Page 8 of The Life of Chuck

“He had a good life, Bri.”

“Not enough of it,” Brian says. “He’ll never get to take the train across Canada like he wanted to. Or visit Australia—he wanted that, too. He’s never going to see me graduate high school. He’s never going to have a retirement party where people make funny speeches and give him a gold…” He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “A gold watch.”

Doug squeezes his nephew’s shoulders.

Brian speaks looking down at his clasped hands. “I want to believe in God, Unc, and I sort of do, but I don’t understand why it has to be this way. Why God wouldletit be this way. It’s a mystery? You’re the hotshot philosophy guy and that’s the best you can do?”

Yes, because death brings philosophy to ruin, Doug thinks.

“You know what they say, Brian—death takes the best of us and death takes the rest of us.”

Brian tries to smile. “If that’s supposed to be comforting, you need to try harder.”

Doug seems not to have heard. He’s looking at his brother-in-law, who is—in Doug’s mind—an actual brother. Who has given his sister a good life. Who helped him get his start in business, and that’s really the least of it. They had some fine times together. Not enough, but it looks like they’ll have to do.

“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”

“And now my dad’s world is dying.”

“But not ours,” Doug says, and gives his nephew another squeeze. “Ours will go on a little while longer.And your mother’s. We need to be strong for her, Brian. As strong as we can.”

They fall silent, looking at the dying man in the hospital bed, listening to thebip… bip… bipof the monitor and the slow breaths Chuck Krantz inhales and exhales. Once it stops. His chest remains flat. Brian tenses. Then it rises again with another of those agonal rasps.

“Text Mom,” Brian says. “Right now.”

Doug already has his phone out. “Way ahead of you.” And types:Better come, sis. Brian is here. I think Chuck is near the end.

3

Marty and Felicia went out on the back lawn. They sat in chairs they carried down from the patio. The power was out all over the city now, and the stars were very bright. Brighter than Marty had ever seen them since he was a boy growing up in Nebraska. Back then he’d had a small telescope and conned the universe from his attic window.

“There’s Aquila,” he said. “The Eagle. There’s Cygnus, the Swan. See it?”

“Yes. And there’s the North Sta—” She stopped. “Marty? Did you see…”

“Yes,” he said. “It just went out. And there goes Mars. Goodbye, Red Planet.”

“Marty, I’m scared.”

Was Gus Wilfong looking up at the sky tonight? Andrea, the woman who’d been on the Neighborhood Watch Committee with Felicia? Samuel Yarbrough, the undertaker? What about the little girl in the red shorts? Star light, star bright, last stars I see tonight.

Marty took her hand. “I am, too.”

4

Ginny, Brian, and Doug stand beside Chuck Krantz’s bed, their hands joined. They wait as Chuck—husband, father, accountant, dancer, fan of TV crime shows—takes his last two or three breaths.

“Thirty-nine years,” Doug says. “Thirty-ninegreatyears. Thanks, Chuck.”

5

Marty and Felicia sat with their faces turned up to the sky, watching the stars go out. First in ones and twos, then by the dozens, then by the hundreds. As the Milky Way rolled away into darkness, Marty turned to his ex-wife.

“I love—”

Black.

ACT IIBUSKERS

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