Free Almost Friends by Philip Gulley Page A

around the garage, up the back steps, and through the screen door into the kitchen.
    “This day can’t end too soon,” he told Barbara, collapsing into a kitchen chair.
    She presented him with a long list of phone messages. “Thirteen phone calls. Not one of them from a happy person. I told them you’d call them back when you got home tonight.”
    Sam groaned. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, why did you do that? I don’t want to call these people. They’re just gonna yell at me.”
    He ate supper to boost his strength, then returned the phone calls, holding the phone away from his ear to protect his hearing. For a Christian town, people were startling in their ferocity, threatening Sam and the meeting with all manner of misfortune if he dared disturb their sleep again.
    “It wasn’t me,” Sam tried to explain. “Dale Hinshaw’s doing this on his own. We told him not to.” But that made little difference, and after five calls Sam called it a night.
    Before he went to sleep, he had the foresight to take his one remaining phone off the hook. He was asleep by nine-thirty, his body occasionally twitching, haunted by nightmares of Dale Hinshaw taking up residence as the new secretary of Harmony Friends. At the stroke of midnight, Sam sat bolt upright in bed, sensing some deep misfortune had been unleashed in his life. The house was perfectly quiet, except for the tick of the clock downstairs. He lay back down, staring at the ceiling, perceiving his world had shifted, though not knowing how and in no way eager to find out.

Ten
The Rock That Cracked
    I f Gloria Gardner had heard her husband say it once, she’d heard him say it a thousand times. “I tell you, I got the worse luck of anyone I know. It’s like I got a cloud hangin’ over my head. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Some days I wonder why I even bother to get out of bed.”
    He always said this within her earshot, and she’d grown immune to his lamentations and no longer took them personally.
    The testimony of the years seemed to bear him out: he was routinely audited by the IRS; while attending the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, he was beaned by a foul ball and remained unconscious the rest of the game; a year later he was struck by lightning and had been afflicted by static electricity ever since. His hair was a sight; people wouldn’t shake his hand for fear of being shocked. And he was strip-searched every time he flew, owing to his tendency to set off metal detectors just by walking near them.
    But all those were mere inconveniences compared to what befell her husband that night, for at the stroke of midnight, when every phone in town was off the hook, lest the citizenry be plagued by Dale’s telephone evangelism, Charlie Gardner had a heart attack. His arms flailed about, striking his wife, who came up out of bed, thinking the phone had rung.
    “That darn Dale. He’s pestering us again,” she muttered.
    Charlie gurgled, then went rigid. His eyes rolled back in his head, making them look like two white marbles, the big kind, the shooters.
    “Oh, Lord,” Gloria cried. “Oh, my.”
    “Call Sam,” Charlie gasped.
    She hurried from their bedroom to the phone in the kitchen, but couldn’t for the life of her remember Sam’s number. She ran back into their bedroom. “I can’t think straight. What’s his number?”
    “Fleetwood 96701,” Charlie whispered.
    Everyone in town had the same prefix. Folks over seventy remembered it as Fleetwood, while the youngsters rattled off the numbers.
    She ran back in the kitchen and punched in Sam’s number.
    A groggy voice answered the phone. “Yeah.”
    “Sam, get over here quick, your father’s dying.”
    “You got the wrong number, lady. There’s no Sam here.”
    She let out an anguished wail.
    Charlie stumbled from the bedroom into the hallway, clutching his chest, the heart attack stepping up his static electricity so that he looked like Albert Einstein, his hair juttingout and fairly