Saving Alice by David Lewis Page B

room, doing the work myself: framing the walls, wiring the electric, installing and texturing the sheetrock, even installing and seaming together the overstocked remnants of cut Berber carpet.
    Opening the door to my inner sanctum, I smelled the musty dampness and closed the door behind me. Sitting at the desk, I looked at my metal bookshelf—an entire library dedicated to stock and futures trading.
    Some of my trading books were new, others decades old. Some were reissues of the philosophies and strategies of long-dead market wizards; others contained ideas culled from recent analysis, complete with elaborate computer back testing. Some extolled the virtues of fundamental analysis, the study of company performance; others taught the art of technical analysis, the practice of interpreting stock behavior.
    Although new indicators were created every day, all the old standbys were here: moving averages, stochastic systems, relative strength indicators, trend lines, support and resistance, etc.
    Lately, I’d preferred to combine an old concept, buying stocks on dips—what I called my divergence system—with a relatively new concept: the fractal, something derived from chaos theory, which, ironically, gave Paul and me another topic to discuss.
    All told, my shelves contained reams of information, and more information is what every trader is looking for—that final piece that will make all the difference: the unerring indicator. The magic bullet. The Holy Grail.
    We’ll be fine, I told myself, thinking of my plans for my family. Once I pulled it together financially, we’d all look back on these days and laugh.
    The other walls were covered with cheap posters of serene landscapes—places far from here: the giant boulders on the Oregon Coast, spring flowers in the Colorado Mountains, autumn hills in Vermont. And my favorite: a sunset pewter bay in Mystic, Connecticut. The tiny basement window, just below the ceiling, was covered with a heavy curtain, designed to eliminate not only any proof of local surroundings but also the annoying webs of spiders who built them faster than I could brush them out.
    Finally, my tired gaze fell to the burnt orange couch, sagging and desprung from Alycia’s preschool need to jump for hours on end. My pajamas had been neatly placed on the arm of the couch. At least Donna had been calm enough to plan our sleeping arrangement.
    I switched on the computer, navigated to eBay, and listed Paul’s camera. Briefly, I had considered giving it back to him sometime in the future, maybe as a gift, then thought better of it. We needed the two hundred dollars as much as he did.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    I awakened at four in the morning with my back hurting and my neck feeling like a pretzel. Upstairs in the kitchen, I fixed a quick cup of instant coffee, then drove to Kesslers on Sixth Avenue, an allnight grocery store. In the florist section, I considered the refrigerated contents. An array of carnations and daisies stood in buckets of water.
    Bought flowers seemed little more than rubbing sand into a festering wound, and yet, with Donna not speaking to me, my only options were to do nothing or do something, regardless of how feeble it seemed.
    Opening the glass door, I grabbed a dozen roses, assorted colors, and winced at the price. When I finally paid at the register, the clerk smirked between yawns.
    At home again, I arranged eleven roses on the table, propping the birthday card against the vase. Next to the vase, I placed the white box containing the earrings, then stepped back to appraise my hopeless gesture.
    Downstairs on Alycia’s door, I taped a pink rose. Then, with a hopeful heart, I got into my twelve-year-old rust-bucket Ford sedan—a rattletrap with spongy suspension, metal-on-metal brakes, and failing heater—and headed off to work. I parked several blocks away, on a side street, noticing Larry’s Buick on Main Street itself, positioned in front of our third-floor offices. It took arriving at