Page 80 of The Rom-Commers

But as the morning light squinted in at me, I was the opposite of those things.

If I’d been home, I would’ve woken up early and gone for a refreshing swim by myself. Then I would’ve come home and made canned-biscuit doughnuts—our family’s standard birthday-morning fare—with homemade chocolate glaze and sprinkles. And my dad would play some nutty rendition of “Happy Birthday” on some random assortment of kooky instruments, and then we’d sing it together so we could do some crazy, improvised harmonies.

Like we did every year.

Not a big thing. Just a pleasant little way to start off a birthday—one I’d never fully appreciated until I was all alone in Charlie Yates’s mansion.

All alone andjust a writer.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to wake up Charlie for pool time this morning. He’d actually made a lot of progress—moving down to sit on deeper and deeper steps every time, until he shifted to standing, and then walking. That’s what he was up to now in the mornings—walking waist deep, in the shallow end, edge to edge, back and forth the whole time until I was done with my laps.

I didn’t even mind him being there. Most days.

But not today. Today, my present to myself was a morning swim on my own. If he could go on a date alone with his terrifying ex, I could certainly take a morning swim alone without his bothering me. No grumpy, pool-phobic writers with cattywampus morning hair allowed.

ON MY WAYto the pool, the first thing I noticed was that Cuthbert’s barn was not on the kitchen table. Margaux had indeed taken him back.Which made the day feel even sadder. It had been so weird at first that Charlie had a guinea pig at all—but now it felt weirder that he didn’t.

Amazing how your perspective can shift.

The second thing I noticed was that Charlie wasn’t sleeping in, like I’d assumed.

He was already awake.

And dressed.

And in the kitchen… cooking something.

He had an apron on. And he was heating frying oil on the stove. And there was powdered sugar spilled all over the floor like he’d ripped the bag open with oven mitts on.

“What are you doing?” I asked, walking nearer.

That’s when Charlie turned in my direction, and I realized he was holding a cylinder of canned biscuits.

You know what I mean bycanned biscuits, right? They’re not really in a can. They’re wrapped in a cardboard tube that you pop open with the side of a spoon. You’ve seen those? I’m only asking because I always thought everybody had seen those—until I beheld Charlie: tube of biscuits in one hand… anda can openerin the other.

A can opener—impaled in the metal lid of the biscuits.

When Charlie saw me staring, he held up the whole situation with both hands and looked at it, too. Then he nodded, like he was in full agreement. “Who designed these things, right?”

I tilted my head, like I just could not be seeing what I was seeing.

I mean, the instructions wereprinted on the label.

“I can get the tops off,” Charlie went on, like he was truly befuddled, “but then I can’t get the biscuits out.” He turned to gesture to a counter’s worth of biscuit corpses that he’d stabbed with forks and crushed with tongs—lying mutilated where they’d been slain.

“Is that biscuit dough on the pendant lamp?” I asked.

Charlie looked up somberly. “I had a leverage problem.”

“It’s a bigger problem than just leverage.”

“There’s gotta be a better way, right?” Charlie said—like a personwho had no idea that,yes, there was, already, in fact, absolutely a far better way.

Reminder: this man had been on the cover ofRolling Stone. Twice.

He was frowning at the biscuit tube. “Maybe I should get an axe from the garage?”

“What’s happening right now?” I asked.

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