Wesson was one of those men who had passed his days waiting for the rest of his life to come about. He busied himself with his work, never marrying and doted on the children of his customers. “Something’s bound to happen soon,” he would often say at the end of a conversation, and there was a quickness to his eyes that demonstrated his implicit faith in the proposition. When his mother died, this faith seemed to abandon him. He went home each evening to the small house that they had shared, shuffling cards or paging through a magazine until he fell asleep. Though he never failed to laugh when a customer was at hand, the eyes he wore became empty and white, as if some essential fire in them had been spent.
Kevin Brockmeier, “The Ceiling”
