5432852385743

“Wisconsin,” I said. Not entirely a lie; my family lived in Milwaukee until I was eleven, when my
father got a job teaching English at the University of Southern Maine. I’d been knocking around the
state ever since.
“Well, you picked the right time to come,” Anicetti said. “Most of the summer people are gone,
and as soon as that happens, prices go down. What you’re drinkin, for example. After Labor Day, a
ten-cent root beer only costs a dime.”
The bell over the door jangled; the floorboards creaked. It was a companionable creak. The last
time I’d ventured into the Kennebec Fruit, hoping for a roll of Tums (I was disappointed), they had
groaned.
A boy who might have been seventeen slipped behind the counter. His dark hair was cropped close,
not quite a crewcut. His resemblance to the man who had served me was unmistakable, and I realized
that this was my Frank Anicetti. The guy who had lopped the head of foam off my root beer was his
father. Frank 2.0 didn’t give me so much as a glance; to him I was just another customer.
“Titus has got the truck up on the lift,” he told his dad. “Says it’ll be ready by five.”
“Well, that’s good,” Anicetti Senior said, and lit a cigarette. For the first time I noticed the marble
top of the soda fountain was lined with small ceramic ashtrays. Written on the sides was WINSTON
TASTES GOOD LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD! He looked back at me and said, “You want a scoop
of vanilla in your beer? On the house. We like to treat tourists right, especially when they turn up
late.”
“Thanks, but this is fine,” I said, and it was. Any more sweetness and I thought my head would
explode. And it was strong—like drinking carbonated espresso.
The kid gave me a grin that was as sweet as the stuff in the frosted mug—there was none of the
amused disdain I’d felt emanating from the Elvis wannabe outside. “We read a story in school,” he
said, “where the locals eat the tourists if they show up after the season’s over.”
“Frankie, that’s a hell of a thing to tell a visitor,” Mr. Anicetti said. But he was smiling when he
said it.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve taught that story myself. Shirley Jackson, right? ‘The Summer People.’”
“That’s the one,” Frank agreed. “I didn’t really get it, but I liked it.”
I took another pull on my root beer, and when I set it down (it made a satisfyingly thick chunk on
the marble counter), I wasn’t exactly surprised to see it was almost gone. I could get addicted to these, I
thought. It beats the living shit out of Moxie.
The elder Anicetti exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling, where an overhead paddle fan
pulled it into lazy blue rafters. “Do you teach out in Wisconsin, Mr.—?”
“Epping,” I said. I was too caught by surprise to even think of giving a fake name. “I do, actually.
But this is my sabbatical year.”
“That means he’s taking a year off,” Frank said.
“I know what it means,” Anicetti said. He was trying to sound irritated and doing a bad job of it. I
decided I liked these two as much as I liked the root beer. I even liked the aspiring teenage hood
outside, if only because he didn’t know he was already a cliché. There was a sense of safety here, a sense
of—I don’t know—preordination. It was surely false, this world was as dangerous as any other, but I
possessed one piece of knowledge I would before this afternoon have believed was reserved only for
God: I knew that the smiling boy who had enjoyed the Shirley Jackson story (even though he didn’t
“get it”) was going to live through that day and over fifty years of days to come. He wasn’t going to be
killed in a car crash, have a heart attack, or contract lung cancer from breathing his father’s
secondhand smoke. Frank Anicetti was good to go.
I glanced at the clock on the wall (START YOUR DAY WITH A SMILE, the face said, DRINK
CHEER-UP COFFEE). It read 12:22. That was nothing to me, but I pretended to be startled. I drank