Once, when he lost himself in the details of Wes’s passing—the helicopter airlifting Wes’s body from the bend in the road where the RV had struck him and where a hole in his head had opened and bled and refused to close-Harper had spilled an entire tray of huevos rancheros for a table of very disappointed midwesterners (Boilermakers, it appeared from their sweats), who shook their big sad heads at him. Harper was tempted to think that head-shaking, when placed within the context of death, should seem pathetically trivial, and that knocking these same heads together would produce a highly satisfying sound, but then, from somewhere deep in his head, he heard Wes’s voice saying, “What if you were a very hungry person with a big fat sad head, wouldn’t you be a little pissed off after being crammed into a tour bus all day, breathing the stink of your fellow man, only to have your waiter dump your food on the floor?” So Harper forgave the head-shaking, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, counted to seven [...]