In any case, when Kevin Howard gets caught, act surprised.
Have you ever thought about the importance of pretenses? One would hardly argue with the fact that more often than not it is easier just turn away and pretend that everything is just fine. People do that when they see a fight, an act of wrongdoing and whatnot. People who work at this office are not an exception, they don’t want to get in trouble. That’s the reason why they choose not to notice a lot of things. It is already decided that when Kevin Howards “gets caught,” they are going to “act surprised.” They will say that he seemed to be “a nice person, a bit of a loner, perhaps, but always quiet and polite.” This is a blatant lie of course, but they just don’t need more troubles than they already have.
What now?
He had been “honorably discharged two decades ago,” returning from Southeast Asia “with a medal of valor, an addiction to alcohol” and “an inability to answer the question: What now?” He had found “a kind of an answer within his insatiable appetite.” Food, to be more precise, a lot of food, helped him to fill that awful emptiness if not in soul, then in his stomach. At the age of twenty-five he weighed “380 pounds,” and he reached “the 500 mark – joining the quarter-ton club – by his thirties birthday.” Hector just “could not stop eating.”
Which of you comes home with me tonight?
She was by no means rather lonely. It was not harmonious solitude, however, and there was a rather strong feeling of emptiness. One of the biggest and most needed pleasures of her life was “the pretense of having to decide between once cookie or the other from the panoply before her.” She asked them, “which of you comes home with me tonight?” Of course, she knew that it looked strange, there was a reason why she preferred to go to the mega-market at night. She didn’t want anyone to see her like that, weak and lonely.
