3

HERE’S THE THING about Grisby: he’s twitchy as a squirrel, and with good reason. He’s a lost soul, a menace to himself, a stranger in his hometown, a permanent accident-waiting-to-happen. If he drives downtown for a drink at the Klondike he’ll come out and get lost looking for his car and have to call Fisher to come fetch him; if Fisher isn’t wearing his bulky old ex-pipeline worker’s parka and his red wool hat, most likely Grisby’ll walk right past him. He doesn’t recognize faces. He recognizes people by their clothes, their glasses, their limp, and if you take that away it’s like he’s never seen them before, never mind that he’s just spent six hours working his shift with them in the kitchen of the Great Alaska Pancake House, or used to date them, or is dating them right now. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that something’s not right in his head.

No wonder he gets jumpy—he can’t tell which Safeway manager threw him out for selling Percocet in the bathrooms last month, or which teenage freaking asshole pulled a gun on him when he showed up with the Vicodin the little fucker wanted. For one memorable week, six years ago now, he was a driver for Bear Cabs, except he got lost driving a fare down the one and only road that leads from the airport, then couldn’t find the Sheraton, the largest, tallest, most visible hotel in the whole of downtown. Fisher thought he was new in town and took pity on him. He’s a sucker for lost causes. That week he spent his shifts driving around with his phone pressed against his ear giving Grisby directions, but that only worked some of the time because if Grisby couldn’t tell which street he was on, there was no hope of saving him from himself. Then when Grisby offered a fare something for his headache, Reggie got to hear about it and Grisby was history.

Grisby makes a fine short-order cook, though: all that nervousness gets funneled down his arms into his twitchy hands, and those hands snatch and tilt and twist, ladling out pancake batter, flicking over bacon, scooping up scrambled eggs like he was born to it. And when the rush’s over, he sits on the plastic garbage can in the backroom and pops something to calm himself, and sucks down a can of cola, then another, the bulb of bone at the corner of his jaw bulging as he widens his mouth and the corrugated tube of his throat flexing as he swallows. He’s got the pared-down, thin-skinned look of a much older man, someone worn down by constant vigilance because hell, the way he’s so twitchy you’d think the world was out to get him. And who’s to say it’s not when it gets all of us in the end?