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CHAPTER TWO

Dr. Gust's obituary ran in The South Coast Daily Sun two weeks later, on May 3, 2014, to be exact, yet another day that PJ Halliday, a sixty-three-year-old Pondville resident, would wake up, as usual, all alone in his house full of shit. That morning, PJ had no clue, not the slightest inkling, how much his life was about to change. PJ Halliday didn't read Dr. Gust's obituary, even though it was right next to another obituary that day—the one that would change his life—and all of it would be connected in the end. PJ didn't know Dr. Gust, so it wouldn't have meant much to him, that the man died slumped over his desk, using the keyboard as a final pillow. During the autopsy, an extraordinary amount of cat hair would be found in Dr. Gust's nostrils, sucked in off the keyboard during Dr. Gust's last breaths. That wasn't in the newspaper, of course; those kinds of details never make it into obituaries. But again, PJ Halliday didn't read Dr. Gust's obituary. It was another obituary, the one printed right next to it, that would catch PJ's attention and set him off on a new life course.

But first, the day had begun ordinarily enough: Still wearing his pajamas, PJ put on his ratty slippers and went downstairs to the kitchen, where he was greeted by his piles. Piles and piles and piles.

"Good morning, house," PJ said.

Good morning, PJ, the house said back. A house will always talk to you, if you live there long enough. PJ had lived in that house for nearly forty years out of his sixty-three, a blue house on the corner of Clear Pond Road with a white front porch.

PJ sat down at his kitchen table to count out his pills. As he swallowed, he looked up at the wooden sign by the telephone, which read A MESSY HOUSE IS A SIGN OF A HAPPY FAMILY. PJ had bought it at Nifty Gifts & Thrifts, the shop next to the post office. He thought it was a good joke, the bit about a happy family, since the house was empty. But his family had once all lived there, happily, or happily enough, and so the sign was probably PJ's most prized possession, if he had to pick. A reminder of how things had once been.

Then again, his house was chock-a-block full of old memories, so there would be a few other contenders for prized possession: the Sharpie drawing on the living-room wall, for example, a relic from one of his daughters' toddlerhoods, never painted over. Or his ex-wife's wedding dress that still hung in the closet, badly yellowed. The toys in the attic. Or his antique car in the garage.

Upstairs were his kids' rooms, rooms he never dared to go into, because the sadness might crush him. His younger daughter, Sophie, had cleared out most of her things, so it was the emptiness that would hurt. Sophie was all grown-up, twenty-six, and she didn't live far, only twenty minutes away, down in New Bedford. He saw her a few times a month. She was doing all right. He was lucky to have her so close by, even if Sophie wasn't always happy to see him.

It was the room at the end of the hall that really killed PJ. In there was Kate's stuff. His older daughter, his firstborn. Kate's room was the exact same as it had been, the night fifteen years ago she had gone to prom and hadn't come home. Her twin bed, her piggy bank, her posters of half-naked men. Fifteen years later, Kate's softball hat was still hanging on her doorknob outside the room. Maybe that was PJ's most prized possession: the blue hat on the door.

"Hello, hat," he said to it sometimes.

I miss her too, the hat said back. I wish...the hat always continued, but it never finished the sentence. A hat doesn't know what to wish for.

PJ knew most of what he owned was junk; he didn't think he was sitting on a pile of treasure. He had empty jars on the counters, mail stacked up so high on the table you couldn't see the tablecloth anymore. He knew it had cheery sunflowers on it. His ex-wife loved sunflowers, and PJ liked to think about the tablecloth hidden underneath the mail, but he could never get the strength up to unearth it. And PJ had more crap, spread around, everywhere. He had shoeboxes full of old letters under his bed. There were stacks of books on the floor, books that couldn't fit on the bookshelves. He slept next to a heap of laundry, some of it clean. There were beer cans lined up by the sink. And in the upstairs bathroom, there were still four toothbrushes in the cabinet. Proof that there had once been other people in this house.

After his pills, PJ got up from the kitchen table and made a cup of coffee in the Keurig. "Piece of shit," PJ grumbled, because he had to press every button on it before it started to boil water. He hated the machine, how it made one single sad cup of coffee, but he was not allowed to be at his ex-wife's house until eight A.M., earliest, and had to be there no later than nine. That was the deal. So, PJ had his cup of coffee first, before going back upstairs and putting on a stretched-out T-shirt with beige cargo shorts. He was a large man, overweight, lots of hair on his chest, his long beard was unkempt, his gray hair was down to his shoulders. He wasn't exactly George Clooney, but women always said he had nice eyes. They were green. Women liked him. They always had. They liked that he read poetry and listened to classical music, could play the piano, but they also liked that he loved rock music, and even the new stuff the young people played in the bar. Women liked that PJ knew about cars. They liked that he could tell a good joke, and that he wasn't a snob. They liked that he loved animals. They didn't mind how flatulent he was. They liked his sensitive nature.