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“Grand,” George said, still staring through the windshield. “Just grand.”

I did my best to think this was part of a standard routine, to find something clever and funny in it. But Jenny wasn’t playing to the crowd. They couldn’t even see her face. And she wasn’t playing to me, either. She was playing to George and George was playing to her, and they would have played it the same way if they’d been alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

“Honey,” Jenny said, “there are a lot of nice people waiting inside.” She was embarrassed, and she knew darn good and well I’d caught him boozing it up.

“Hooray,” said George.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “the show must go on.”

“Why?” said George.

Up to then, I’d never known how joyless what they call a joyless laugh could be. Jenny gave a joyless laugh to get the crowd to thinking that what was going on was simply hysterical. The laugh sounded like somebody breaking champagne glasses with a ball-peen hammer. It didn’t just give me the willies. It gave everybody the willies.

“Did—did you want something, young man?” she said to me.

What the hell—there was no talking to George, so I talked to her. “I’m from the Indianapolis office. I—I have a message about his wife,” I said.

George turned his head. “About my what?” he said.

“Your—your ex-wife,” I said.

The crowd was out on the sidewalk again, confused and shuffling around and wondering when the funny part was going to come. It sure was a screwy way to sell refrigerators. Sully Harris was starting to get sore.

“Haven’t heard from her for twenty years,” George said. “I can go another twenty without hearing from her, and feel no pain. Thanks just the same.” He stared through the windshield again.

That got a nervous laugh out of the crowd, and Sully Harris looked relieved.

Jenny came up to me, bumped up against me, and whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “What about Nancy?”

“She’s very sick,” I whispered. “I guess she’s dying. She wants to see him one last time.”

Somewhere in the back of the van a deep humming sound quit. It was the sound of Jenny’s brains. Jenny’s face turned into dead sponge rubber—turned into something as stupid as anything you’ll ever see on a department store clothes dummy. The yellow-green lights in her blue glass eyes winked out.

“Dying?” said George. He opened the door of the cab to get some air. The big Adam’s apple in his scrawny throat went up and down, up and down. He flapped his arms feebly. “Show’s over, folks,” he said.

Nobody moved right away. Everybody was stunned by all this unfunny real life in the middle of make-believe.

George kicked off his trick shoes to show how really over the show was. He couldn’t make himself speak again. He sat there, turned sideways in the cab, staring at his bare feet on the running board. The feet were narrow and bony and blue.

The crowd shuffled away, their day off to a very depressing start. Sully Harris and I hung around the van, waiting for George to take his head out of his hands. Sully was heartbroken about what had happened to the crowd.

George mumbled something in his hands that we didn’t catch.

“How’s that?” Sully asked him.

“When somebody tells you you’ve got to come like that,” George said, “you’ve got to come?”

“If—if she’s your ex-wife, if you walked out on her twenty years ago,” Sully said, “then how come you gotta fall apart now on account of her—in front of my customers, in front of my store?”

George didn’t answer him.

“If you want a train or an airplane reservation or a company car,” I said to George, “I’ll get it for you.”

“And leave the van?” George said. He said it as though I’d made a very fatheaded suggestion. “There’s a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of equipment in there, Sonny Jim,” he said. He shook his head. “Leave all that valuable equipment around for somebody to—” His sentence petered out. And I saw there wasn’t any sense to arguing with what he was saying, because he was really getting at something else. The van was his home, and Jenny and her brains were his reason for being—and