Leavitt slowly faded from my mind—the pile of contacts and phone numbers still spread across the table before me but already forgotten—as I lost myself in the din from the stereo. At high volume I barely heard the phone ring. During that summer the sound had almost become unfamiliar; since my friends had left town the phone rarely rang. Nobody prodding me to go out for beers, or get together to watch a ballgame or to barbecue. Sometimes my mom called, tapdancing around the reason for her call before finally asking how the job hunt was going. My answer was always the same. Answering lots of ads, networking, sending out resumés. No answers yet, but I'll definitely get some interviews soon. Yeah, sure I could talk to their insurance agent and see if there's anybody in his home office I could talk to. Of course I'll follow up on that. I would say just enough to ease her mind, and though she always sounded uncertain I hoped she hung up the phone with confidence and a clear conscience, reasonably reassured that she wasn't abandoning her youngest child to his adult fate.
I turned down the stereo—fIREHOSE's ode to R.E.M. dropping to low volume—and picked up the phone. On the other end, I heard only coughing and what sounded like the distant whir of a vacuum cleaner.
"Sorry about that," Wheatyard finally said, as the coughs trailed away. The vacuum still whirred, which seemed strange. Cleaning the house seemed like an unlikely pastime for him. "Hey, I'm coming into town this morning. Meet me at Mullen's."
Mullen's Tap was a bar and, as I saw from a glance at the digital clock on the microwave, it was only 10:15 in the morning. My reluctance to accept such an offer from Wheatyard was fully justified. But his tone was amiable, carefree, as if he had already forgotten my brazen empathy with readership- and profit-obsessed editors a few days before. Maybe I was being given the chance to reconnect, to study him further.
"Sure," I said, defying all reservations.
"Be there in half an hour. See you later." For all his verbosity on the injustices of small-town mechanics and small-minded editors, Wheatyard could be concise when he needed to be.
As I hung up the phone, an idea came to me. I stood, turning away from the contacts pile. I opened a kitchen drawer and brought out the local phone book, flipping straight to W. Whalen, Whatley, Wheat, Wheatley…Wheeler. No Frieda Wheatyard. No Elmer Wheatyard either, but maybe Tillsburg was in a different directory than Champaign.
So it seemed Frieda didn't live here in town, unless she had married and changed her name, in which case I'd never find her. Either way she probably went far beyond Champaign. I thought about all the things I would have asked her about Wheatyard—his childhood, how he ended up in Tillsburg, how he gets by. But it was no use. I decided to forget about her and instead keep asking about Wheatyard around town, with people who hardly knew him.