He did not know why he did it. He told himself later that it was a kindness. He told himself he only wanted her to stop listening to the clock.
The trouble with Linda was that she would not stay small.
His mother's next letter was four pages long and three and a half of them were about Linda. What did Linda do? Where was she from? Did she cook? Did she go to church? Was she a musician too, heaven help them? Wes, cornered, gave Linda a job as a dental hygienist. He gave her a home town, Hartford, which seemed safely dull. He gave her dark hair and a fondness for bowling and a sister in New Britain. By June Linda had a cat named Pepper, to whom he was allergic, which explained why he could never bring Linda home. By August Linda had a bad back, which explained Labor Day. By October Linda was so real in his mother's letters that Wes sometimes caught himself wondering how she was doing.
Then, on the first of November, a blue envelope arrived that he opened standing in the stairwell, and it contained a single sheet of notepaper and four sentences.
*Dear Wesley. I have set a place for Linda at Thanksgiving. I have also bought allergy pills, so the cat is no longer a concern, and Mrs. Peterson's nephew is a chiropractor. If Linda is not at my table on the twenty-fourth I will assume she is imaginary, and I will drive to New Haven to find out why my son needs imaginary women. Love, Mother.*
He showed the letter to Ozzie Fratelli, the Lamplighters' bass player, between sets at the Anchor on a Friday night. Ozzie read it twice and handed it back with the solemnity of a doctor delivering a diagnosis.
"You're dead," Ozzie said. "That's a dead man's letter. You're gonna have to hire somebody."
"I can't hire somebody. Who would I hire? How would I pay them?"
So Wes did nothing, which was his preferred strategy for most emergencies, and November went by in a series of increasingly frantic silences, and on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving he found himself standing in Moretti's Bakery on Wooster Street at eight o'clock in the morning, smelling of no sleep and cold coffee, intending to buy a pie.