Praise for Elizabeth Flock’s debut novel Me & Emma:

‘Brilliantly written, this is a must-read.”

—Closer

“This is an amazing tale … We urge you to read it –

you won’t be disappointed!”

—OK!

Praise for Elizabeth Flock’s debut novel But Inside I’m Screaming:

“Another gripping story from the author of Me & Emma, this is a highly personal tale of a young woman who finds herself losing control of her life.” 5 Stars —OK!

“An intriguing plot which is both disturbing and shocking.” —B Magazine

“… an absorbing novel … this former reporter writes a story that’s hard to put down.” —The Oakland Tribune

“.an insightful, touching and, yes, even funny account of what it’s like to lose control as the world watches …” —New York Times bestselling author Mary Jane Clark

“From the first page, Elizabeth Flock takes you inside the mind and heart of a young woman of promise, about to be destroyed by her own past. A riveting, fast-paced tale …” —Judy Woodruff, CNN

“Once I started it, I could not put it down. The author’s realistic writings about what goes on in a psychiatric hospital are amazing.” —Writers Unlimited

Also by Elizabeth Flock

ME & EMMA

BUT INSIDE I’M SCREAMING

Available now from MIRA® Books

Everything Must Go
Elizabeth Flock

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For my brother, Regi Brack

Chapter one

2001

Five-fifteen p.m. Henry pushes open the door, drops his keys on the front hall table. “Mom?”

He turns into the living room, shut up and dark, the curtain drawn against the brightness of the fall day. His shrunken mother is on the couch balancing a highball in one hand, a cigarette burning out in the other, in clothes that once fit properly but now swallow her up. Her thinning brown hair is flecked with gray and hanging loose from a swirl of a bun.

“David?” she asks, not yet pulling her stare from the television set.

“No, Mom. It’s me,” he says, “Henry.”

She looks over and sees that yes, it is Henry. He can see the disappointment in her eyes, glazed over from the glow of the TV.

He takes the cigarette from her, stubs it out in the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table and makes a mental note to clean up all the drink rings and ashes.

He opens the curtains with the string pulley and when he turns back to her she is shading her eyes against the light, but then her hand drops back down to the couch.

“How are you?” he asks.

She does not answer him, but he is used to that and so has not waited for a reply.

In the kitchen he opens the refrigerator to see what he’ll need to pick up at the grocery store.

Over the din of squealing contestants spinning large dials, Henry asks, “How’re you feeling?”

“Are you just home from football?” she asks. “How was practice?”

“I’m home from work, Mom,” he says, taking a deep breath and leaning down to scoop her up. “Remember?”

She clasps her hands behind his neck, holding on, bumping along in his arms with each step up the stairs.

Henry is gentle placing her into her bed. Moving through the room, he picks up a Ladies’ Home Journal that has fallen to the floor from her nightstand, and replaces it within reach, right side up. On top of the Readers’ Digest.

“How was work?” she asks, pulling the covers up.

He pauses on his way out of the master bedroom to answer her.

“You know what? It was a hard day,” he says. He sighs the kind of sigh that carries a weight. “Bye, Mom. I’m going out for a while but I’ll be back later, okay? I’ll check on you later.”

She is already sleeping when he leaves.

It was not always this way.

“Henry, pass the baked beans, please,” his mother says. She rests her cigarette in the notch of the ashtray and reaches across the picnic table toward him.

The clay container feels heavy to seven-year-old Henry and he concentrates very hard to make sure it does not tip on its way over the deviled eggs with the paprika sprinkled on top. Black flies scatter.

“Thank you,” she says. She is making a point by emphasizing the please and thank you and waits with an expectation of you’re welcome from Henry. He stops chewing and with split-second reasoning decides the greater offense would be to talk with his mouth full so he nods his you’re welcome and hopes his mother will accept this as the best he can do under the circumstances. Did you see I did the right thing right you looked at me like it was good so maybe I did, he thinks, in one jumbled seven-year-old thought process.

“Can I be excused?” Henry’s older brother, Brad, asks.

“You haven’t finished your hot dog yet,” she says. Henry races to finish his own, to escape into the sunny day, away from the fragments of adult conversation floating over his head: Detroit riots. Sergeant Pepper and The Downfall of The Beatles. The Smothers Brothers, which he had indeed watched with his parents one night when they let Henry and Brad stay up past their bedtime, but Henry had not really liked the show and fell asleep before it finished so all he really wanted right now was to be released from the table.

Brad crams the rest of the hot dog into his mouth and says, “Now can I?” Wonder bread bun flicks out of his mouth.

Their mother sighs at Brad and looks away so their father, Edgar Powell, says, “Yes.”

Henry’s father has a spot of ketchup on the front of his madras shirt, and Henry can tell this is bothering him because he keeps wiping it with his paper napkin and sighing in disgust when it refuses to disappear.

“Can I, too?” Henry asks. The dinner is cutting into the July twilight that won’t hold its breath for long. So they squirm to be released because even hot dogs don’t make up for lost time in summer light, a conch-shell call to the young boys.

