Float Plan. Rob Hiaasen

into mojitos, his lap heavy with chainsaw. He raised his pollen mask to drink to his crumbling marriage. Two years and eleven months, a 2.92-year marriage. Will never rounded off – math teachers rarely do. He met Terri at a soul-sucking faculty meeting (although he remembered her from high school; the opposite was not true). Teresa Morrow was Lakeview High’s new English teacher and girls’ lacrosse coach. They sniffed around each other for a few weeks – Terri hated the word sniffed. “We’re not dogs!” – until they had coffee, a weekend lunch, three dinner dates. Soon Terri visited Will’s two-bedroom apartment he shared with Mack, his best friend. That night, she wore what she called her ABC dress – ass barely covered. In the morning, she put it back on.

      She had always wanted to be a teacher. He had wanted to be a teacher or maybe a journalist.

      “Journalism is too risky. No job security. At least in teaching you know you can have a job for life.”

      “Well,” Terri told him, lacing her fingers through his hand, “I think you’re a great teacher.”

      Should you marry someone if you want to live off the air they were breathing at the moment you first kissed them? Will imagined he was the lone holder of Terri’s air each time they kissed. He wasn’t sure the thought rose to the level of romanticism, but it had to be in the ballpark.

      Barb and Bill Larkin immediately liked Terri and wrangled her into the family even though she wasn’t a Catholic. A year later, when the young people asked to get married in his parents’ back yard and not at St. Mary’s, Barb Larkin agreed and promptly set a dragnet for a suitable caterer. Her husband didn’t care either way. Church. Back yard. Shopping mall. Delicatessen. It didn’t matter where you started, only mattered where you wound up, as Bill Larkin told his son. It’s about the history you make and hold together. Married people are each other’s history holders, he told his son.

      In the beginning, Terri was amused by Will’s ways. His feet rubbed together at night; he claimed he suffered from Restless Leg Syndrome. Her quality of sleep was reduced, as she could only hope his legs would grow out of their restlessness. And this was a minor grievance, but Will refused to ride roller coasters. At the State Fair in Timonium one year – two years – Terri tried to lure Will onto a roller coaster, but he was not a roller-coaster person. People tried to make an early-riser out of him, too. But some people will never be early-risers or roller-coaster people.

      Will loved Terri’s ways. Her mistrust of exclamation points and the way she dog-eared the bottom of book pages signaling favored lines. Her devout preference for lawn seats at Merriweather Post Pavilion. How she hated green Bic pens and magic tricks – nothing more than a slick form of lying! How she liked his height – 6’3” – his shady blue eyes, the untamable cowlick in what she called his pelt of chestnut hair (“It’s just brown,” he’d say, “I don’t have a pelt”), even his elbow-sharp Adam’s apple.

      He did have grievances: the woman once wore a Red Sox sweatshirt to Camden Yards until a robust crowd reaction steered her toward different wardrobe choices at ensuing games. Less embarrassing was her refusal to throw her peanut shells on the ground during O’s games. She was a neat, brand-challenged fan. Although she teased him about “minor infractions” (cramming the dishwasher; leaving his socks balled up in the laundry; snoring like a drunk Sasquatch), one growing complaint was Will could overdo his drinking, especially in social settings, which he tended to avoid so the issue didn’t find initial traction.

      They both agreed Thursday was the finest day of the week and Sunday the bluesiest. Terri didn’t mind Will joy-riding on shopping carts in the Wegmans parking lot. He didn’t mind the English books cramping their starter bookcases – multiple school copies of Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, Fences, To Kill a Mockingbird, Johnny Tremain, and a warehouse of anthologies. Terri made room for Will’s favorite book, a raggedy paperback of Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer. The book was from his grandfather, William Larkin Sr. (in a namesake firewall, his son was William Larkin Jr. and his son was William Larkin, no rank). From his grandfather, Will held loyalty to the Packers of old, Lombardi’s Packers.

      The novelty of each other lost its novelty. In the last frayed months, they hit rough patches until every day felt rough. Kissing was the first to go, followed by a sexual drought of Guinness Book proportions. Will thought it was a simple case of romantic remission. But things were said. He could be a cynical, young man who drank too much; she could be a nagger as if her mission was the overhaul and perfection of his character. Will obsessed over the New Yorker cartoon contest but didn’t want to visit the city. Too many people, too nerve-wracking even thinking about getting around there. He even shied away from the neighbors’ block parties. All that ho-humming around, all that smiling.

      “You don’t want to do anything or meet anyone new,” Terri said.

      “I have you,” he said.

      Until he didn’t.

      “A fucking gazebo,” Will mumbled to Dean, their 9-year-old basset hound. The raising and lowering of his pollen mask was beyond the powers of his coordination, so Will kept the pollen mask on top of his head like a party hat. He faced Dean.

      “Tell me, kind sir, do you want a gazebo?”

      The dog was snoozing, his caramel-colored back leg bicycling. Will wondered what Dean would look like in a pollen mask. He would resist.

      Under the cloak of night (9:15 p.m.), and with the Dunhams away, Will commanded Dean to stay on the deck, but the dog honored no commands. Will carried his weapon low on his left side, the chainsaw thumping against his leg. It was 45 yards to the gazebo. Earlier in the day, he had road-tested the tool. Terri hadn’t taken all of her books yet, including several of her English textbooks. The chainsaw’s single slice into The Bedford Introduction to Literature (Eighth edition) was thrifty and punishing; Will’s hard target was the section “Approaches to Poetry” (p. 1067), which lay shredded in murdered verse on the garage floor. He considered cleaving The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson when he remembered he bought Terri the anthology. Sorry, Emily. In multiple cuts, the chainsaw dismembered 1,775 of her poems, all her dashes dashed, her lyrical stanzas pulverized. Will viewed the episode as his only successful approach to poetry.

      His feet crunching leaves, he walked past his rotted wood pile and found cover in his neighbor’s yard in a cathedral of spring-green oaks, sprawling azaleas and finally, the Dunhams’ hedgerow of forsythias. As Dean snuffled about, Will eyed the five posts. He remembered his father telling him the right way to saw. He hadn’t listened.

      Will assessed the wood pentagon above him and chose the gazebo’s post farthest from the house. A lefty, Will struggled at first with the wrap handle, but true to its hype, the chainsaw started on the first pull, unlike his mower. Will cut a groove in the post, and the saw sharked into the wood, spitting out shavings. One post down, four to go. Then two. But the early work, coupled with massive amounts of rum, left him prematurely fatigued. Will sat down on his neighbor’s grass, the chainsaw grumbling in neutral. He fought off early onset napping but granted himself a 20-minute restorative break. Then he rose to assault the deck’s third post.

      Dean was the first to detect the intruder.

      “Excuse me, can you tell me what you’re doing?”

      Will looked up the slope. The Anne Arundel County sheriff’s deputy looked eight feet tall. He appeared to have left his neck at home. The young deputy billy-goated down into the woods toward the wounded gazebo. Will thought he might have taught the kid a few years back.

      “We’ve had complaints from two neighbors who say they saw someone under the house here.” Will put the chainsaw down on the ground, nice and easy-like.

      “Sir, do you want to shut it off?”

      Will stipulated that, yes, he should turn the chainsaw off.

      “The neighbors reported they saw someone sawing down this gazebo. Does that sound like something you would be doing out here?”

      “Normally not. But today is different.”

      Yup. Had him three years ago. Billy Snyder.