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There was a hole in his life where Jake and Sal had been, of course. Legal work couldn’t fill it, so he became more active in the community. He served as a trustee for the Curry Public Library and inaugurated the first Curry Book Festival. He did PSAs on the New Hampshire TV channels for the annual statewide blood drive. He worked one evening a week at the North Conway food bank (because others have it worse) and one evening a week at Harvest Hills, the animal shelter across the state line in Fryeburg. In 1979 he got a beagle puppy there. Frank went with him everywhere for the next fourteen years, riding shotgun.
He did not remarry, but he had a lady friend down the road in Moultonborough who he visited from time to time. Her name was Sarah Coombes. He did her legal work and paid off the mortgage on her house. He and Frank didn’t always spend the night, but Sarah kept a bag of Gaines-Burgers in her pantry for those times when they did. These visits grew rarer as the years passed; Phil was more likely to go home when the day was finished and microwave whatever his housekeeper and woman of general work left for him. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—he was struck by the emptiness of the house. On those occasions he’d call Frank to his side and scratch him behind the ears, and tell him that others had it worse.
The one community job he refused was co-coaching the Curry Little League team. That was just too close to home for Just Phil.
So the time passed, so the story was told. For the most part, it was good time. There were scars, but not disfiguring ones, and what were scars, after all, but wounds that had healed?
He picked up a limp and began to walk with a cane. Marie retired. He began to suffer arthritis in his hands, feet, and hips. Marie died. He announced his retirement and the town (Curry was now on the verge of becoming a small city) threw him one hell of a party. He was given many presents, including a plaque proclaiming him CURRY’S #1 CITIZEN. Several speeches were made, culminating in Phil’s address to a gathering that almost filled the auditorium of the new high school. It was a modest address, it was witty, and most of all it was short. He needed to piss like a racehorse.
Frank the beagle died peacefully in the fall of 1993. Phil buried him in the backyard, digging the hole with his own hands, although his joints squalled in protest at every shovelful. When the grave was filled and patted down and re-sodded, he gave a funeral oration, also short. “I loved you, old boy. Still do.” That was the year Phil turned eighty-one.
In 1995, he began to suffer migraines for the first time in his life. He went to see Dr. Barlow, who he still thought of as the New Doc, although Phil had been seeing him for checkups and arthritis for ten years. Barlow asked him if he was having double vision with the headaches. Phil said he was, and admitted that sometimes he found himself in different parts of the house when the headaches eased up, without remembering how he got there. Dr. Barlow sent him to Portsmouth for an MRI.
“Not such good news,” said the New Doc after examining the results. “It’s a brain tumor.” Then, as if congratulating him: “Quite rare in a man your age.”
Barlow recommended a neurologist at Mass General. Because Phil no longer drove except around town, he hired a young fellow named Logan Phipps to chauffeur him. Logan talked a great deal about his family, his friends, his girl, the weather, his part-time job, his desire to go back to school. Other things, as well. It all went in one of Phil’s less than acute ears and out the other, but he nodded along. It came to him on that ride that you began to separate from life. It wasn’t a big deal. It was like tearing a supermarket coupon slowly but steadily along a perforation.
The neurologist examined Phil and examined the scans of Phil’s elderly brain. He told Phil he could operate and take that nasty brain tumor right out, which made Phil think of an old song where a girl proclaimed she was going to wash that man right out of her hair. Sal frequently sang it in the shower, sometimes while she was washing her own hair, which Phil never took personally. When Phil asked the neurologist what the odds were that he would wake up from that operation—and as himself—the neuro guy told him fifty-fifty. Phil said he was sorry, but at his age those odds weren’t good enough.
“Your headaches may be quite bad before…” The neuro guy shrugged, not quite wanting to say before the end.
“Others have it worse,” Phil said.
3
On a windy October day in the fall of 1995, Phil slid behind the wheel of his car for the last time. Not a Chevrolet jalopy or a Buick these days but a Cadillac Seville equipped with all the bells and whistles. “I hope to Christ I don’t kill anybody, Frank,” he said to the dog that wasn’t there. He was headache free for the time being, but a coldness—sort of a distantness—had begun to inhabit his fingers and toes.
He drove through town at twenty miles an hour, increasing his speed to thirty when he left downtown. Several cars swerved around him, horns blaring. “Eat shit and die,” Phil told each of them. “Bark if you agree, Frank.”
On Route 111 the traffic thinned away to almost nothing, and was he surprised when he passed the bright yellow sign reading 2 MILES TO THE ANSWER MAN? He was not. Why else was he risking his life and the lives of anyone he happened to meet going the other way? Nor did he believe it was the spreading black rot in his brain sending out false information. He came to the next one soon after: bright blue, ANSWER MAN 1 MILE. And there, just over a rise on the outskirts of Curry Township, was the table and the bright red umbrella. Phil pulled over and turned off the engine. He grabbed his cane and struggled out from behind the wheel.
“You stay there, Frank. This won’t take long.”
Was he surprised to see the Answer Man looked just the same? Same bright eyes, same thinning hair, same clothes? He was not. There was just one change Phil could see, although it was hard to be sure with his vision doubling and sometimes trebling. There was only a single sign on the Answer Man’s table. It read
ALL ANSWERS FREE
He sat down in the client’s chair with a grunt and a grimace. “You’re just the same.”
“So are you, Just Phil.”
Phil laughed. “Pull the other one, why don’t you?” A stupid question, he supposed, but why not? Today all the answers were free.
“It’s true. Inside, you are just the same.”
“If you say so, but I have my doubts. Have you still got your big clock in your bag?”
“Yes, but today I won’t need it.”
“Freebie Friday, is it?”
The Answer Man smiled. “It’s Tuesday, Just Phil.”
“I know that. It was an impotent question. Are you familiar with those?”
“I’m familiar with every kind of question. What’s yours?”
Phil decided he no longer wanted to ask why me; it was, the Answer Man would have said, another impotent question. It was him because he was him. There was no other reason. Nor was he curious about how long he would live. He might see the snow fly, but it was a sure thing he wasn’t going to be around for the spring melt. There was only one thing he was curious about.
