Life After Genius Read Free Page A

he has it coming. But this, this is beyond the realm of getting back; this is pure cruelty. “I can’t, Dad. Sorry, but I just can’t.”
    His father walks back over to the elevator to relay the message. Uncle Martin stares at Mead with hate in his eyes, then the elevator door closes and he is gone. Only then does Mead get out of the hearse and follow his father through the rear entrance into the store, stepping abruptly back in time to his childhood.
    Ten thousand square feet of sofas and coffee tables and dining room suites, of bed frames and mattresses and dressers and rockers, of floor lamps and carpets and caskets, distributed over three floors. That’s Fegley Brothers. Unchanged from as far back as Mead can remember. When he started elementary school, fitted with his first pair of prescription glasses, Mead used to pretend the store was a castle and that he was the young prince who would one day inherit it. On the first floor, he would crouch behind bookcases and entertainment centers, pretending they were trees and that the forest was filled with bandits. He’d pop up from behind sofas brandishing a yardstick as if it were a sword and fight them off. On the second floor, he would jump from bed to bed, pretending that he was leaping over rivers filled with jaw-snapping alligators, then he would ascend to the third floor where the king kept all his riches, where closed caskets sat on raised platforms under klieg lights and looked to the young Teddy Fegley like treasure chests filled with gold. The only place he did not play was in the basement. The dungeon. The place where the king kept his prisoners chained to the walls and fed them only water and gruel. The place where the young Teddy Fegley’s imagination really soared. This was where he consigned the boy in first grade who tripped him in the hall, laughed, and said, “Can you see the floor, Theodore?” And the girl who gave him, on Valentine’s Day, a shoebox containing the corpse of a bird. “Is it dead, Ted?” she said, and then ran off to join her coterie of tittering friends. But the king had the last word and he sent to the dungeon all those who dared betray the trust of the young prince.
    Floorboards creak under Mead’s feet as he now crosses through the back office and peers out onto the showroom floor. Standing in the middle of the showroom, talking to a customer, is Lenny, a balding, middle-aged man of indistinct features. A fixture at Fegley Brothers as permanent as those klieg lights on the third floor. Mead realizes, with a bit of a shock, that he doesn’t know the man’s last name. He has always referred to him simply as Lenny. A man of many talents: salesperson, deliveryman, pallbearer, gravedigger. If something needs doing, Lenny is the guy who will get it done.
    “So how does it work?” Mead asks his father.
    “How does what work?”
    “The store. How does it work?”
    “Well, customers come in, select a piece of furniture, and we deliver it to them the following day.”
    Mead gives his father a sidelong glance. “Thanks, Dad, for that illuminating description.”
    “I’m sorry,” he answers back. “Was that a serious question?”
    Mead gazes at a display of six walnut chairs seated around a matching dining room table but sees instead the dean, standing at the podium. He sees him tap a piece of chalk against the lectern until the auditorium quiets. He hears him apologize to the assembled mathematicians and then make up some excuse as to why today’s much-anticipated presentation has been called off. Mead sees the attendees rise from their seats and head for the exits. Some of them are angry, some are merely disappointed. One of them is utterly surprised. Then the auditorium is empty. Quiet enough to hear a pin drop as the end of one life gives birth to the next.
    “Yes,” Mead says. “Yes, it is a serious question.”
    H IS FATHER STARTS HIM OFF with the accounting books, with lists and lists of incoming and outgoing