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to me and to all of us who knew him, Mrs. Castor,” I said in a soft, urgent voice. “No one will ever understand what he brought into our lives. But it was something about fearlessness, maybe, and going for it no matter the odds. It was something about integrity and originality. I don’t want to sound like a Nike commercial, Mrs. Castor, but therereally was no one else like Rob. He’s the most important friend I’ve ever had, and ever will.”
    She shut her eyes and nodded.
    “Lovely,” she said.
    I straightened up, feeling slightly relieved.
    “But not enough,” she went on.
    Still smiling, I froze. “Excuse me?”
    “‘Like a whore, I unpack my heart with words,’ said Hamlet. Do you know what that means?”
    “Are you insulting me, Mrs. Castor?”
    “Don’t be petty, Nick. Of course I am. I’m not interested in your grief today, little man. In fact, I’m not interested in anything to do with you. I thought a conversation with you would be important somehow, but I was wrong. So, go. Just go!” she cried suddenly. “Flutter off back to your life. I should never have called, and I never will again.”
    I stood a moment, too stunned to be angry, and then came to my senses and walked swiftly down the hallway and out the front door. She’d called me, it occurred to me, for the express purpose of wounding me as deeply as possible. I thought I heard her singing something loud and off-key as I hastened across the lawn. Once in my car, I began driving home, swiftly, as if to outdistance something that was gaining on me.

Chapter 5
    I N ENSUING WEEKS, EVEN AFTER THE TV trucks finally slithered away and the anchor people packed up and left, the town remained slightly altered, a touch bewildered. We all commented on that fact. It was the new watchfulness that had stolen over us. It was the way in which, in the aftermath of all that glary media attention, we felt ourselves looking on at everything as if perched slightly outside our own bodies. At the same time, there was the roused feeling of election to it, like we were special somehow. But as more than one of us said to another, Special, dear God, for what?
    As the weeks went by, and things finally relaxed and the weather grew colder, we told ourselves that we were glad to have our town back, and our unclogged city streets, and the open spaces of our afternoons. But then the New York Times Magazine published a nasty, in-depth “investigative” article on Rob and Kate called “Literary Labor Lost: TheRob Castor/Kate Pierce Story.” It laid a heavy emphasis on the selfishness and egos of everyone concerned, and a great wave of tired outside attention crashed over us yet again, and for one week we wondered if we weren’t right back where we’d started.
    We were collectively like a hooker angry with the life she leads who is nonetheless rouged and waiting and open for business. We hungered for the media attention, I mean, even as we pretended otherwise. We saw the recognition as deserved, at bottom. It seemed validation for how each of us felt ourselves going along in our lives with some secret rind of personal value not yet noticed by the world, and still awaiting its moment in poignant close-up.
    But we were also outraged by the New York Times article, plain and simple. We hastily reconvened an “emergency session” in New Russian Hall, where we spent a long and stormy evening debating what to do by way of response. We admitted the journalist got the look of Monarch right, with its graceful grid of streets, its historic redbrick district and its church on a gentle rise. She got the easeful style of daily life here right, and the way, for example, that at the high school gym, birdsong floats in the open windows over the thwack of the ball against the backboard. She even got how Monarch Mountain broods over the town all day long.
    But no one had ever said before that “The shadow the mountain casts seems to extend even to the waking life of the citizens of