Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead

They had been walking together. Now Harriet stiffened, stopped. Her head swiveled in his direction, but her hair was in front of her eyes, making it hard to read the expression in them.

Bobby chewed and chewed, but couldn’t tell what he was eating. It didn’t have any taste.

Bobby didn’t notice the other people in the diner staring at them, and forgot they were in makeup until the waitress approached. She was hardly out of her teens, with a head of frizzy yellow hair that bounced as she walked.
“We’re dead,” little Bobby announced.
“Gotcha,” the girl said, nodding and pointing her ball-point pen at them. “I’m guessing you either all work on the horror movie, or you already tried the special, which is it?”
Dean laughed, dry, bawling laughter. Dean was as easy a laugh as Bobby had ever met. Dean laughed at almost everything Harriet said, and most of what Bobby himself said. Sometimes he laughed so hard the people at the other tables started in alarm. Once he had control of himself, he would apologize with unmistakable earnestness, his face flushed a delicate shade of rose, eyes gleaming and wet. That was when Bobby began to see at least one possible answer to the question that had been on his mind ever since learning she was married to Dean-who-owned-his-own-lumberyard: Why him? Well—he was a willing audience, there was that.

EXCEPT FOR THE dark hair, Dean didn’t look anything like him. Dean was short. Bobby wasn’t prepared for how short. He was shorter than Harriet, who was herself not much over five-and-a-half feet tall. When they kissed, Dean had to stretch his neck. He was compact, and solidly built, broad at the shoulders, deep through the chest, narrow at the hips. He wore thick glasses with gray plastic frames, the eyes behind them the color of unpolished pewter. They were shy eyes—his gaze met Bobby’s when Harriet introduced them, darted away, returned, and darted away again—not to mention old; at the corners of them the skin was creased in a web of finely etched laugh lines. He was older than Harriet, maybe by as many as ten years.

This was taking a chance, joshing her about the husband he didn’t know. But she smirked and said: “Everything you ever wanted to know about two-by-f

But she smirked and said: “Everything you ever wanted to know about two-by-fours but were afraid to ask.”