“And it must be nice working in a bowling alley,” I said. “All the new people coming and going, the excitement of competition.”
“What would you do in a bowling alley?”
“For one thing, take care of the rental shoes. They need to be irradiated or something between uses. And polished. You have to check the laces regularly.”
The chief nodded, and the purple Barney chair squeaked more like a mouse than like a dinosaur.
My clothes had nearly dried, but they were badly wrinkled. I checked my watch. “I better get moving. I’m going to have to change before I can go to the Grille.”
We both rose to our feet.
The Barney chair collapsed.
Looking at the purple ruins, Chief Porter said, “That could have happened when you were fighting Harlo.”
“Could have,” I said.
“Insurance will cover it with the rest.”
“There’s always insurance,” I agreed.
We went downstairs, where Stevie was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, happily eating a lemon cupcake.
“I’m sorry, but I broke your bedroom chair,” Chief Porter told him, for the chief is not a liar.
“That’s just a stupid old Barney chair, anyway,” the boy said. “I outgrew that stupid old Barney stuff weeks ago.”
With a broom and a dustpan, Stevie’s mom was sweeping up the broken glass.
Chief Porter told her about the chair, and she was inclined to dismiss it as unimportant, but he secured from her a promise that she would look up the original cost and let him know the figure.
He offered me a ride home, but I said, “Quickest for me is just to go back the way I came.”
I left the house through the hole where the glass door had been, walked around the pool instead of splashing through it, climbed the slumpstone wall, crossed the narrow alleyway, climbed the wrought-iron fence, walked the lawn around another house, crossed Marigold Lane, and returned to my apartment above the garage.
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. BUT THEN, BY GOD, I DO something about it.
This proactive strategy is rewarding but dangerous. Some days it results in an unusual amount of laundry.
After I changed into clean jeans and a fresh white T-shirt, I went around to Mrs. Sanchez’s back porch to confirm for her that she was visible, which I did every morning. Through the screen door, I saw her sitting at the kitchen table.
I knocked, and she said, “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I hear you just fine.”
“Who do you hear?”
“You. Rosalia Sanchez.”
“Come in then, Odd Thomas,” she said.
Her kitchen smelled like chiles and corn flour, fried eggs and jack cheese. I’m a terrific short-order cook, but Rosalia Sanchez is a natural-born chef.
Everything in her kitchen is old and well worn but scrupulously clean. Antiques are more valuable when time and wear have laid a warm patina on them. Mrs. Sanchez’s kitchen is as beautiful as the finest antique, with the priceless patina of a life’s work and of cooking done with pleasure and with love.
I sat across the table from her.
Her hands were clasped tightly around a coffee mug to keep them from shaking. “You’re late this morning, Odd Thomas.”
Invariably she uses both names. I sometimes suspect she thinks Odd is not a name but a royal title, like Prince or Duke, and that protocol absolutely requires that it be used by commoners when they address me.
Perhaps she thinks that I am the son of a deposed king, reduced to tattered circumstances but nonetheless deserving of respect.
I said, “Late, yes, I’m sorry. It’s been a strange morning.”
She doesn’t know about my special relationship with the deceased. She’s got enough problems without having to worry about dead people making pilgrimages to her garage.
“Can you see what I’m wearing?” she asked worriedly.
“Pale yellow slacks. A dark yellow and brown blouse.”
She turned sly. “Do you like the butterfly barrette in my hair, Odd Thomas?”
“There’s no barrette. You’re holding your hair back with a yellow ribbon. It looks nice that way.”
As a young woman, Rosalia Sanchez must have been remarkably beautiful. At sixty-three, having added a few pounds, having acquired the seams and crinkles of seasoning experience, she possessed the deeper beauty of the beatified: the sweet humility and the tenderness that time can teach, the appealing glow of care and character that, in their last years on this earth, no doubt marked the faces of those who were later canonized as saints.
“When you didn’t come at the usual time,” she said, “I thought you’d been here but couldn’t see me. And I thought I couldn’t see you anymore, either, that when I became invisible to you, you also became invisible to me.”
“Just late,” I assured her.
“It would be terrible to be invisible.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t have to shave as often.”
When discussing invisibility, Mrs. Sanchez refused to be amused. Her saintly face found a frown of disapproval.
“When I’ve worried about becoming invisible, I’ve always thought I’d be able to see other people, they just wouldn’t be able to see or hear me.”
“In those old Invisible Man movies,” I said, “you could see his breath when he went out in really cold weather.”
“But if other people become invisible to me when I’m invisible to them,” she continued, “then it’s like I’m the last person in the world, all of it empty except for me wandering around alone.”
She shuddered. Clasped in her hands, the coffee mug knocked against the table.
When Mrs. Sanchez talks about invisibility, she’s talking about death, but I’m not sure she realizes this.
If the true first year of the new millennium, 2001, had not been good for the world in general, it had been bleak for Rosalia Sanchez in particular, beginning with the loss of her husband, Herman, on a night in April. She had gone to sleep next to the man whom she had loved for more than forty years—and awakened beside a cold cadaver. For Herman, death had come as gently as it ever does, in sleep, but for Rosalia, the shock of waking with the dead had been traumatic.
Later that year, still mourning her husband, she had not gone with her three sisters and their families on a long-planned vacation to New England. On the morning of September 11, she awakened to the news that their return flight out of Boston had been hijacked and used as a guided missile in one of the most infamous acts in history.
Although Rosalia had wanted children, God had given her none. Herman, her sisters, her nieces, her nephews had been the center of her life. She lost them all while sleeping.
Sometime between that September and that Christmas, Rosalia had gone a little crazy with grief. Quietly crazy, because she had lived her entire life quietly and knew no other way to be.
In her gentle madness, she would not acknowledge that they were dead. They had merely become invisible to her. Nature in a quirky mood had resorted to a rare phenomenon that might at any moment