The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel Read Free Page A

who was born in the same decade as you!”
    Knife. Flatten. Stack. Tie.
    By the time he gets back upstairs, the vindaloo is cold again. If he reheats it in that plastic dish, he’ll probably end up with cancer.
    He takes the plastic tray to the table. The first bite is burning. The second bite is frozen. Papa Bear’s vindaloo and Baby Bear’s vindaloo. He throws the tray against the wall. How little he had meant to Harvey and how much Harvey had meant to him.
    The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.
    No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset. No one cares why a thirty-nine-year-old man has thrown a plastic tub of vindaloo across a room like a toddler. He pours himself a glass of merlot. He spreads a tablecloth on the table. He walks into the living room. He unlocks a climate-controlled glass case and removes
Tamerlane
from it. Back in the kitchen, he sets
Tamerlane
across the table from him, props it against the chair where Nic used to sit.
    “Cheers, you piece of crap,” he says to the slim volume.
    He finishes the glass. He pours himself another, and after he finishes that he promises himself that he’s going to read a book. Maybe an old favorite like
Old School
by Tobias Wolff, though his time would certainly be better spent on something new. What had that dopey rep been going on about?
The Late Bloomer
—ugh. He had meant what he said. There is nothing worse than cutesy memoirs about widowers. Especially if one is a widower as A.J. has been for the last twenty-one months. The rep had been new—not her fault that she didn’t know about his boring personal tragedy. God, he misses Nic. Her voice and her neck and even her armpits. They had been stubbly as a cat’s tongue and, at the end of the day, smelled like milk just before it curdles.
    Three glasses later, he passes out at the table. He is only five foot seven inches tall, 140 pounds, and he hasn’t even had frozen vindaloo to fortify him. No dent will be made in his reading pile tonight.
    “AJAY,” NIC WHISPERS. “Go to bed.”
    At last, he is dreaming. The point of all the drinking is to arrive in this place.
    Nic, his drunken-dream ghost wife, helps him to his feet.
    “You’re a disgrace, nerd. You know that?”
    He nods.
    “Frozen vindaloo and five-dollar red wine.”
    “I am respecting the time-honored traditions of my heritage.”
    He and the ghost shuffle to the bedroom.
    “Congratulations, Mr. Fikry. You’re turning into a bona fide alcoholic.”
    “I’m sorry,” he says. She lowers him into the bed.
    Her brown hair is short, gamine-style. “You cut your hair,” he says. “Weird.”
    “You were awful to that girl today.”
    “It was about Harvey.”
    “Obviously,” she says.
    “I don’t like it when people who used to know you die.”
    “That’s why you won’t fire Molly Klock, too?”
    He nods.
    “You can’t go on like this.”
    “I can,” A.J. says. “I have been. I will.”
    She kisses him on the forehead. “I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want you to.”
    She is gone.
    The accident hadn’t been anyone’s fault. She’d been driving an author home after an afternoon event. She’d probably been speeding to catch the last automobile ferry back to Alice. Possibly she had swerved to avoid hitting a deer. Possibly Massachusetts roads in winter. There was no way to know. The cop at the hospital asked if she’d been suicidal. “No,” A.J. said. “Nothing like that.” She had been two months pregnant. They hadn’t told anyone yet. There had been disappointments before. Standing in the waiting room outside the morgue, he rather wished they had told people. At least there would have been a brief period of happiness before this longer period of . . . He did not yet know what to call
this.
“No, she was not suicidal.” A.J. paused. “She was a terrible driver who thought she wasn’t.”
    “Yes,” said the cop. “It wasn’t