April 17
Ron’s June 17
The next day, Frank moved much of his operation to the back room of Good Yarn like it was a field office.
Kim’s stockroom was small. A folding table, two metal shelves of overstock, a mini fridge she had bought at a yard sale and never cleaned. Frank had pushed the shelves against the wall and spread the entire table with newspaper layouts, ink samples, and a laptop so old it hummed like a small appliance. He’d been there since 6:00 in the morning. It was now past noon and he had not asked for lunch.
Kim stood in the doorway holding two mugs of coffee. The good kind. Frank had earned it.
“Hey my friend, how’s it going?” she asked.
Frank didn’t look up. “Don’t get sentimental on me. He’ll see right through this if we get sloppy.”
She set his mug on the corner of the table, the only spot not covered in paper. Frank picked it up without looking, sipped, and kept working.
The front page was laid out on the screen. Kim leaned in. The banner read PAX RIVER DAILY across the top in the same typeface Frank had used for thirty years. Below it, the date: July 4, 2026. And the headline, bold, centered, taking up a third of the page: AMERICA CELEBRATES 250.
Below that, a smaller subhead: Pax River Joins the Nation in Celebration.
Kim’s throat tightened. “My goodness,” she said. “That looks real.”
“It is real. It’s my paper. Same fonts, same layout, same column width. I’ve been putting this thing out since 1994. It’s a small community paper, not the Washington Post, plus I could do it blindfolded.” Frank scrolled down. “The problem isn’t the front page. It’s everything else. Sports scores. Weather. Obituaries. Classifieds. He reads the whole paper, Kim. Cover to cover. If the weather says seventy-two degrees on July 4 and it’s actually forty-eight outside his window, he’ll know.”
“So what do we do?”
“We guess. We use some of those artificial intelligence gadgets. We make up baseball scores for games that haven’t been played. We write fake obituaries for fake people with common names here in the valley. We forecast weather for a month that hasn’t happened.” Frank leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “And we pray he doesn’t check the box scores against his memory, because that man remembers every Nationals game he’s ever watched.”
Kim pulled the folding chair from behind the door and sat. The back room was warm and close. Frank’s coffee breath and newsprint and the faint smell of the mini fridge’s rubber seal. The stack of printouts on the table. Front pages, sports sections, weather forecasts. Each one dated a day in late June. A whole fabricated month in black and white.
“How many papers?” she asked.
“Twenty. One for every day between June 11 and July 4. He won’t read them all, but they need to exist. Annie brings one every visit. Carol leaves one on his nightstand. If he asks for Tuesday’s paper, Tuesday’s paper better be ready.”
Kim admired the stack. Twenty fake newspapers. Twenty days of invented reality. All of it designed to hold together a world that didn’t exist for a man who read every word of everything.
“What about television?” Kim asked.
“Carol handled it. Cable’s disconnected in his room. Staff told him there’s a building-wide outage. A wiring issue. He complained about it twice already.”
“He’ll keep complaining.”
“Meh, that’s his charm. Complaining means he’s alive.”
Frank pulled a proof page from the printer and handed it to her. A short item below the fold: FIREWORKS MOVED TO BRIDGETON.
Kim adjusted her gigantic glasses and read aloud. “The Pax River Town Council has voted to skip fireworks this year due to dry conditions and a burn ban in effect across the Valley. The popular display has been moved to the Bridgeton Fairgrounds.”
“So?”
“That’s brilliant,” Kim said.
“Can’t give him fireworks,” Frank said. “But we can give him a reason why there aren’t any.”
Frank went back to the screen and Kim watched him work. His fingers moved slowly on the keyboard, two-fingered, like men of his generation typed, like each letter had a price. He had been a newspaperman for thirty years. This was the first time he’d ever used his skills to lie.
“Frank.”
“Yeah.”
“You said you knew his brother, Charlie. In Vietnam. But you never really told me how.”
Frank stopped, but didn’t turn around. His hands stayed on the keyboard like they’d forgotten what they were doing.
“I didn’t just know of him,” Frank said. “We ran around together once. Saigon. Some bar none of us should’ve been in. He was waiting for transport back to his unit and I was waiting for mine and we ended up at the same table because there weren’t any other seats.”
Kim waited.
Frank’s back was still to her.
“He talked about Ron the whole night. The whole night, Kim. His brother this, his brother that. Said Ron was the best man he’d ever known. Said Ron was the reason he enlisted in the first place.” Frank picked up his coffee. Set it back down without drinking. “I didn’t think about that night for fifty years. Then Brandon Wise mentioned Ron Drummond at a VFW meeting and the whole thing came back. Charlie’s face. That bar. How he said his brother’s name.”
Kim didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t break whatever Frank was holding together.
Frank turned back to the screen. “You know what’s harder than lying to one man?”
“What?”
“Getting a whole town to agree on the same lie.” He started typing again.
“But we’re doing it. Because Charlie Drummond sat in a bar in Saigon and talked about his brother like he was the last good thing in the world. And maybe he was.”
Kim took her coffee back to the front of the shop. The store was empty, as usual. Afternoon light came through the window and caught the flags on the wall. Still there. Still hanging.
She thought about what they were building. Not a parade. Not decorations. Not fake newspapers. They were building a world. A complete, functioning, day-by-day world designed to convince one ninety-one-year-old man that three months hadn’t happened. That June was real. That July was coming. That his country could still come together.
And the terrifying part wasn’t that it might not work.
The terrifying part was that it might.
From the back room, she heard Frank’s keyboard. Two fingers. Slow and steady. Marching across the keys. Building a lie one letter at a time.
Kim wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Eighteen days, she thought. Eighteen days for Charlie.
New chapters posted every Monday and Thursday until April 23.