Read Online Last of the Independents by Sam Wiebe - Free Book Online

is heavier and won’t mix properly if added first. My grandmother took these tonics medicinally at two in the afternoon and again at seven, claiming they levelled off her blood sugar and took the place of a diuretic. When she called down to ask if I wanted one, I was as dead to the world as one of the Kroons’ customers. I mumbled a yes instead of asking for tea.
    I’d spent Saturday night back in the funeral home, and had the same to look forward to tonight. I’d lasted about thirty hours tweaked on caffeine and a disappearing-reappearing Yeats-inspired erection. I took a shower in the basement stall, then dressed and headed upstairs.
    My grandmother had set up one of her TV trays on the back porch. We sat and looked at the carnage wrought by last night’s windstorm. That morning, when I’d delivered my dog from the throes of constipation, the laurel bushes that served as a fence between us and our neighbour had been rocking ferociously. Now, as I ate half the tuna sandwich my grandmother made, I watched the dog inspect the fallen branches and root beneath the laurel leaves that carpeted our backyard.
    â€œYou sure you don’t mind doing the yard?” My grandmother’s way of introducing a chore she wanted done.
    â€œNo big deal, Gran.”
    â€œAnd the doorframe, you’ll take care of that?”
    â€œI’ll get it done.”
    â€œI know. You’ve just been busy. Like your grandfather, always working even when you’re not.”
    We watched the dog toy with the slack clothesline, fumbling a clothes-peg about the yard with her snout.
    â€œToo bad that’s not a power line,” my grandmother said.
    A t 3:00 a.m. I woke up behind the desk in the Kroons’ office, bathed in the glow from the laptop. I could hear what sounded like plastic being dragged across concrete. The screen showed no movement in the nearby rooms. I stood up, conscious of the bulge in my pants, thinking if I’d attended to that and ignored the yard work, I probably wouldn’t have fallen asleep. I was glad there wasn’t a camera on me.
    I trained my Mag-Lite on the carpet, walked to the door of the embalming room, and threw the door open. It slammed off the wall. I hit the lights. Nothing.
    The sound had stopped. I killed the lights and shut the door. Down the hallway and back to the room, silence except for my own footfalls. At the door to the office I heard the same scraping sound from the break room. I trained the light through the glass door and saw a mouse beat a swift retreat to the darkness of the space behind the cupboards.
    I relaxed, thinking, that’s exactly how the situation plays out in a horror movie, right before Jason Voorhees appears and eviscerates some unsuspecting co-ed.
    I went back to the office and sat down behind the desk in the darkness and the silence. I turned off the Mag-Lite.
    â€œGuess there’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said, hoping it was true.
    M onday afternoon I stumbled sleep-deprived into my office, collected my notes and the list of questions I’d prepared, and headed out to interview the proprietor of Imperial Exchange and Pawn, the last place Django James Szabo had been seen. I was at the door when I remembered to dump the receipts I’d just collected on the table and Katherine’s package on her desk (a special-delivery box that contained some kind of sex toy she’d been too embarrassed to have sent to her home because her father opens her mail). As I did this I chanced to look up at the car calendar and noticed it was Labour Day, a statutory holiday, and nothing was open. The only person foolish enough to be in their office on this fine rainless afternoon was me.
    T uesday I was outside of Imperial Pawn at 9:54 a.m. I spent the minutes in my car sucking back a London Fog and holding Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class in front of me and trying to make sense of the letter-like markings within