“I swear it’s impossible to keep these children in one place for more than five minutes,” Henry’s mother says to the two other mothers on her side of the bench, who nod sympathetically, yes, yes it is hard to keep them in line so why even try just let them go boys will be boys after all.

“Yes, you may both be excused,” she says, leaning across the table so her husband can light her next cigarette with his Zippo lighter.

Henry notices she has not completely stubbed out her last cigarette. He looks up to see if this bothers her as much as it does him, and determining it does not appear to bother her in the least, he finger-stops the Coke in his straw and releases it over the smoking remains of cigarette. Gulping the last of his drink he sighs “aah” like in the commercial but is disappointed nobody notices his attempt at humor so he races off after Brad. On the way he picks up a stick because they’d agreed to play cowboys and Indians and he remembers he is supposed to be an Indian and Indians used sticks not guns to fight the cowboys so he’d better get a good one because Brad is tough competition.

“Wait up,” Henry calls out.

Back at the table all are laughing at a joke one of the men makes and the women are shaking their heads at its silliness. All except Edgar Powell.

Edgar Powell is the sort of man who only says “God bless you” after the first sneeze. If multiple sneezes follow he pointedly ignores them. For Edgar Powell this is a pragmatic choice, a studied economy of words, not a malicious wish that the sneezer be condemned to damnation. He is equally frugal with his laughter.

“Boys, watch out for your brother,” their mother calls and Henry groans, watching his just barely two-year-old brother David toddle toward them, arms Frankenstein-extended. David David David, it’s always take care of your brother and watch out for your brother. Brad’s the oldest so he gets to do older-kid stuff, David’s the baby so he gets all the attention, and then there’s me, invisible me, he says to himself, kicking at a rock, waiting for Brad to shoot him like he always does. Henry’s truth is that he is the one who does everything right. But this seems very little compared to David David David and Brad Brad Brad, and he wishes his parents saw the gut punches, the head locks or the Chinese water torture where Brad pins him down and lets the string of spit hang down almost to his face before sucking it back up. Then there was the time Brad made Henry eat dirt, which still humiliates him even though it happened last year. Thankfully Matt Rollins, who gave Brad the idea in the first place, moved to Baltimore not long after. At least I’m not a tattletale, he thinks. His best friend, Petey, had cautioned against tattling and had told of even worse big-brother tortures. Never ever tell on him, Petey had said in the fort they’d built in back of Henry’s house.

Sometimes, though, it was easy not to tattle because Brad would unexpectedly stick up for him at school if the occasion presented itself. Or Brad would talk baseball with him—in a know-it-all way, but still. Life was good when this happened. It made it all worthwhile when, say, the Yankees won and they shouted with joy and leaped into each other’s arms and punched their fists into the air with happiness.

“David’s a cowboy with you,” he calls out to Brad.

“No, he’s not,” Brad yells, hiding somewhere out of Henry’s sight.

“Yes, he is. There are more cowboys than Indians so he’s on your team,” he says. He turns to David, who has now reached him. “Davey, go over there, Brad’s calling you. Go over there to Brad.”

“Bad?” David has not yet mastered his r’s and Henry has encouraged this coincidental nickname.

“Yeah, Bad,” Henry says, gently pushing his brother toward the fringe of the park. “Go over there.”

“Ha-ha,” he calls out. “He’s coming over.”

“Yeah, well, you just got shot so you’re dead,” Brad says, standing up from not as far away as Henry had imagined.

Cowboys and Indians gives way to a makeshift series of sticks balanced across rocks at different heights so the boys can leap over them, taking turns being Evel Knievel. But Brad hurts his knee and starts a wrestling match that is incomplete as David repeatedly tries to take part and boys, watch out for your brother dots it and it is therefore far less satisfying than any of them had hoped. Henry’s cousin, Tommy, at ten is bigger than both of them, and at one point has Brad pinned down requiring Henry to jump onto Tommy’s back to peel him off.

“Get off,” he says. “Get off,” because brothers innately stick together against outside foes even cousin foes.

It’s two against one. The Powell boys against cousin Tommy carries on until that, too, is exhausted. They scatter then and Henry wanders off into the wood to see what’s what. Let Brad watch David for once how come he always gets out of it anyway, Henry thinks. It’s such a gyp.

It is two or three yards into the thick, cool shade of trees when Henry happens on two birds. It’s clear they are fighting and he stops to watch. They are well matched—the same breed, the same size. It does not occur to Henry that he has the power to put a stop to this. To intervene. To interrupt the natural course of events. He is frozen and spellbound. He finds it strange how silent they are, the pecking brutal, the feathers—the long ones on top—start peeling off. The bird on the bottom, the one being nailed over and over again by the beak, struggles slightly but Henry sees it is resigned. Horrified, Henry watches the weak one give in. The downy smaller feathers underneath floating in the air like dandelion fluff. The beak pecking pecking pecking red with blood. Henry is surprised at the brightness of the color, so much like his mother’s lipstick or like the fake Dracula blood he had smeared on either side of his mouth last Halloween.

