Carbs & Cadavers

Carbs and Cadavers
© 2006 by J. B. Stanley.

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First e-book edition © 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738718293

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Cover design by Ellen Dahl

Cover illustration © Linda Holt-Ayriss / Susan & Co.

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In gratitude to my friend, Holly Hudson Stauffer,

for sharing books, coffee, and the gift of her time

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following people for lending their expertise: Anne C. Briggs, Deputy Kurt Jahnke of the Lane County Sheriff’s Department, my husband Timothy Stanley and the other fine physicians of Henrico Doctor’s Hospital, Barbara Hollister for her pie recipe, Judy Edwards for her equine info, Jessica Faust of Bookends, Inc., and Barbara Moore and Karl Anderson of Midnight Ink.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song
above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, from
The Hobbit

James Henry wrapped a
towel around his formidable stomach and stepped onto the bathroom scale. He hesitated before looking down. He hadn’t weighed himself in over a year, but his new pants were growing tighter and tighter and several of his belts no longer fit at all. Finally, he steeled himself for the results and peered down, but he couldn’t see the numbers as the rotund, protruding flesh of his belly completely blocked them from view.
This is what it must feel like to be eight months pregnant
, James thought glumly.

He leaned forward, trying to read the scale without making the numbers on the dial jump around too much as he shifted his weight. When he was actually able to make out the results, James leapt backward off the scale as if it had suddenly caught fire. He frantically dried the bottoms of his wet feet and the sides of his calves, assuming that an extra thousand ounces of water must have been clinging to his body in order to produce such a number. Exhaling heavily, James stepped back onto the scale and once again examined the truth laid out in bold black-and-white digits: 275 pounds. He was more than fifty pounds overweight.

James sat down on the toilet and put his face in his hands. Over the last few months, he felt like he had been laid out at the bottom of an open grave while shovelfuls of dirt were thrown on top of him. First, his wife filed for divorce after a three-year separation so that she could marry a hotshot lawyer, then James’s mother died, forcing him to move back home to care for his sour, reclusive father, and now, on top of everything else, James was fat. The two things he had loved most—his job teaching English literature at the College of William and Mary and his wife, Jane—were both gone. Now he was an overweight, divorced, thirty-five-year-old loser living with his father.

“I’ve got to
do
something about myself,” he moaned aloud. “I’ve
got
to go on a diet.”

After weighing himself, James Henry finally got dressed and trudged wearily downstairs to make breakfast. He cracked three eggs into a bowl and mixed them vigorously with milk. The sound of the liquid slapping about in his mother’s tin mixing bowl gave him a small measure of comfort. Next, he poured the pale yellow mixture into a sizzling frying pan and then sprinkled the cooking eggs with parsley and a dash of garlic salt. He popped two bagels in the toaster and poured two glasses of orange juice while keeping an eye on the frying pan. When the surface of the eggs began to look crinkled, like a piece of plastic wrap, James expertly flipped the omelet and then covered its surface with a thick coating of shredded cheddar cheese. The toaster oven beeped. James pulled out the bagels, spread a generous layer of cream cheese over each crisp half, and then slid them neatly onto two chipped plates. He divided the omelet in half with the spatula, pushed a half onto each plate, and then called his father.

“Pop! Breakfast!”

Jackson Henry shuffled into the room wearing his usual attire: a faded plaid bathrobe over a pair of denim overalls. He glowered at the food laid out on the counter and then raised a pair of furry eyebrows as he bent over to examine his bagel more closely, a frown creasing his wrinkled face into deeper furrows.

“What kind are these?” he growled as he carried his plate over to the table.

“Cinnamon raisin,” James replied, spearing a forkful of egg. “Why?”

Jackson sat down at the kitchen table and scraped his chair loudly across the linoleum floor as he moved his thin frame closer to his plate. He began to pick raisins out of his bagel like a petulant child.

“I told you, I like sesame seed,” he grumbled, tucking a paper napkin into the neck of his shirt.

James sighed. “The store was out of those, Pop. I’ll get them next time.” He inhaled the pleasant aroma coming from his own bagel as he lifted it to his mouth. He loved the smell of cinnamon.

When James was a boy, his mother would have made homemade cinnamon rolls on a dreary October day like today. They would be waiting, perfectly warm and fresh from the oven, with rivulets of icing cascading down their steep, savory brown sides. When James came home from band practice and Jackson arrived home from a long, satisfying day’s work at Henry’s Hardware & Supply Company, the scent of cinnamon would fill the entire house.

It was the small things, like the aroma of cinnamon or the gleam on the tin mixing bowls, that made James miss his mother’s presence the most. She had died in August, just two short months ago. Physically, Jackson was perfectly healthy, but over the last decade, he had become more and more reclusive. After his hardware store was bought out by one of the big chain stores, something in Jackson seemed to wither up and die. He began to leave all of the errands into town to his wife, tinkering about in the back shed for most of the day. James’s mother complained that her husband barely talked anymore. He came inside for meals, which he didn’t finish, and to watch TV in the evenings. The only shows he watched were the game shows. He no longer read the paper or seemed to have any hobbies.

James had always assumed his mother would live to a ripe old age. She was vivacious and full of life, constantly working on some charitable venture or volunteering at the local elementary school. She walked three miles every morning and had never smoked a day in her life, so when she had a sudden heart attack in her sleep, James was completely stunned and devastated. He knew her death marked the end of his life as a professor in Williamsburg. He could not leave his father to fend for himself, nor did he feel right putting him in a nursing home. James was their only child and his mother would have wanted him to move back to Quincy’s Gap in order to care for his father, so he did.

