A Safe Place for Dying

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I have been blessed with the prodding, well-tempered criticism, and encouragement by the finest of individuals. To those who critiqued the whole blooming manuscript, to Mary Anne Bigane, Joe Bigane III, Susan Taylor Chehak, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Lori Fredrickson, Eric Frisch, Missy Lyda, and Beth Smith, I say again… and again: Thanks.

To Patrick Riley, who also waded through the words, and then sweated the marketing and applied the Taser at critical junctures, I can say only that you’re the best of pals.

To my new friends at Thomas Dunne, to Marcia Markland and Diana Szu, and to India Cooper, who did the copyediting, you made what I did much better.

And to my daughter, Lori, my son, Jack, and to my wife, Susan… you make what I am much better.

It was a spectacle even on the four-inch screen of my fifty-nine-dollar television.

Edna Rectenberry, the white-curled fusspot of Chicago P.B.S.’s Our Prairie, Our Heritage, was on her knees outside the wall of the gated community, Crystal Waters, barking questions at six preschoolers about the purple wildflowers they’d planted there. She’d just poked her microphone at one fidgeting towhead, in short pants and a better necktie than I’d ever own, when the roof of one of the mansions behind the wall rumbled up like a flaming orange spaceship and vaporized into black smoke. The explosion pounded the ground as glowing cinders of charred wood and shattered roof tile began raining down like hell’s own charcoal.

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