The car Milt Carraway won on The Price is Right sat under a cover in the garage. He had driven the Buick LeSabre every day and very purposely retired it with exactly 100,000 miles on the odometer.
He had every calendar he owned since he opened his business socked away in filing cabinets and the cabinets were marked with the years the calendars encompassed.
Milt had been known to eye his lawn from across the street to make sure the sides of the walkway were edged evenly.
He was also funny-he had made Bob Barker genuinely laugh on stage at CBS Television City-, gregarious, and ran a small but successful financial planning company.
He ran for mayor of Tompkinsville on a fifteen-point plan to improve the already idyllic town and had been able, in a few terms, to make twelve of the fifteen promises come true.
“Milt,” hundreds of friends, acquaintances and strangers told him, “you could be mayor of Tompkinsville for life.”
Milt had decided to shoot for that, to be mayor until he wasn’t capable anymore.
Milt sat back in the director’s chair he had gotten as a gift for his third term in office and eyed the can of beer in his hand.
A splash came from the pool behind him- Milt could tell you his lap times to the tenth of a second if you asked him- and his niece’s Irish Setter ambled to the corner of the burgundy picket fence to pee.
Milt looked around the near empty yard.
He couldn’t have predicted it a month ago.
His Fourth of July parties had been legendary-not debaucherous or even rowdy-just copious food, ice cold mass-market beer, great badminton tournaments and a huge trophy for the cornhole champion…
Milt sipped his beer, having gotten lost on some of the slang on the label.
He didn’t love the beer.
You’ll learn to love it, he told himself.
You’ll be okay with not being mayor anymore, too.
He sipped the beer again.
The brewmaster was in his yard, his first visit to Milt’s Fourth of July party.
Elizabeth was handing the man, Kulliver was his name, a massive bowl of potato salad.
Relax, honey, Milt Carraway thought. We’ll have gallons of potato salad left over to take to Forgotten Harvest.
On the beer can in Milt’s hand in print small enough that it was tough for Milt to read, it said “Cackling Jester Brewing peels off a portion of its ducats to support just causes always.”
The Cackling Jester logo, a pudgy court jester with hops on its hat instead of bells, was now a part of Milt Carraway’s vault of a brain.
Milt had known his granddaughter Katie was in a band.
He knew they were called Rust Cunt.
He knew they were playing a protest/benefit concert in Shackleford Field, just outside Tompkinsville, in Shasta, with other like-minded bands.
Still, Milt was rather shocked when he got a text “Katie’s in trouble.”
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