The dying bird finally manages a mournful squawk.

“Stop,” he says out loud, finding his voice. “Stop it,” he shouts, running forward, waving his arms. “Stop.”

The bloody beak rises and the bird flaps off. Henry’s spindly legs walk to the mess on the pine needles. He squats down next to the bird on its side, a beady eye finds his, locks and then shuts.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay now.” He is trying to soothe the bird but is sick at his stomach seeing he is too late.

Not so far away the stronger bird waits to finish what he had started.

“Go,” Henry yells. Tears in his eyes he rushes at the bird. “Go away. Go.”

He returns to the bird on the ground and kneels. This is the closest he has ever been to a bird. He reaches out, and with his index finger, he strokes the top of the bird’s head. The only part that is not bloody. It is membrane-soft, smooth and still warm and Henry finds it the saddest thing he has ever ever seen in the whole wide universe.

There is no time to bury it; Brad will be looking for him, Henry thinks. Or Tommy. Or maybe his mother. If he is gone too long. And it feels like he’s been gone too long.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “Sorry, bird.” On his haunches he allows the tears to fall.

It astounds him that he is only steps from his family, from all the picnic activity. He does not tell anyone about it. He keeps it for himself, feeling he alone was entrusted with the weight, the responsibility of being the only witness to this spectacularly rare event. It is fine with him that no one notices he is no longer playing. He takes a stick and hits random bushes at the edge of the clearing … mad at himself he had allowed it to happen. Come to think of it, he thinks, thank God Mom and Dad didn’t find me, not that they really would have, but still—they would have asked why I let the bird die.

The boys are called back to help throw out soggy paper plates and clinking beer bottles. The mothers are stacking the Tupperware and drinking out of plastic cups, giggling at something one or the other has said before the boys reach the table in near darkness.

In the car ride home the boys are quiet, drunk with exhaustion. David has fallen asleep between them, his head bobbing with each bump in the road. In front of them their mother moves closer to their father, who is driving. The station wagon has one long continuous front seat and their father reaches out and drapes his arm across the top of the seat back, across their mother’s shoulders, and their murmuring this and that about who said what mixes in with the sound of the engine and Henry next feels his father’s arms scooping him up to carry him into the house. Brad trails them, his steps weaving in sleepiness.

Ahead of them on the front walk his mother is carrying David.

Henry dreamily reaches his first finger to his little brother’s head he confuses with the bird’s, so soft and smooth. But David’s head just out of reach.

Chapter two

1977

Henry’s fingers are too numb to tie a good knot in his cleats so he jams the leftover strings under the tongue and hopes they’ll stay.

“Powell!” His coach speaks in exclamation points. “Look alive! You’re going back in!”

He tilts forward so he can see down the bench to the running back, who has just hobbled off the field cradling a hurt elbow, steam rising off his body like a cup of coffee, curling up into the cold fall air. Henry wonders how it is he can suddenly feel his own heart beating in his throat. I’m the last of the Powell men to do something really do something so I can’t screw up I really can’t please God don’t let me screw this up, he thinks.

“Wake up, Powell!” The coach’s head flicks to the right only by an inch or so but communicates exasperation perfectly and Henry jumps up.

He stomps warmth into his legs, and at the sound of the whistle he shoots out onto the field, passing the wide receiver, who had gone in to give Henry a break and who now looks relieved to be coming out. Henry knows why: the smallest guy on the other team is still bigger than their running back, the Fridge, nicknamed more for his eating habits than for his resemblance to a professional football player. At first a source of profound embarrassment, Fridge now calls himself by his own nickname. “Hi, it’s Fridge,” he’ll say into the phone to a teammate’s mother. When she calls up the stairs to her son “Fridge is on the phone,” she momentarily forgets she is rapidly disappearing from her teenager’s life like a Polaroid in reverse.

The whistle blows again. Henry is aware that he very nearly bounces when he is tackled to the ground.

A hand dangles above his helmet but instead of reaching out for it he heaves himself up off the frozen playing field. You take hold of that hand and you might as well hang a LOSER sign on your back, he thinks. Henry moves back into position. Inhaling, he focuses. He looks over and across to the quarterback. Steve Wilson. Telepathically they speak … the words carried silently through the air, molecules of code that will separate this moment from all others. A ballet choreographed in an instant, this instant, one that will set Henry Powell on an entirely different, life-changing trajectory. They nod at each other and turn back to the game. Tick tick tick: time resumes.

Whistles … numbers called out … grunts all around … thumps of bodies hitting the ground.

But then this: Henry is free, the opposing players moving over to the Fridge, forgetting Henry altogether, as both he and Steve Wilson knew they would. The conductor has tapped his baton on the music stand and the ballet begins.

“Twenty-four!” The shout comes from a distance. To clue the others into the Wilson-Powell Plan. Wilson’s young voice cracks in hormonal urgency.

“Do it!” His coach is mouthing from the sideline. Henry’s legs propel him farther away from Wilson, getting him into place for the grand finale.

