The Restaurant Inspector by Alex Pickett

Author:Alex Pickett [Pickett, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299331689
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Late that night, at the hospital, where Jake was still confined to his bed, Tara convinced Cal to go home. The door to the room was open now, and they sat next to their sleeping son, who had been awake a half hour before—lucid but weak. Cal didn’t want to leave but Tara reminded him that he didn’t have any vacation time or sick days remaining and if he lost his job, they wouldn’t be able to afford to keep Jake in the hospital. After one last chat with the doctor and a long look at his son, Cal got in his truck and left.

The highway was pitch dark. When his eyes adjusted, he scoured the fields for animals and a few times considered stopping to shine for deer with the spotlight in his back seat. Shining was the only activity Cal preferred to do alone. He was just as satisfied scanning the light back and forth in empty fields as when he found a group of ten deer. Something about exposing the space behind the darkness, momentarily turning night into day, made him feel that the world was easier to control, or at least understand. It’s one of the few experiences in Cal’s life that, if asked why he liked it, he wouldn’t try to explain.

But tonight he was too worried to shine, even though it seemed that Jake was going to pull through. Without another means of distraction, he found his thoughts stuck on the text Kristi had sent him hours earlier. It had simply read How’s Jake? She had obeyed their “no sexting” rule, and the text came in under the name “Arthur Work” so he wasn’t worried about getting caught. And yet he couldn’t shake his irritation, though normally even the most innocuous text from her brought him a joy that was, to his wife, suspiciously out of place from a coworker.

Perhaps her text reminded him that the affair threatened his relationship with his son. Or he didn’t want to remember how close he’d been to ejaculating earlier, considering he was not in the frame of mind to finish himself off when he got home. Or maybe being forced to examine his infatuation with Kristi in light of the current crisis made him feel stupid and childish. Worrying for so long outside his son’s room clarified what should really matter.

He slowed his truck at the sight of two glinting eyes. A young doe stared unblinking in the middle of the road. Under his breath, Cal let slip the phrase, “There you go along now, little dogie.” He shook his head and realized how exhausted he was. Before he could tap the horn the deer snapped out of it and loped away. As he resumed his drive, Cal was moved by the memory of the deer’s innocent expression and felt a sense of loss that it wasn’t still in his vision.

If he were the one sick in bed, worried he could die, he assumed he would think a lot about little fleeting things like that deer.

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