I liked my Budweiser with a chaser of beer nuts.
I dined on frozen pizza and Stagg Chili most nights.
And despite my best efforts to try and download Dean’s music on Spotify—which I had failed at spectacularly, accidentally erasing my Cloud account in the process, whatever the fuck that even was—I much preferred to listen to my collection of records from the seventies and eighties.
I liked to watch old detective movies starring Humphrey Bogart.
I read books nobody would have suspected, tear-jerkers by Nicholas Sparks and rags-to-riches romances by Judith Krantz and the kind of pulp-fiction paperbacks you find in the bargain bins of second-hand bookstores with their spines creased and their pages dog-eared.
Sometimes I imagined myself as the leading man in a spicy blockbuster by Jackie Collins or Nora Roberts.
Sometimes I kicked myself for being such a sappy fool and stayed up late working on the ledgers and invoices for the hardware store.
Sometimes I went to bed, wishing nothing more than to feel the warmth of someone beside me… to hear them whisper my name…
“Harry! Harry!”
What I heard was not a whisper.
As I turned onto Chestnut Drive, the voice calling to me snapped me out of my daydream.
Mrs. Dinkle had obviously spotted my truck from her front yard and was now bounding toward the curb to wave me down, her fluffy pink robe billowing and several curlers flailing about on her head.
I saw the alarm on her face and quickly pulled over and jumped out of the truck. “Mrs. Dinkle? What’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
“No, it’s not.” Her voice was trembling, her legs unsteady.
I looked Mrs. Dinkle up and down to see whether she was hurt.
I glanced at the house, expecting to see smoke billowing from the windows.
I reached for the toolbox in back, ready to arm myself with a wrench and fight off any intruders that may have broken into the house.
Then, seemingly from the sky above, I heard the most forlorn—meow!
Mrs. Dinkle and I both looked up to see Binky, Mrs. Dinkle’s beloved ginger cat, dangling from a branch above our heads.
With a terrified whimper, Mrs. Dinkle clamped a knuckle between her teeth and began to cry.
“It’s okay, Binky’s gonna be just fine,” I reassured her. “I’ll save him.”
“But how?” She began to sob. “I don’t have a ladder and he’s at least six-stories high.” Binky was, in fact, no higher than the roof of a single-story house. “Binky’s gonna die!” she shrieked. “Please don’t let him die, he’s in the prime of his life!”
“Nobody’s gonna die today,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t regret what I was about to do. Stepping up to the trunk of the tree, I reached for the lower branches and hoisted myself up.
Above me, Binky howled.
Below me, Mrs. Dinkle wailed.
I grunted as I pulled myself higher up the tree, praying each branch would take my weight, edging ever closer to Binky.
“Hold on there, pal. I’m coming.”
I inched my way along the limb to which Binky was clinging. The cat seemed incapable of pulling himself to safety, instead dangling from the branch precariously, claws sliding slowly down the bark, about to fall until—
I shot my hand out.
I grabbed the scruff of his fluffy neck just as he lost his grip.