For if this catch is not made the game is lost. Like the last five minutes of a television drama at the end of the May season, the suspense hovers in the air and threatens to remain unresolved. The crowd swells collectively to the edge of bleacher seats—perhaps because the spectators sense the beauty of the choreography that is now apparent to all but the opposing team or, more likely, it is so cold the metal makes sitting nearly unbearable.

“Twenty-four!”

The play calls for him to catch the ball, zigzag over, run as many yards as possible and pass underhanded to the running back, Ted Marshall. It will be Marshall’s job to run the ball into the end zone. The coach’s voice seems distorted to Henry, like slow motion during the turning point in that drama when the main character accidentally falls off a ledge, her lover reaching for her in vain, calling her name that one … last … time.

His arms extend into the air. He tilts his head up into the dark sky and wonders for a moment how he’ll be able to see the ball against the storm clouds, which now seem pigskin-brown.

Thump.

The backslap, good natured though it was, startles him back to 1984 and causes an unfortunate cringe that is noticed all around. “That was something, Powell,” the man is saying, eyeing his own profile in the three-sided mirror. “No offense, but I never thought you’d make that catch. It was impossible. How many yards was it? Then the touchdown. Jesus. Incredible,” he sucks in his protruding belly and turns this way and that, eyes never leaving the mirror. “You should’ve seen it,” he says to his girlfriend, who is checking her watch. “After that the season turned around. We went to the state championship. Thanks to that. Scouts were there and everything. Hey, whatever happened to Teddy that day?”

Henry Powell shrugs his answer and throats are cleared. Neal Peterson, a former teammate, exhales, releases his stomach muscles, and turns away from his reflection. The stilted reminiscence comes to an end as they both knew it would. Henry, who is now kneeling with a wrist corsage of pins, to fold cuffs up so the pants will break just so.

“How about a little longer up front on the left—yeah, that’s right,” Peterson says. “Great. When do you think these will be ready? I’ve got to fly to Houston next week.”

“I can get them to you by Friday,” Henry says, rubbing another waxy white line along the fold in back. The pins are already in all the way around the pant leg—why bother with the white chalk on top of it, he thinks. He’s not as adept as his boss, Mr. Beardsley, and ends up rubbing the white line onto his thumb and index finger.

“You heard from anybody lately?” Peterson reaches back for his wallet with the scratchy Velcro flap that still holds despite years of crumbs and loose threads wedged into the black nubs. His jacket sleeves fall back down and Peterson is slightly annoyed to again have to winch them back up, above his elbows.

“Naw,” Henry says. He scribbles tailor notes onto the generic order pad Mr. Beardsley says must be on hand at all times, “in case of emergencies.” Henry wonders what kind of crisis would call for a white-green-pink triplicate of a guest check.

“Heard from Benny the other day. From Cancún, that fat bastard.” Peterson laughs, certain that Henry, too, appreciates Benny’s spirit of adventure. But to Henry, Benny is as anonymous now as he was back in high school. Henry cannot even conjure up his face. But to someone like Neal Peterson the cast of the Class of 1978 will remain photographically burned on the yearbook that is his brain.

“That guy’s crazy,” he is saying, “drunk off his ass in some Mexican place, calling me. Jesus.” Another admiring chuckle from Neal Peterson as his credit card slides back into place alongside another that reads License to Chill along the top, a Carlos & Charlie insignia underneath rattan-style letters spelling out Panama City. “You gotta come out with us, man. We’re hitting Blackie’s later. Mills’ll be there. And Smith-er-eens. And Figger. Remember him? He was two years ahead of us? Newton’s his last name—you know him. Yeah, you do. He’s the one with the sleepy eye who got the shit kicked out of him outside Carvel’s after that Homecoming game, whatever year that was. Remember? How could you not know Newton? Anyway, come out tonight. Blackie’s at ten. Catch you later, Powell!” His finger pointing, thumb cocking an invisible trigger, while the other hand lowers his Ray Bans back down off the top of his head to the bridge of his nose before pushing at the door clearly marked Pull.

The store windows at Baxter’s have sheets of amber plastic coating on the inside, to protect clothes from the sun’s destructive rays, but Henry sees, when Peterson hurries out the door after his girlfriend (humbled, he thinks, by the pushing-not-pulling thing), it’s cloudy out, stormy even, rendering Peterson’s sunglasses useless. But if Sonny Crockett wears sunglasses on dark days, Henry smirks to himself, so does Neal Peterson.

Henry detaches the pink copy of the guest check and folds it into the pinned-up slacks. Anticipating a long empty day, he sets the bundle aside so he’ll have something to do later.

The truth is Henry does know Newton. Figger. A man-child who had facial hair in eighth grade and told everyone Henry had VD when Henry refused to give him his A+ paper on Tess of the D’Urbervilles in ninth grade.

Of course he knows Newton.

