He lived for seventy-two years, the average allowable age for a married white male in his particular milieu. Two hours after his funeral, Libby, his wife of thirty years, was deep in a game of bridge. When her best friend, Laura Jenkins, who'd arrived at Bridge Night late because she had just returned from her grandfather's funeral in another town, said: "I'm so sorry, Libby, dear," Libby, who'd done badly in the first round of play replied without taking her eyes off her cards: "That's OK, Laura. I think I'll do better this round." And she smiled so sweetly, like a little darling.

Within days of his death, even his children, Roxanne and Leo, had difficulty remembering his face but then they wouldn't have remembered it when he was alive, five minutes after talking to him.

Here's what Bobby Parker looked like: his face was sort of round in a kind of square way that wasn't so much long as it was short and nobody seems to recall the color of his eyes. He wasn't tall but he wasn't squat. His weight was right on the money. He dressed in clothing appropriate to the occasion and he never mixed pink and gray. He may have been losing hair but one thing is certain: his hair was dark brown.

Or was it light brown?

But one thing is certainly certain: Bobby Parker worked for thirty-five years in an accounting firm. He wasn't exactly an accountant, more like just a clerk, doing clerking things that involved forms and files and filling in blanks. At the beginning of his career he had a rubber stamp that he could apply to those forms. He loved that rubber stamp. At some point before he retired, he stopped using the stamp. Nobody at the firm remembers that stamp. Nobody at the firm can recall a form needing the application of a rubber stamp. Nobody at the firm remembers, recalls, recollects, reflects upon, or reminisces over Bobby Parker. This was true one minute after he left the firm on his retirement day. This was true for the entire thirty-five years that he worked for the firm.

The fact that he received a pension check at the end of each month is probably proof for the existence of God, or at least a remarkably successful test bed for payroll software. In fact, everything that happened to Bobby Parker from the moment of his birth was anticlimactic in the way that turning off a tap stops the flow of water, but might allow a continuous drip.

When Bobby Parker was five years old he lived in a small rural community close enough to the city to smell the smog on humid days but too far from the country to see the occasional cow munching grass behind a wire fence. On one particular day a certain number of days after his fifth birthday, Bobby Parker was walking along a sidewalk thinking about nothing in particular.

Oh, this and that, his thought train went.

Ahead of him lay the community's busiest intersection. One of its traffic signals was malfunctioning. When it turned red, it turned red in every direction. When it turned green, it turned green in every direction. Fortunately, the community's busiest intersection saw only a handful of cars on Sunday afternoon and this was Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, a car was approaching the intersection and the driver was thinking more about being stopped than he was about driving in a manner that would ensure that he wouldn't be stopped. The driver's name was Ted Jenkins, the father of Laura Jenkins, who would one day be Bobby Parker's wife's best friend. Ted Jenkins was worried about being stopped by the police because he'd just finished a day of fishing and drinking, and his quota of downed beers far exceeded his quota of caught fish. In fact, after he'd run out of bait without catching a single fish, he'd just watched the fish jumping in the middle of the lake as he drank the entire twelve bottles of beer in his cooler.