Free Eureka by Jim Lehrer Page A

town, he went right, toward the West.
    Sing, Otis, sing.
    His initial interest in “Sunflower” and other pop songs had intensified in the ninth grade, when he was also memorizing the capitals of all the states. That had led Otis to create helpful silly ditties that were meant to be sung like the old radio jingles for cornflakes and other tasty products. He’d begun with the goal of writing a jingle for each of the then forty-eight states and their capitals, but he had done only eleven or twelve—all written in a small, blue-lined-paper spiral notebook—by the time he got tired of the enterprise.
    He suddenly remembered one of them.
    If I loved Ida of Boise,
And she had weeds in her garden there,
I would go and help Ida-hoe.
    It was silly and stupid, but it made him laugh out loud, something he had not done in a very long time.
    It had been so long, in fact, that he couldn’t even remember the last time.
    IT WAS NOT a sudden, spontaneous decision to turn west. He essentially made it on Thursday afternoon, on the ride from the Cottonwood Valley Cemetery after Pete Wetmore was laid to rest. Otis was in the fourth car in the funeral motorcade to and from the cemetery, well behind and away from the mortuary limos with June and the rest of the Wetmore family and close friends.
    June Wetmore’s anger had kept Otis far from her and everything having to do with the death of her husband. The eulogy at the funeral was given by a man who had grown up with Pete in Colorado. He spoke mostly of Pete as a kid, as a hardworking, smart, fun person who wanted to play in the Count Basie band.Two of the eight pallbearers were from KCF&C but they were Jack Thayer, the chairman of the board, and Leonard LaCrosse, the vice president of actuarial affairs.
    Otis, anonymously through Thayer, had made the suggestion that they might want to have a trumpet solo played at the funeral service. Otis sat with Sally in the back row of the church during the service. There was no trumpet solo, only the choir of the First Methodist Church singing regular funeral hymns.
    Sally did her best to comfort Otis about June Wetmore’s reaction toward him. So did Bob Gidney. They had obviously talked about it. Both said it was an understandable lashing-out. Bob said suicide of a loved one, particularly a spouse, can be inexplicable, but it can also overwhelm the survivor with debilitating waves of guilt. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why didn’t I do more to prevent it? It was my fault, it was my fault. If only I had been a better wife—or husband or son or daughter or friend— he/she would be alive today. Having another villain to share the blame helps ease the guilt.
    “You are that villain on two counts, probably,” said Bob. “First, for the way you treated Pete; second, for not reacting to Pete’s leaving that meeting and your building that day. It will pass with time—but it will take time.”
    Otis doubted it would ever pass, that there would ever be enough time.
    But he had also tried very hard to believe he was not the real villain, no matter what he did or didn’t do. Otis knew about the trumpet, about something that had happened to Pete Wetmore many years ago. Yes, yes—Otis wished like hell that he had not treated Pete Wetmore like shit and that he had figured it was important to keep Pete in the office that fateful day. But that didn’t make Otis Pete’s killer.
    Those lips had killed him.
    On the other hand, aren’t there one helluva lot of frustrated trumpet players and Johnny Mercers and opera singers and novelists and brain surgeons and pro quarterbacks and Bill Gateses who don’t kill themselves? Don’t they do other things to compensate, to make life work for them? Sally, for instance. She put aside her actress dreams to be a good wife and mother.
    FRIDAY AFTERNOON, LATE , Otis walked from his office two blocks over to his bank and withdrew five thousand dollars in cash from his savings account. Otis was on the board of the bank,