The VD rumor caught fire and Henry found himself at home watching The Rockford Files while his fellow ninth graders were pouring Hawaiian Punch into small plastic cups at the Homecoming dance (their first dance ever). A week later he was at the water fountain and heard Melanie Parks say, “Ew, I’m using the fountain downstairs instead,” and was certain from her tone it was fear of contagion that scared her Fair Isle–sweatered self away. At first he reasoned that they may think he has VD, but at least—he told himself—at least that meant he wasn’t a virgin. The very word reeked of ignominy and disgrace. As if anticipating this train of thought, though, Figger Newton told everyone Henry contracted VD through sex with his cousin.

“Why aren’t you out, dork?” Henry’s older brother, Brad, asked the Saturday night following the Homecoming dance. He had come up from behind Henry and flicked him on the head before plopping down on the other end of the couch.

“Why aren’t you out?”

“Good comeback, spaz,” Brad said. “Seriously, what the hell’s the problem with you?”

Both were staring ahead, carefully avoiding anything that might imply the conversation mattered.

“I don’t have a problem,” Henry said. “What’s your problem?”

Chico and the Man is a repeat.

“Is it that Figger fuck?”

Henry winces at his brother’s use of the word fuck. Brad has a harsh way of saying it. His teeth really cut into his lower lip before pushing out the for something but it always sounds worse coming from him and anyway it’s none of his business and he’s setting me up, I can just feel it, he thought at the time.

“Why do you care?” Henry said.

“I don’t want a freakazoid for a younger brother, that’s why,” Brad said.

Henry notices that there was a pause before Brad said this. And he could have sworn Brad had glanced over at him. In earnest. Like he really might have cared. A slight pause, but then with Brad sometimes it was what he didn’t say.

And before Brad left, the conversation abandoned just like that, dangling in between them, Henry felt an impulse to cry and to hug his brother, so grateful for the sibling talk, so filled with love that he, momentarily at least, forgot his social misery. The feeling was quick, like a skipped heartbeat. Once it passed Henry got up to change the channel.

The sensor running underneath the floor mat just inside Baxter’s front door has triggered the chime that to Henry sounds like the doorbell at his Aunt Millicent’s New York apartment. That apartment, a shabby walk-up in Greenwich Village, always sick with the smell of cumin and curry and God-knows-what-other Indian spices Aunt Millicent experimented with, fancying herself the sophisticate of Henry’s family. “Just because she went to India once twenty years ago,” his mother muttered every time her sister appeared wearing skirts fashioned out of sari material. Aunt Millicent also says “ciao” instead of “goodbye,” tells them she’ll “ring” them later and signs her letters and cards “cheers.”

“Can I help you?” he asks, knowing that if Mr. Beardsley were here he’d get a lecture about enunciation and eye contact.

“Just looking,” the woman says, fingering the circle of shoulders fanning out from the easy-sportswear display in the center of the store, Mr. Beardsley’s attempt to remind this generation that sport coats are, in fact, leisure wear. “Casual Fridays ruined us all,” he lamented to Henry when they set the sign in the middle of the rack. “Used to be no man worth his salt would enter a workplace in anything less than a suit and tie,” he said, sifting one by one through each jacket, making sure the tiny bright upside-down-cupcake markers indicating size matched the actual garment—”Nothing worse than landing on the perfect jacket and finding out it’s not your size after all,” he’d say.

Along with sport coats, easy sportswear consists of cotton chinos (straight-legged with one-and-a-quarter-inch cuff), wide-wale corduroys (some embroidered with golf clubs, ducks or whales for the clubby inclusion they suggest), a large variety of oxford cloth shirts (“The largest in three counties,” Mr. Beardsley would proudly point out), and a wide selection of classically styled sweaters that are instantly recognizable and therefore comforting to a certain set of customers wary of anything new, anything that varies wildly from what their forebears wore. And so a man could purchase a V-neck tennis pullover, cream-colored with navy and maroon stripes around both the neck and hem. Which is to say he could easily duplicate the Gatsby style his own father had cultivated, complete with red crepe–soled white ducks and the proper white flannel trousers to match. Also for sale, an exact replica of the ubiquitous L. L. Bean Norwegian sweater, navy with white flecks evenly distributed throughout, promising to repel water should the wearer find himself caught in a downpour without a corduroy-collared field jacket, found not so far away in the outerwear section.

Henry tries to busy himself with the week’s receipts so his customer doesn’t think he is smothering. Mr. Beardsley stalks customers toward the end of every month, so eager is he to bring the numbers up, somehow failing to see a connection between the too-polite, breezy “no thanks, just stopping in for a sec” and the backing toward the door. Henry sees it and winces, knowing he’d do the exact same thing in their shoes. At least they’re polite to him, he always thinks. At least they’re not simply walking out. Mr. Beardsley does not notice.

“Will this be all?” Henry says, reaching for the three-pack (spelled p-a-k) of Hanes undershirts, size small, and the thin box of twelve one-hundred-percent-cotton handkerchiefs. Though he has been trained to use the new bar code detector meant to simplify transactions, the bar code won’t catch the attention of the laser line in the wand. He has to punch in the numbers by hand.

“Yes, thank you,” she says. He showily counts out the eleven dollars and twenty-seven cents change so she knows it is exact.

She, he notes, pulls the door open.

