The Loose Wire · dramatis personae
The Cast
Who's who in the notebook, introduced the way the pages introduce them, and giving nothing away about how it ends. Somewhere to get your bearings, or to dig a little deeper into anyone you've already met.
John Mercer
The man telling the story, and the man who died in it. Thirty-one years fixing the machines that keep the world's food cold; a fisherman, a card player who could read a table of strangers cold, a Leo who could strike up a conversation with a fence post. He married five times and was buried by the one thing he never saw coming. He carried a little spiral notebook his whole life, for part numbers and card counts and the odd thought he didn't want to lose. This is the last one.
Nora Mercer
John's eldest, the first of three, a daughter with two younger brothers close behind her, the whole batch eighteen months apart. She was reading a room before she could read a book: the family's keeper of birthdays and photographs and hard truths. When the official answers didn't fit the facts, she was the one who refused to let it go.
Emily
The first wife, and the first mistake, though neither of them could read it in that gold light out on the water. An architect's daughter with a pencil list of every place she meant to go. She wanted the whole world. She got John instead, got free of him, and did better without him.
Lisa
The second wife, and Emily's best friend, which tells you a thing about John he'd rather it didn't. Loud, magnetic, trouble; the kind of trouble that could, for a few minutes at a stretch, quiet the thing that was always roaring in him.
Maggie
The third wife. A live wire, the loudest fire John ever ran straight at, married in a hurry and gone in a season. She was running from something inside her own body, same as he was. Only hers was meaner, and in the end it caught her.
Colleen
The fourth wife. Met at church, of all the places. Steady until she wasn't; the drink took her by inches. Hers was the house on the good quiet street. And hers was the jetted tub upstairs, the sanctuary John mocked and rigged with a plumbing joke and never once set foot in. Remember the tub.
Sarah
The fifth wife, and the last, the one still married to John the morning the water was running. He called her the best thing that ever happened to him, and he needed, badly, to believe it. What she was underneath, the notebook takes its time getting to.
Paige
Sarah's daughter. A sweet, sad young woman John was always kind to, and who was kinder to him than her own father ever bothered to be. She has a habit of leaving little glass hummingbirds where you'd least expect to find one.
Marcus
Sarah's son. He ran John's wedding in a living room and, years on, carried his casket to the grave. A good kid in a bad house, carrying a good deal more than anyone around him knew.
Wren
Marcus's girl. A gentle, odd soul the family liked to poke fun at, a vegan, an animal-rescuer, and the one person who saw plainly what none of the rest of them would, and quietly walked Marcus straight out of the whole thing.
Walt Mercer
John's father. An aerospace man who put real hardware into orbit, and left his own boy on his own at eighteen for a promotion in Florida, never once knowing he'd handed down the single thing John would never learn how to put down.
Dale
A man in Florida. Ask again later.