Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

working the old money corridors of LaSalle Street and the Magnificent Mile—who had committed the unpardonable sin of getting cozy with Anthony “the Mink” Ferri.

It was one of those open secrets among the backrooms, wise guy haunts, and smoke filled offices of organized crime task force members. Ferri fell for the woman hard, overlooking the stigma attached to her chosen vocation. She was seen on the mobster’s arm at all the gala charity events, governor’s balls, and high society soirees up and down the North Shore. She was a looker—that much Oswald remembers—her beauty a combination of a dark, sultry Jennifer Connelly, and an exotic native of some uncharted Peloponnesian island. And for a while, she and the Mink were inseparable.

Then she went and did something inexcusable, something that no self-respecting Catholic mobster could abide: she got herself pregnant.

The sigh that comes out of Oswald Means right then is laden with the anguish and remorse of the ages. He can’t bear to look at the wig anymore, and he can’t bear to throw it away. All he can do is carefully return it to its nest of tissue paper, where it will likely stay entombed for another decade, collecting dust and festering in his subconscious.

He takes a deep breath, turns, and starts getting dressed for the first day of the rest of his life.

He searches for his guns, so preoccupied by his dark thoughts now that he doesn’t even notice his own testicles hanging out of his boxers, swinging like pendulous fuzzy dice from a rearview mirror. The cut-down Mossburg 12-gauge pistol-grip, loaded for rhinoceros—is wedged behind the golf clubs in his closet, a full set, which haven’t been used in eons. He grabs the shotgun, a box of shells, and the APC nine-millimeter postil hidden on the top shelf behind the bike helmet that he never wears.

He gets dressed in a hurry, noticing by the bedside clock it’s still only 5:59 a.m. He’ll have to wake Gerbil up—unless she hasn’t turned in yet. He turns the lights out, leaving the sad little shoebox on the dresser. He’s too busy to notice.

He has work to do.

10.

The average time span between full moons—29.53 days, which amounts to precisely three hundred and sixty hours, forty-four minutes, and eleven seconds—is known as the synodic month, but to Oswald, down through the years, it has become known as Caleb’s Rule. Matilda always believed that her father’s “lunar atonement” had somehow been ratified into cosmic law and was governed forevermore by the late patriarch, who gazed down from the heavens like some celestial Supreme Court justice. And now that the moon was governing Oswald’s fate, he was certain that Caleb Valkenburg was watching his every move and would be enforcing the deadline with extreme prejudice.

The duration of the synodic month varies from calendar month to calendar month (and from viewing location to viewing location) due to the moon’s elliptical orbit. The different phases of the moon are determined by the relative positions of the sun, the earth, and the moon. The moon appears full when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth. When the sun is on the same side of the earth as the moon—a phase commonly known as a “new moon” (or “dark moon”)—the moon is invisible to the naked eye.

On the evening of Oswald’s epiphany, the new moon is already three days into its next cycle—already rising each night like a luminous fingernail over the shimmering black horizon of Lake Michigan.

According to both the Chicago Tribune and the Farmer’s Almanac, the lunar metamorphosis this month will last approximately 32.5 days.

However, nobody on earth is less interested in all this than Andrew R. Kornblum.

Twelve days into the lunar cycle, on a Thursday morning, just before dawn, Kornblum scrabbles out of bed after a night of dreamless, woozy sleep. He vaguely remembers going to bed the night before, but since starting the new cocktail of Effexor, Klonopin, Cymbalta, Ritalin, and Xanax, he remembers very little of his ghastly dreams.

He drags himself around his bedroom, a scrawny middle-aged man in tartan plaid boxer shorts, trying to remember what it is he needs to do today. He pauses in front of the dresser mirror. He thinks and thinks, his mind swamped with medication, recrimination, and regret.

All at once he remembers what it is he has to do. He remembers the task.

His clothes—carefully selected the night before for the big day—hang off the back of a bureau chair. He dresses carefully in business casual, as his former employer might call it, pulling on his pleated khaki pants, his goldenrod Izod twill shirt, Topsiders, no socks. He takes his time, as if dressing for a performance.

Most of the preliminary due diligence has already been done. Paperwork has been sent to the lawyer. The note—carefully composed over the last two days—lies on the kitchen table under a clay turtle paperweight that his daughter made for him at Montessori school about a dozen millennia ago.

Kornblum skips breakfast and goes right over to the pedestal table by the front door.

He finds his keychain, removes the key to the Dodge Caravan, and then puts the rest of his keys next to the mail basket in plain view. He turns off the air conditioning but leaves the porch light on, as well as the overhead in the kitchen. On his way to the garage, he dumps a week’s worth of dry cat food in Mr. Peepers’s dish.

The forest-green Caravan, still as shiny as the day it rolled off the assembly line, is waiting for him in the garage. As specified in his master plan, the tank is a quarter full—just enough to make it to the limestone quarry outside.

He gets in, fires it up, thumbs the garage door opener, yanks the lever into reverse, and backs out of the enclosure and into the last day of his life.

* * *

The weather is mild for April along the Mississippi. The huge northern Illinois