The Leisure Seeker: A Novel by Michael Zadoorian Page B

told, she was an unpleasant woman who believed that the world owed her much more than she ever received. I don’t believe that she was ever really close to anyone, not her two husbands, not her son or daughter, and she certainly wasn’t close to me. Even still, it hurt John terribly to watch her turn into something that was much worse than his unhappy mother. Toward the end of her time at home, she would be up and down all night, wandering her neighborhood, prone to fits of rage and apoplexy.
    We started getting late-night calls from her second husband, Leonard, a gentle, easily defeated man, pleading for our help. After she ended up in the nursing home (and this was the early days of nursing homes, where they had the genuine look of hell to them), John said he would never end up in one of those places, made me swear that I would never put him in one, no matter what happened to him. He told me that he would kill himself first, if he ever thought he was going senile.
    It was about a year ago when I started finding the gun stashed in strange places in our house—sock drawer, kitchen cupboard, magazine rack—I was terrified. I’d ask him about it, but he never knew how it got there. The problems were getting worse then, and I knew that people in his condition tend to think everyone’s after them, so I hid the gun for good. He kept asking me if I’d seen it, sometimes three or four times a day. Then he just seemed to forget about it. I was relieved until a few months later when I found a half-written suicide note stuffed between the pages of one of his favorite Louis L’Amour books, The Proving Trail . I couldn’t decipher a lot of it, but Igot the gist. As you can imagine, it was pretty upsetting. But how upset should you get over a suicide note where the person seems to lose interest in the middle?
    As I’ve said before, these days, John only occasionally realizes that he is losing his mind. I think that’s when he asks about his gun. This is the evil, damnable, and lucky thing about his sickness. By the time he finds the gun, he has forgotten what he wanted it for.
    “I’ve seen it, John, but I just can’t remember where it is.”
    “Is it in the van?”
    “I don’t know, John. I just can’t remember things like I used to. You know how that is.” I glance at him, and he seems satisfied at this explanation.
    “Look at that, John,” I say, pointing to the side of the road at the telephone poles, splintered and crooked, that have been following the road for some time. This line of drunken soldiers has suddenly veered off to the right out of sight.
    “Where do you suppose they’re headed to?”
    John says nothing. I know he’s still thinking about that gun while he can, before his mind hits the reset button. Stiffly, I chatter on, trying to fill the air, fill his head, with words. “I read about those poles in my guidebooks,” I say. “The telephone lines are following an old alignment of Route 66, but there’s no road there now. There are a lot of different old stretches of the highway. They kept changing it over the years. Sometimes the road goes though towns that don’t even exist anymore.”
    John nods, but not at me blathering on about forgottenroads leading to phantom towns. He is having one of his arguments with himself, telling off whomever it was that stole his gun. He’s following his own forgotten road.
    I’m wishing the wandering line of phone poles would return because I want to follow them, find out where they would take us. A ghost town sounds good to me, a fine place to set up shop. I roll down my window a little farther, pull off my cap, and drag a brush through my hair. The bristles scratch my scalp, but it feels good. I pull the greasy strays, the opaque flecks of skin from the brush and release them into the wind. I rummage through the glove box until I find a rubber band, which I use to make a short pigtail. This is how I will wear my hair now, I decide, thinning or not. I put the