They rode the rest of the way to Fairview in silence. Halleck wanted to pull her to him 
and tell her sure, okay, he would do what she wanted. Except a thought had come to him. 
An utterly absurd thought. Absurd but nevertheless chilling.
  Maybe there's a new style in old Gypsy curses, friends and neighbors - how about that 
possibility? They used to change you into a werewolf or send a demon to pull Off your 
head in the middle of the night, something like that, but everything changes, doesn't it? 
What if that old man touched me and gave me cancer? She's right, it's one of the 
tattletales - losing twenty pounds just like that is like when the miners' canary drops 
dead in his cage. Lung cancer.
  leukemia ... melanoma ...
  It was crazy, but the craziness didn't keep the thought away: What if he touched me and 
gave me cancer?
  Linda greeted them with extravagant kisses and, to their mutual amazement, produced a 
very creditable lasagna from the oven and served it on paper plates bearing the face of 
that lasagna-lover extraordinaire, Garfield the cat. She asked them how their second 
honeymoon had been ('A phrase that belongs right up there with second childhood,' Halleck 
observed dryly to Heidi that evening, after the dishes had been done and Linda had gone 
flying off with two of her girlfriends to continue a Dungeons and Dragons game that had 
been going on for nearly a year), and before they could do more than begin to tell her 
about the trip, she had cried, 'Oh, that reminds me!' and spent the rest of the meal 
regaling them with Tales of Wonder and Horror from Fairview Junior High - a continuing 
story which held more fascination for her than it did for either Halleck or his wife, 
although both tried to listen with attention. They had been gone for almost a week, after 
all.
  As she rushed out, she kissed Halleck's cheek loudly and cried, "Bye, skinny!'
  Halleck watched her mount her bike and pedal down the front walk, ponytail flying, and 
then turned to Heidi. He was dumbfounded.
  'Now,' she said, 'will you please listen to me?'
  'You told her. You called ahead and told her to say that. Female conspiracy.'
  'No.'
  He scanned her face and then nodded tiredly. 'No, I guess not.'
  Heidi nagged him upstairs, where he finally ended up in the bathroom, naked except for 
the towel around his waist. He was struck by a strong sense of deja vu - the temporal 
dislocation was so complete that he felt a mild physical nausea. It was an almost exact 
replay of the day he had stood on this same scale with a towel from this same powder-blue 
set wrapped around his waist. All that was lacking was the good smell of frying bacon 
coming up from downstairs. Everything else was exactly the same.
  No. No, it wasn't. One other thing was remarkably different.
  That other day he had craned over in order to read the bad news on the dial. He had to 
do that because his bay window was in the way.
  The bay window was there, but it was smaller. There could be no question about it, 
because now he could look straight down and still read the numbers.
  The digital readout said 229.
  'That settles it,' Heidi said flatly. 'I'm making you an appointment with Dr Houston.'
  'This scale weighs light,' Halleck said weakly. 'It always has. That's why I like it.'
  She looked at him coldly. 'Enough bullshit is enough bullshit, my friend. You've spent 
the last five years bitching about how it weighs heavy, and we both know it.' In the 
harsh white bathroom light he could see how honestly anxious she was. The skin was drawn 
shinily tight across her cheekbones.
  'Stay right there,' she said at last, and left the bathroom.
  'Heidi?'
  'Don't move!' she called back as she went downstairs.
  She returned a minute later with an unopened bag of sugar. 'Net wt., 10 lbs.,' the bag 
announced. She plonked it on the scale. The scale considered for a moment and then 
printed a big red digital readout: 012.
  'That's what I thought,' Heidi said grimly. 'I weigh myself, too, Billy. It doesn't 
weigh light, and it never has.
  It weighs heavy, just like you always said. It wasn't just bitching, and we both knew 
it. Someone who's overweight likes an inaccurate scale. It makes the actual facts easier 
to dismiss. If'
  'Heidi -'
  'If this scale says you weigh two-twenty-nine, that means you're really down to 
two-twenty-seven. Now, let me
  'Heidi -'
  'Let me make you an appointment.'
  He paused, looking down at his bare feet, and then shook his head.
  'Billy!'
  'I'll make it myself,' he said.
  'When?'
  'Wednesday. I'll make it Wednesday. Houston goes out to the country club every 
Wednesday afternoon and plays nine holes.' Sometimes he plays with the inimitable 
titgrabbing, wife-kissing Cary Rossington. 'I'll speak to him in person.'
  'Why don't you call him tonight? Right now?'
  'Heidi,' he said, 'no more.' And something in his face must have convinced her not to 
push it any further, because she didn't mention it again that night.
  
  Chapter Five
  221
  
  Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
  Billy purposely kept off the scale upstairs. He ate heartily at meals even though, for 
one of the few times in his adult life, he was not terribly hungry. He stopped hiding his 
munchies behind the packages of Lipton Cup o' Soup in the pantry. He ate pepperoni slices 
and Muenster cheese on Ritz crackers during the Yankees-Red Sox doubleheader on Sunday. A 
bag of caramel corn at work Monday morning, and a bag of Cheez-Doodles on Monday 
afternoon - one of them or possibly the combination brought on a rather embarrassing 
farting spell that lasted from four o'clock until about nine that night. Linda marched 
out of the TV room halfway through the news, announcing that she would be back if someone 
passed out gas masks. Billy grinned guiltily, but didn't move. His experience with farts 
had taught him that leaving the room to pass that sort of gas did very little good. It 
was as if the rotten things were attached to you with invisible rubber bands. They 
followed you around.
  But later, watching And Justice for All on Home Box Office, he and Heidi ate up most of 
a Sara Lee cheesecake.
  During his commute home on Tuesday, he pulled off the Connecticut Turnpike at Norwalk 
and picked up a couple of Whoppers with cheese at the Burger King there. He began eating 
them the way he always ate when he was driving, just working his way through them, 
mashing them up, swallowing them down bite by bite ...
  He came to his senses outside of Westport.
  For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical self - it was not thinking,