After painfully handing in his resignation to the English Department chair, James packed his old Bronco full with his belongings—mostly books—and gave the key to his cozy brick townhouse back to the rental agency. He took a final walk through the streets of historic Williamsburg, early in the morning before the crowds arrived, and marveled at how beautiful the trees looked lining the gravel road stretching toward the campus of William and Mary. The morning sun set the autumn leaves ablaze as if bidding James a fiery farewell.

He took the hint, filled up a thermos of Sumatra Blend at the coffee house, and then drove four hours west, to the hometown he only visited during Christmas and summer breaks. Boasting one main street and a population of two thousand Virginians, Quincy’s Gap was a picturesque burg nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. Settled beneath the impressive shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was a pastoral, tranquil place where farms formed an emerald-and-saffron checkerboard when viewed from the air and horses roamed over hilly pastures.

In the middle of these farms, the town arose as a neat square of historic wood and brick buildings. Beyond the town proper were two strip malls. One was comprised of Home Doctor, the mammoth hardware store, and a Dollar General. The second housed the Winn-Dixie, the video rental store, a nail salon, pet groomers, and an Italian restaurant. Other than Dolly’s Diner and the drive-in movie theater, which only operated during the spring and summer months, all of the town’s shops and eateries were on Main Street. The tiny side streets housed the municipal buildings, lawyers and medical offices, and the three homes listed on the National Register that were open to the public for a small charge.

James Henry had returned to Quincy’s Gap just in time to fill the vacancy of head librarian for the county’s main library branch. His salary was sharply reduced from what he had earned at William and Mary, but his living expenses were, too. James moved into his old room, lovingly maintained by his late mother as a shrine to her only child. Every toy soldier, comic book, baseball glove, and even the tattered posters of various rock ’n’ roll icons were still scotch-taped to the walls as if James were planning to bring a son of his own home to play in his childhood room. But James had no children. What he had instead was a lot of heavy baggage—both emotional and physical.

His life-altering move had taken place almost two months ago, and James had come to believe that returning to Quincy’s Gap signaled the end of any chance of happiness. He would grow old in a place where he had spent torturous years as an awkward boy, followed by four more years as a solitary, unpopular teenager, and finally, as an unmemorable college student returning home during semester breaks.

Staring at his half-eaten bagel, James snapped out of his self-pitying reverie and shifted his weight on the uncomfortable metal chair with the cracked seat cushion and tried to read a newly released piece of historical fiction about a boy growing up in Afghanistan. He had a few minutes to spare before heading to work, and he desperately wanted to know if the boy would win the coveted kite contest so exhilaratingly described by the author. As James read, Jackson scraped his chair noisily away from the table and shuffled back to the den, leaving half of his egg uneaten and a completely pulverized bagel on his plate.

It began to rain just as James finished his breakfast, licking globs of cream cheese from his fingers. He peered out at the gray skies, checked his watch, and then fixed himself a tuna sandwich for lunch, wrapping it gingerly in tinfoil along with two dill pickle spears. He grabbed an apple and a snack-sized bag of cheese puffs and packed them all into his leather tote bag. Hesitating, he took a second bag of cheese puffs from the pantry and added those to the tote as well.

James loved cheese puffs. They had been his favorite snack for as long as he could remember. As a boy, he ate them at the movies, in front of the TV, and while doing homework. At the library, he now ate cheese puffs with his right hand so that his left would be clean enough to turn the pages of whatever library book he was reading during his lunch break. Even when he was a professor, he had often gotten the orange dust on his student’s papers, for he liked to enjoy a treat while grading essays. James was well aware that he had earned the nickname of Professor Puff, and though he hated the idea that the moniker had a double meaning, the satisfaction he received from the cheesy, crispy crunchiness of cheese puffs far outweighed what his students called him behind his back.

“Pop!” James called over the sounds of contestants screaming on
The Price Is Right.
“There are some cold cuts in the fridge for you to make a sandwich for lunch. And there’s some canned beef and barley soup in the pantry.”

Jackson didn’t reply, but James knew there was nothing wrong with his father’s hearing. In fact, he had grown accustomed to his father’s silence. Jackson hadn’t had much to say since he sold the hardware store, and when he did speak, his words were usually critical or strung together to form a complaint. James preferred it when his father was in one of his quiet moods. He wondered how his mother had put up with such morose company, but then again, she had had a way of bringing out the best in everyone.

Heading out to his Bronco, James ignored his reflection in the glass of the storm door. His handsome face looked swollen and weighed down by a rapidly enlarging double chin. He carried his extra weight well—it was evenly distributed over a big-boned, six-foot frame, but his stomach bulged far out over his waistline and his jowls were becoming a distraction. People no longer noticed his intelligent, golden-brown eyes, sincere smile, aquiline nose, or soft waves of nutmeg-colored hair. They became hypnotized by the shaking flesh on his cheeks, sliding their library books across the desk to be checked out in a bit of a stupor.

“Good Morning, Professor Henry,” was the chorused greeting that James received ten minutes later at the library’s front door. It was the same one he had heard every day since he had taken the job a month ago. Francis and Scott Fitzgerald, the twins who formed the library’s only other staff members, aside from a retired schoolteacher who worked part-time, were always waiting to be let in by the time James arrived at eight forty-five.