Henry returns to the register area and reaches under the counter for the newspaper. He lifts out the classified section, folds it in half, to be transferred to his locker later. The rest of the paper does not interest him.

A little later—minutes? hours?—Henry becomes aware he has been staring at the wall for some time.

The store is empty. Vacant. The air stagnant. Sometimes, on the slowest of slow days, Henry is certain he can feel the atmospheric pressure bearing down and he fears he might choke.

And this is one of those days.

The sun, amber through the plastic window covering, spotlights dust particles suspended in the stale air. Baxter’s has bad circulation and on particularly humid days there is an unpleasant and inexplicable smell of camphor mixed in with the old fabric. Intellectually, Henry knows inanimate objects cannot breathe but occasionally finds himself thinking the clothing has sucked up all the oxygen, leaving him with only mustiness.

It does not help matters that the store is packed with merchandise, sparing only narrow aisles that snake to the fitting rooms located in the back. The maze is so cramped that large-size customers are forced, in some cases, to turn sideways while making their way through the store. Every inch of floor space is crammed with some display or another. Upon entering, a customer will encounter the first of seven round racks, this one announcing new arrivals. It is understood that new is a loose term at Baxter’s for many of the sport coats on this particular rack have been nestled there for several seasons. The new arrivals are flanked by two more circular displays, one set aside for sport coats in the smaller sizes, the other a bit taller, for heavier overcoats. So one must turn either right or left and pass in between these round obstacles just to make it halfway through the store to the square command center that is the register setting atop a glass case featuring cuff links, tuxedo studs, some ties, handkerchiefs—various and sundry items to complete a man’s wardrobe. If all the floor displays were magically lifted up and carried away, the old, worn industrial gray carpet would show exactly where they should be re-deposited, thanks to these trails beaten down by years of customers’ feet.

All four walls of the store are lined with racks that stretch length-wise, the upper level so tall Henry is called upon to reach the larger sizes of suits or coats. If left alone Mr. Beardsley is forced to use a pole with a hook on the end of it. Pants are hanging lower and therefore require less attention.

In the beginning, when store owners were called purveyors, roads were only recently paved with tar and President Roosevelt’s New Deal restored good fortune to many, Albert and Christian Baxter opened Baxter’s to great fanfare. Red, white and blue bunting outlined the roof, the glass storefront squeaky clean and sparkling in the sun and nearly everyone in town turned out in fine clothing. Albert and Charles opened the doors wearing paper armbands on top of their high-collared dress shirts. Visors cast green tints on their spectacles and mustaches. Back then, in 1939, Henry’s hometown had a population of 6,053 and was considered quite bustling. Fancy. On the rise. And Baxter’s exemplified its wealth and promise. Breeding was what most of the townspeople took the greatest pride in. One third of the population could trace their roots back to at least one family member of great national significance. The remaining two-thirds, while not scruffy exactly, were left to cater to the needs of the wealthy. As the town grew, so did Baxter’s importance, and shops bloomed on either side of it.

It is hard to pinpoint the moment when Baxter’s went from fancy to frayed, but most likely it came after the war, after the nation had perfected frugality. The town (by then population 21,367) felt a collective sense of shame at its preening. Or guilt perhaps. Either way, it was as if a notice had been posted that from that point forward anything that hinted at opulence, anything that drew attention to one’s fortune, was tasteless.

Albert and Christian Baxter quickly and sensibly sold the property to a self-made millionaire who kept the name but lowered the standards. The nearby metropolis offered plenty of jobs— careers—but became too expensive and crowded and so Henry’s became a town of commuters. The population swelled to forty thousand. The town originals sniffed at the newcomers, thinking them ordinary: the workhorses of society who did not know the old Baxter’s. They inevitably overlooked the plain and traditional Northeastern wear and flocked instead to whatever was the style of the day. Thankfully, though, some of the quality merchandise remained, so stalwarts continued to shop there.

Strange that the swell of occupants did not translate into town growth. Henry’s was mostly a town of ones. One stationery store. One hardware store. One supermarket. One dry cleaner. And for many years a car dealership that by the 1980s had gone the way of the Woolworth’s—both moving like moths to the light that was and is Westtown, a growing community three miles away. Baxter’s was soon left hanging on to its spot on Main Street by its leather-tabbed, buttonholed suspenders.

Still, the town has a shabby elegance that Westtown cannot duplicate. Try though it might, Westtown has an altogether nouveau sheen to it that is distasteful to all in Henry’s community. If there were a town motto it would be quality not quantity. The families here take pride in the fact that the previous generation also had house accounts at the hardware store or the stationery store and, yes, for a time, even at Baxter’s.

Henry’s is a town where honking endures as a form of greeting, not an expression of anger. Where everyone in a certain circle knows their friends’ old cars and knows, therefore, all their friends’ movements.

It is a place in which thank-you notes are written immediately following dinner parties. Bloody Marys with celery stalks served every Sunday even without company. Cotillions co-exist with salad dressing from packets that promise—with the addition of oil—to produce genuine Italian dressing.

