechanically the rest of that day. There were hundreds of dead people, hundreds of souls, and just the two of them to manage it.

  Bob blinked away the memory. Sometime between thoughts, he turned on the cold water and let it run down his bathroom sink. He splashed his face, trying to erase the memory of the Big Wind. It didn’t work very well. And in seven days, he was going to have a brand-new tragedy to remember.

  11

  Waiting for an Opportunity

  Richard Hertly was relatively confident he had Drifter’s routine down. The man wasn’t as clockwork as he’d been in Arizona, and Richard imagined that the man named Drisc had something to do with that. The two went into the same coffee shop Drifter visited every day after work. That meant he had at least an hour before the two men would walk out.

  Richard rummaged through the fast-food wrappers on the passenger seat and pulled out his notebook. The first page hit him like a slap in the face. It was an older notebook, one from before his life was turned upside down. It had a grocery list and various other random thoughts he wanted to remember. One sentence was underlined three times: “Linda’s birthday next week.”

  Richard punished himself every chance he got for what he was putting Linda through. This was the worst punishment he could think of. He took a deep breath and turned to a page of notes about Drifter. The substitute had a class of about thirty students and was at the school from six a.m. until four p.m. After school ended, Drifter would visit this coffee shop.

  Drifter’s schedule after his routine coffee fix depended on the small man with brown hair. If this Drisc person was around, Drifter would go wherever the shorter man led. Other days, Drifter would go to his small apartment in Liverpool and read. Hertly turned the page to his interview notes. He was as careful as he could be when talking to the parents in the area. He had to learn which parents belonged to which children and find random ways to approach them, so as not to cause Drifter to suspect Richard was in the area. The notes were infuriating.

  “My daughter just loves Bob,” one woman said. “It’s so nice to see a teacher engage the children so well.”

  “My son actually asked me for a book for Christmas,” another mother said. “I almost wish I could go back to third grade.” During the interview, the mother, a round woman with short hair, smiled at Richard and made jokes about how much better kids today had it. Richard turned and left instead of screaming at the woman. Kids today have it so much better, Richard thought glumly. They only have to worry about homicidal maniacs killing them. That’s so much better than a low score on some state test.

  Drifter already had the parents caught up in his act. They would praise his teaching skills and wonder at how well he worked with children, all the while clueless that he was a sociopath. But there was one person Richard could talk to that might know about Drifter’s darker habits.

  If Drifter trusted his friend, maybe that was whom Richard needed to see. Maybe Drisc was just some innocent guy who would only notice some odd habits of Drifter’s. Or maybe Drisc was just as sick as Drifter was. There was only one way to find out, and it was about time Richard gained something new from his search. He just had to wait for a chance to catch the Irishman alone.

  12

  A Date

  Patience wasn’t surprised when Bob arrived ten minutes early to pick her up. She wasn’t surprised that he had over-packed for an afternoon hike. He looked ready to climb Mt. Everest. She wasn’t at all surprised when he opened his car door for her. During the few phone calls they’d shared, he’d given her the impression he was old-fashioned. The single, long-stemmed rose on her seat surprised her.

  “The rose is for you,” he said shyly.

  “I’ll be sure to tell any of the other women you pick up today,” she said with a smile. He was cute in an earnestly clumsy way.

  “Right,” he said with a chuckle. He put the car in gear as she put the rose to her nose to smell its fragrance.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. She didn’t tease him to be mean. He was like a teenager in some ways, wanting everything to be perfect. Patience wasn’t about to tell him how romantic the whole thing seemed to her. When he got flustered and started acting like that teenager, it made her feel like one.

  They hit a stop sign and he turned on his radio. An audiobook started up. He looked at her and grinned. Is this a joke? she asked herself, trying not to laugh. His smile wilted, and he turned the radio off. She couldn’t stop a chuckle from escaping her.

  “That was a terrible joke,” he said. Mr. Obvious pointing out the blue sky.

  “I got it,” she said flatly.

  “Really, I wasn’t going to listen to it,” he said. She believed him, but he must not have thought so.

  “I have no intention of reading at all during this trip.”

  She looked at the backseat of the car, where three books sat. “Really?” she said.r />
  “Scout’s honor,” he said. He took a moment to rub his temples.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  “Just a headache.” He looked like he was really hurting.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure I’m not going to give up today because my head hurts a little.” That was quite possibly the perfect thing to say to her. She smiled.

  “If you’re not feeling well, we could do this some other time,” she said.

  “Who knows when that would be?” he asked, glancing over at her. “I have you now, and I don’t mean to give that up for a ‘maybe next time’.” That was definitely the perfect thing to say.

  “So I’m a prisoner?” she asked with a wry grin.

  “And no amount of teasing will convince me to let you escape.”

  “Do I at least get to know where we’re going?” Over the phone, he had said they were going exploring. Patience asked where, and he only told her to bring hiking boots.

  “Somewhere special,” he said and smiled. He looked average. When she’d first met him, she wasn’t sure she could pick him out of a lineup, much less how much she’d like him. That honest smile, like he was someone who doesn’t want to hide anything from anyone, was what made him different.

  Only he did have some secrets. She could tell he was uncomfortable from time to time. She’d ask about his past, and he’d get quiet. She assumed part of it had to do with him being an orphan. Maybe something happened when he was young. Bob would admit anything embarrassing about himself. He’d laugh at his mistakes and never rub in anything she did wrong. But he’d never admit he’d been hurt or wronged. Whatever he was hiding, it wasn’t something terrible, just something he didn’t like about himself.

  The car ride would have been a great date in itself. They talked to each other and shared stories. She’d tease him, and he’d laugh and respond with interest. It took him a while to use his wit, but the moment he caught on that she wasn’t easily insulted, he let his guard down. Patience hated it when a guy tried to treat a girl like she couldn’t handle a joke.