The Typewriter

Three

One evening, a few days later, Elizabeth reminded Milo that her family was gathering for a reunion that weekend, and she was anxious for the kids to see all their cousins, whom they had not seen since they were toddlers.

Milo nodded and began clearing the dinner dishes from the table. He remembered Elizabeth mentioning something about a family reunion, but the dread which accompanied the announcement had the effect on him of wiping from his mind any details of the trip she may have offered.

For him those trips north were akin to having a tooth pulled -- without novocaine. Try as he might to ingratiate himself with his wife's parents, they kept Milo at arm's length, making him feel about as welcomed in their home as a mold spore.

"What day is that?" he asked. "The trip to New Hampshire?"

"This weekend," said Elizabeth. "We're leaving early Saturday morning and not coming back until late in the day on Sunday." She got up from the table and started for the family room, where their twins were settling on the couch, already comatose in front of the television.

An entire weekend with the Brookings clan. Milo couldn't imagine a more unpleasant way to spend forty-eight hours. If he were lucky, he could disappear into one of the many rooms within the palatial family home and they would forget about him. But he doubted that would happen. He was an easy target, especially for Elizabeth's brothers, Chaz and Doug. Over the years Milo had become their pinata, dangling above them, waiting for one of them to split open his guts, and they did so without mercy.

Tall, well-built, and successful, Chaz and Doug were everything Milo was not. They managed large departments with dozens of people and traveled around the world winning lucrative contracts for their employers. By contrast, Milo worked for a small, family-owned accounting firm in town and was paid a modest salary.

The only way he and Elizabeth could afford to move into a single-family house on a quiet residential street in Echo Hill was through Elizabeth's job with a large insurance company and a bit of assistance with the down payment from her father.

A favor his father-in-law suspended over Milo's head like a bucket of pig's blood.

I have to get out of that trip, he thought. I need to think of a reason not to go, something ironclad and irrefutable. Death was a possibility, but that was so permanent. There had to be another way.

While Milo loaded the dinner dishes into the dishwasher, his mind worked on a scheme that would free him of his obligation to attend the reunion.

It came to him as he closed the door on the dishwasher and pressed the START button.

To validate the rightness of his decision, Milo ventured down to the basement and headed straight for the corner, where the Smith Corona sat on the card table. This was the answer. He now knew with absolute certainty how he would spend the upcoming weekend, and it would not be in New Hampshire.

Milo went up the basement steps and up the stairs to the second floor, and into his bedroom. There he dug a notebook out of a box on the floor at the back of his clothes closet. In the notebook were story ideas written years earlier. As he scanned the bits and pieces of narrative or dialogue or character descriptions, he came upon a single sentence which seemed to be waiting for him to rediscover it.

The old man's loneliness dissolved the moment he placed his fingers on the keys of the typewriter.

A mental image formed. It was a Royal typewriter, circa 1900, matte black, a beast of a machine weighing a good fifteen or twenty pounds. It sat on the kitchen table in a double-wide trailer, in a Maine trailer park, surrounded by the refuse of a man's long lonely life.

But it was no ordinary typewriter. It held within it the power to bring back to life the old man's loved ones who had already passed on. All he had to do was type their name.

In Milo's mind, the dark corner of the basement in his house was suddenly transformed into his writing studio, appearing before him in vivid, living color, the way Dorothy's black and white Kansas opened onto the Technicolor world of Oz.

The table was strewn with paper, pencils sharpened to the nub, balls of crumpled paper on the floor. All his romantic notions of the writing life swirled around him in a phantasm of images lifted from the biographies of his favorite writers: coffee-stained manuscript pages, ashtrays filled with day-old ashes and bent cigarette butts. Milo didn't smoke, but that did not stop his imagination from placing a gold ashtray on the table among his papers.

Yes, this was the answer. Now he just had to tell his wife.