This, a town where children make eye contact and call their parents’ friends mister and missus and are taught to shake hands at very young ages.

“Do you know,” Henry’s mother once said to his father across the dinner table, after a bridge game at a friend’s Westtown home, “do you know I had to introduce myself to her children? She didn’t even blink. Not a word. They were little savages, those children. I’m so glad you all have manners. My children have manners.”

Henry, a boy then, sat up straighter at the compliment. He noticed Brad did, too. Even little David seemed to Henry to be politely sleeping upstairs.

From then on Henry thought of Westtown as inferior.

Henry imagines Blackie’s at ten. Blackie’s is one of the few bars in town (an exception to the rule of ones). But unlike the surly man at Mike’s tavern, the bartender at Blackie’s ignores the fact that some of his clientele are grossly underage. Most weekend nights his patrons are boys whose voices had only recently dropped a register and girls whose baby fat had yet to redistribute itself. Blackie’s is one step above sticky floors, two steps below the brass-and-fern decor slowly springing up in most bars in towns with eyes pointed optimistically to the future.

For a moment Henry is sure the door opened. Positively certain. He whips around to find it just as closed as it was three seconds ago. Maybe it jammed closed when that woman left, he thinks. He gets up and opens it and tries it from the outside. It is, in fact, just fine. No jamming after all.

Satisfied, he takes his seat again and sifts through the receipts in front of him, putting them in numerical order. He arranges himself over the papers so he looks studious. In case someone did come in, he would look engrossed. As if having a customer would be somewhat annoying, actually. You could come back later and I wouldn’t mind at all, he imagines his attitude to be.

He checks his watch again and pushes the receipts together, tapping them into alignment, and tries not to think of the sheer waste his existence is turning out to be. His movements feel clunky and self-conscious. As if he is being watched closely, the subject of a science experiment. An experiment some cosmic deity had cooked up, he thinks, to see just how deep a human being can sink into waking oblivion.

Or maybe it is a movie, he thinks. The Life Story of Henry Powell, starring (drumroll, please) Henry Powell, ladies and gentlemen. His heart sinks deeper into his chest, an imaginary screenwriter scribbles. He sifts through the shoe box under the counter marked Miscellaneous. Stage notes indicate the box is gray. The screenwriter uses words like pathetic and desolate in his description of the scene. Henry’s shoulders are slumped. The screenwriter in his sunny California office, so remote from Henry’s Northeastern existence. A gray existence. Like the shoe box. The screenwriter tilts back in the ergonomic desk chair all Californians seem to sit in and steeples his fingers together in supreme satisfaction at the metaphor.

Henry can envision Peterson in a pink T-shirt under his blazer (sleeves up) leaning against the bar at Blackie’s, swigging his beer—for if anyone swigs a beer it’s Peterson, he thinks. With, say, Bob Seger playing on the radio he’ll fling non sequiturs like pizza dough. Hoping to catch the interest of his audience: “Figger” Newton, Gaynor Mills and Chris “Smithereen” Smith, so called because in tenth grade he took a hammer and smashed the box he’d received a D on in Shop. Though his classmates were admiring of the gesture, deep down Chris Smith knew he’d exploded not because of the grade but because the night before his parents had told him of their plans to separate. They never did end up getting back together, as they’d promised him that night. And Smithereen never quite got over it. Henry knows that at some point “Against the Wind” will give way to something by the Eagles. Serpentine conversation will slither from junk bonds and Drexel Burnham and, inevitably, back in time to Bunsen burners and football games won and lost. Bored heads will be fixed on the game scores scrolling along the bottom of the TV hanging in the corner of the bar. Braves lose. Mets up by two. Henry decides then and there he will not be going to Blackie’s tonight.

The magnetic pull of his new answering machine is too much to resist. Not many people have these tape-recording devices attached to home phones. But Henry had his friend, the manager of Radio Shack, order one for him after reading about them in Esquire.

He picks up the phone and dials his own number. “This is Henry Powell,” his own voice greets him, “please leave a message when you hear the beep.” Though he knows what awaits him, he enters his code: 22849. He mouths the words as the robotic voice delivers the news: “You have—slight pause—no—slight pause—messages.”

He knew she wouldn’t call him. He’d met her in the birthday card section at the stationery store that morning. Janine. She had moved closer to him at the precise moment he had unknowingly reached for a card with a pornographic cartoon image. Horrified, Henry had held on to the one he had chosen, hoping she had not seen it, and then, to hide the front, he pulled the matching envelope. But she had seen the slot the envelope came from and there was no denying the fact that Henry appeared to be a complete and total pervert.

Henry, beet-red but thinking “the best defense is a good offense,” said, “Hi. I’m Henry Powell.”

Janine stretched her upper lip out first in disgust but then, minding her manners, forced it into a smile, said, “I’m Janine.”

Henry hoped a conversation would distract her long enough so he could back up against the opposing card rack and tuck the dirty card into a section, any section, from behind his back. “Do you work up the street?”

“No. I’m in town visiting my college roommate.”

