Free The Tell by Hester Kaplan Page A

milk gone bad and pine tree deodorizers, with a dizzying array of candy, energy drinks, muscle magazines, mini fruit pies. Wilton walked up and down the short aisles, running his fingers over the goods. The woman at the counter watched Wilton on her surveillance monitor; he was on television again and loving it. He waved at her. By the cold case, three girls who’d been in Owen’s class the year before wiped the glass with their hands to view the lineup of drinks.
    â€œYou girls going to buy something?” the woman at the register yelled. It was common knowledge that she didn’t like Spruance kids.
    â€œThey’re with me,” Wilton called back.
    â€œWe are not with you,” one of the girls snapped to set him straight. She glanced at Owen. Was this fool with him? He nodded. They banged their bottles of soda on the counter. They added two scented candles, lollipops, and a lighter at the last minute, which Owen put back. They didn’t look at Wilton when he paid or when he held the door open for them so they could skitter past. Only when they were outside did they yell thank you and collapse into one another, laughing as they wove down the sidewalk.
    Wilton stared after them, dopey with astonishment. “Such spirit in those kids. I’ve seen more today that’s amazing and real than I have in a long, long time,” he said. “Ah, Owen, you don’t get it, do you? You’re just jaded.” He slapped Owen on the back.
    The man was completely out of step with the world and the year. Where have you been, Owen wanted to ask as they turned onto the boulevard. He didn’t know what Wilton lacked exactly, but he was starting to sense it was enormous. Another person’s deepest need to have his sorrow soothed could either draw you in or repel you. It was what drew Mira to Wilton—was what had drawn her to Owen as well—but to him, it was something that could pull you down and drown you. Wilton struggled up the incline of Lloyd Avenue and took a puff of an inhaler he pulled from his pocket. At Hope Street, where they would part so Owen could go to the Y for his swim, Wilton sat on a low stone wall to catch his breath.
    â€œYou’re staring at me,” he said. “Not that I mind, of course. But who can ever read that face of yours? Not even your wife, I bet. Who can ever know what you’re thinking?”
    â€œI was wondering about why you didn’t work after your show went off, why you just disappeared. What happened?”
    Wilton watched the kids from the swim team push through the glass doors. “I loved what I did, and then one day I didn’t. I woke up with this suffocating feeling, like my chest was being crushed. I could hear my ribs cracking. The dread was enormous, ER-visiting, heart-clutching dread. It was terrifying. I thought I was about to die. They called it a depressive episode. ‘You mean a nervous breakdown,’ I said, and I told the doctors that I just hoped there weren’t reruns. Good joke, right? So after a couple of weeks in the hospital, I spent the next decade and a half hanging out by my pool and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.” He sighed dramatically and picked at the knee of his jeans.
    Owen knew the details were vague on purpose, the story meant to be heard, an incitement to wonder. It might be morose and worrisome, but it was gilded with false California ease, a blue swimming pool, an expensive recuperation. Who could take fifteen years to think about something as amorphous as life?
    â€œAnd did you figure things out?”
    â€œNo, but I got a nice tan.” Wilton shrugged. “There are no epiphanies in real life. You know that. You get to a certain age when the why doesn’t matter so much. There isn’t time for that. It only matters what you do next, because you don’t have so many nexts left. And I didn’t want next to be more of the same, so I