Free Forever Odd by Dean Koontz Page B

disapproved of licensing them.
    Tears streamed down his cheeks, dripped off his jaw line, off his chin, but vanished before they spattered the table.
    Unable to comfort or even understand Elvis, eager to get back to the Blue Moon alleyway, I used the kitchen phone to call the Grille, where they were in the breakfast rush.
    I apologized for my bad timing, and Terri said at once, “Have you heard about the Jessups?”
    “Been there,” I said.
    “You’re in it, then?”
    “To the neck. Listen, I’ve got to see you.”
    “Come now.”
    “Not in the Grille. All the old gang will want to chat. I’d like to see them, but I’m in a hurry.”
    “Upstairs,” she said.
    “I’m on my way.”
    When I hung up the phone, Elvis gestured to get my attention. He pointed at the salt shaker, pointed at the pepper shaker, formed a V with the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand, and blinked at me tearfully, expectantly.
    This appeared to be an unprecedented attempt at communication.
    “Victory?” I asked, reading the usual meaning in that hand sign.
    He shook his head and thrust the V at me, as though urging me to reconsider my translation.
    “Two?” I said.
    He nodded vigorously. He pointed at the salt shaker, then at the pepper shaker. He held up two fingers.
    “Two Elvises,” I said.
    This statement reduced him to a mess of shuddering emotion. He huddled, head bowed, face in his hands, shaking.
    I rested my right hand on his shoulder. He felt as solid to me as every spirit does.
    “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what’s upsetting you, or what I should do.”
    He had nothing more to convey to me either by expression or by gesture. He had retreated into his grief, and for the time being he was as lost to me as he was lost to the rest of the living world.
    Although I regretted leaving him in that bleak condition, my obligation to the living is greater than to the dead.

FOURTEEN
    TERRI STAMBAUGH OPERATED THE PICO Mundo Grille with her husband, Kelsey, until he died of cancer. Now she runs the place herself. For almost ten years, she has lived alone above the restaurant, in an apartment approached by stairs from the alleyway.
    Since she lost Kelsey, when she was only thirty-two, the man in her life has been Elvis. Not his ghost, but the history and the myth of him.
    She has every song the King ever recorded, and she has acquired encyclopedic knowledge of his life. Terri’s interest in all things Presley preceded my revelation to her that his spirit inexplicably haunts our obscure town.
    Perhaps as a defense against giving herself to another living man after Kelsey, to whom she has pledged her heart far beyond the requirement of their wedding vows, Terri loves Elvis. She loves not just his music and his fame, not merely the
idea
of him; she loves Elvis the man.
    Although his virtues were many, they were outnumbered by his faults, frailties, and shortcomings. She knows that he was self-centered, especially after the early death of his beloved mother, that he found it difficult to trust anyone, that in some ways he remained an adolescent all his life. She knows how, in his later years, he escaped into addictions that spawned in him a meanness and a paranoia that were against his nature.
    She is aware of all this and loves him nonetheless. She loves him for his struggle to achieve, for the passion that he brought to his music, for his devotion to his mother.
    She loves him for his uncommon generosity even if there were times when he dangled it like a lure or wielded it like a club. She loves him for his faith, although he so often failed to follow its instructions.
    She loves him because in his later years he remained humble enough to recognize how little of his promise he had fulfilled, because he knew regret and remorse. He never found the courage for true contrition, though he yearned to achieve it and the rebirth that would have followed it.
    Loving is as essential to Terri Stambaugh as constant swimming is