Henry, successful in relieving himself of the card, smiled. “Huh. Who’s your roommate? Maybe I went to school with her.”

It appears to Henry that Janine might be warming up and even perhaps—please God—forgetting about the card she thinks he chose on purpose. “Sloan Phillips? Do you know her?”

Henry once carried a very bombed Sloan Phillips up her front walk after a party they’d gone to together junior year but felt this was not the time to bring it up to Janine.

“Yeah, I know Sloan. Wow. You’re her college roommate?”

The conversation went on from there and culminated in Henry saying, “If you guys are going out later, give me a call,” after she’d mentioned wanting to go to Blackie’s since she’d heard so much about it. But he had known she wouldn’t call.

The door chime sounds as Henry replaces the phone onto its receiver. A work fantasy blitzkriegs his brain: the buxom and ponytailed St. Paulie girl blowing in through the front doors with outstretched arms finally free of the frothy mugs she’s gripped ever since he discovered her in ninth grade and lovingly attached her image to the ceiling over his twin bed with circles of Scotch tape. But no. It is Mr. Beardsley, grinning hard underneath the single section of hair carefully directed from the left ear across the top of his head to just above the right ear.

“Henry, my boy, life is good,” he says, breezing past him, all Old Spice and mentholated cough drops. “Life. Is. Good.”

“How’s it going?” Henry asks, defying his boss’s admonitions to steer clear of colloquialism.

“I’ll tell you how it’s going, my boy,” his exaggerated enunciation a friendly but firm correction. “We’re going big time.” His arms stretch out, his face clownlike with wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Big time.”

Henry winces at the “we.”

It was not supposed to be we. This was to be an interim job, one that supplied just enough income to keep afloat until something better came along. The classified section had conspired, though, to keep Henry here. Work From Home, one ad would announce. That hadn’t sounded too bad until he called the number at the bottom of the square and found it had been disconnected. On Your Way to the Top, another read, but when Henry called he’d learned getting to the top required a significant amount of seed money. “To make money you have to spend money,” the man on the phone had explained. When Henry told him he had little to nothing to give, the man abruptly terminated their conversation, which, until then, had been super friendly. Each week produced more discouragement until finally Henry decided to postpone his job search. Just for a while, he told himself.

“Big time?” His indifference was a way to keep Mr. Beardsley from confusing interest with shared enthusiasm.

Beardsley swings around to face Henry. “I just came from lunch with Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan.” He pauses to bask in admiration he’s certain will follow. It appears, though, that this announcement will not have the impact he had counted on.

“Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan?” Beardsley repeats himself, annoyed that he must now suffer the indignity of explaining the significance of the meal, diminishing its triumph. “Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan are legends in boutique men’s clothing. Legends. I know it’s hard to believe but you know Clarke’s over in Westtown? Well, it wasn’t always the big draw it is now. Used to be you wouldn’t be caught dead in Clarke’s—all Sansabelt pants and white vinyl. You wouldn’t take your grandfather in there, much less find anything for yourself, God forbid. Schmidt and Logan went in, cleaned house, turned it into a multimillion-dollar cash cow.”

Beardsley’s remaining shred of excitement finally dissipates, deflated by Henry’s blank stare. “You young people, “he says, “you think everything magically works. Everything’s all taken care of. You don’t have to do a thing, businesses just run themselves. Bills just magically get paid.…”

Henry watches his boss’s lips move. Their ugly stretchy movements remind him of the eel listlessly snaking back and forth in its tank in the Chinese restaurant near Route 3.

“… but you and me, we’re the workers. We’re the ones behind the scenes, making sure when people come down Main Street they’ve got choices, a nice string of shops to go in and out of, family places.…”

Carefully, so carefully, Henry reaches his right hand over to his left wrist and pretends to scratch a spot just beside his watch. Twisting it so the face angles up and he can check the time without the giveaway wrist roll, he nods in agreement to Mr. Beardsley’s mouth, opening and shutting around the words pouring out his sales philosophy. When Beardsley glances at the front door midsentence, Henry sees his chance and successfully negotiates a quick glance-down.

It is three-fifteen.

It’s warm enough to take off the top of the Jeep. It’s been smelling like mildew lately but then again it could rain so maybe I should just keep it on.

“Hel-lo? Anybody in there?” The rapping at his skull rattles him out of his head and back to Mr. Beardsley, who is holding up the bundle that is Peterson’s pants. “I suppose I’m expected to psychically divine what I am to do with these pants balled up here behind the desk?”

“Oh, yeah,” Henry says. “I was going to do that after—”

“After what? After your daydream?” Mr. Beardsley jabbers on as he folds Neal Peterson’s pants around the tailor ticket. “Honestly, Powell, I can’t keep following you around reminding you about how the system works. You never used to need that, as I recall. What happened to those days? What happened to that energetic young man I hired not so long ago? Yes, Mr. Beardsley. No, Mr. Beardsley. Anything I can do, Mr. Beardsley? Now all I get is ‘how’s it going’ if I’m lucky.”

He shriveled up and died of boredom, Henry thinks. Rest in Peace. RIP.

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