“Good thing they don’t know who you are,” I said. Mr. Harrigan’s email handle (he loved having a handle) was pirateking1.

“If someone is keeping track of my searches, they don’t have to. They’ll be able to suss out my interests and solicit me accordingly. My name means nothing to them. My interests do.”

“Yeah, spam is annoying,” I said, and went into the kitchen to dump the watering can and put it in the mudroom.

When I came back, Mr. Harrigan had the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and was taking deep breaths.

“Did you get that from your doctor?” I asked. “Did he, like, prescribe it?”

He lowered it and said, “I don’t have a doctor. Men in their mid-eighties can eat all the corned beef hash they want, and they no longer need doctors, unless they have cancer. Then a doctor is handy to prescribe pain medication.” His mind was somewhere else. “Have you considered Amazon, Craig? The company, not the river.”

Dad bought stuff from Amazon sometimes, but no, I’d never really considered it. I told Mr. Harrigan that, and asked what he meant.

He pointed to the Modern Library copy of McTeague. “This came from Amazon. I ordered it with my phone and my credit card. That company used to be just books. Little more than a mom-and-pop operation, really, but soon it may be one of the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. Their smile logo will be as ubiquitous as the Chevrolet emblem on cars or this on our phones.” He lifted his, showing me the apple with the bite out of it. “Is spam annoying? Yes. Is it becoming the cockroach of American commerce, breeding and scurrying everywhere? Yes. Because spam works, Craig. It pulls the plow. In the not-too-distant future, spam may decide elections. If I were a younger man, I’d take this new income stream by the balls . . .” He closed one of his hands. He could only make a loose fist because of his arthritis, but I got the idea. “. . . and I would squeeze.” The look came into his eyes that I sometimes saw, the one that made me glad I wasn’t in his bad books.

“You’ll be around for years yet,” I said, blissfully unaware that we were having our last conversation.

“Maybe or maybe not, but I want to tell you again how glad I am you convinced me to keep this. It’s given me something to think about. And when I can’t sleep at night, it’s been a good companion.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and I was. “Gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Harrigan.”

So I did, but he didn’t see me.

* * *

I let myself in through the mudroom door like always, calling out, “Hi, Mr. Harrigan, I’m here.”

There was no reply. I decided he was probably in the bathroom. I sure hoped he hadn’t fallen in there, because it was Mrs. Grogan’s day off. When I went into the living room and saw him sitting in his chair—oxygen bottle on the floor, iPhone and McTeague on the table beside him—I relaxed. Only his chin was on his chest, and he had slumped a little to one side. He looked like he was asleep. If so, that was a first this late in the afternoon. He napped for an hour after lunch, and by the time I arrived, he was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

I took a step closer and saw his eyes weren’t entirely closed. I could see the lower arc of his irises, but the blue no longer looked sharp. It looked foggy, faded. I began to feel scared.

“Mr. Harrigan?”

Nothing. Gnarled hands folded loosely in his lap. One of his canes was still leaning against the wall, but the other was on the floor, as if he had reached for it and knocked it over. I realized I could hear the steady hiss from the oxygen mask, but not the faint rasp of his breathing, a sound I’d grown so used to that I rarely heard it at all.

“Mr. Harrigan, you okay?”

I took another couple of steps and reached out to shake him awake, then withdrew my hand. I had never seen a dead person, but thought I might be looking at one now. I reached for him again, and this time I didn’t chicken out. I grasped his shoulder (it was horribly bony beneath his shirt) and gave him a shake.

“Mr. Harrigan, wake up!”

One of his hands fell out of his lap and dangled between his legs. He slumped a little farther to one side. I could see the yellowed pegs of his teeth between his lips. Still, I felt I had to be absolutely sure he wasn’t just unconscious or in a faint before I called anyone. I had a memory, very brief but very bright, of my mother reading me the story of the little boy who cried wolf.

I went into the hall bathroom, the one Mrs. Grogan called the powder room, on legs that felt numb, and came back with the hand mirror Mr. Harrigan kept on the shelf. I held it in front of his mouth and nose. No warm breath misted it. Then I knew (although, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I actually knew when that hand fell out of his lap and hung between his legs). I was in the living room with a dead man, and what if he reached out and grabbed me? Of course he wouldn’t do that, he liked me, but I remembered the look he got in his eyes when he said—only yesterday! when he’d been alive!—that if he was a younger man, he’d take this new income stream by the balls, and squeeze. And how he’d closed his hand into a fist to demonstrate.

You’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless, he’d said.

Dead people didn’t reach out and grab you except in horror movies, I knew that, dead people weren’t ruthless, dead people weren’t anything, but I still stepped away from him as I took my cell phone out of my hip pocket, and I didn’t take my eyes off him when I called my father.

Dad said I was probably right, but he’d send an ambulance, just in case. Who was Mr. Harrigan’s doctor, did I know? I said he didn’t have one (and you only had to look at his teeth to know he didn’t have a dentist). I said I would wait, and I did. But I did it outside. Before I went, I thought about picking up his dangling hand and putting it back in his lap. I almost did, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It would be cold.

I took his iPhone instead. It wasn’t stealing. I think it was grief, because the loss of him was starting to sink in. I wanted something that was his. Something that mattered.

* * *

I guess that was the biggest funeral our church ever had. Also the longest cortege to the graveyard, mostly made up of rental cars. There were local people there, of course, including Pete Bostwick, the gardener, and Ronnie Smits, who had done most of the work on his house (and gotten wealthy out of it, I’m sure), and Mrs. Grogan, the housekeeper. Other townies as well, because he was well liked in Harlow, but most of the mourners (if they were mourning, and not there just to make sure Mr. Harrigan was really dead) were business people from New York. There was no family. I mean zero, zilch, nada. Not even a niece or a second cousin. He’d never married, never had kids—probably one of the reasons Dad was leery about me going up there at first—and he’d outlived all the rest. That’s why it was the kid from down the road, the one he paid to come and read to him, who found him.

* * *

Mr. Harrigan must have known he was on borrowed time, because he left a handwritten sheet of paper on his study desk specifying exactly how he wanted his final rites carried out. It was pretty simple. Hay & Peabody’s Funeral Home had had a cash deposit on their books since 2004, enough to take care of everything with some left over. There was to be no wake or viewing hours, but he wanted to be “fixed up decently, if possible” so the coffin could be open at the funeral.