Peanut Butter

The last thing Orrin Openmeyer bought in his lifetime was a jar of peanut butter. It was an 18-ounce jar of organic extra-chunky salted, so maybe his death—crossing between the barely visible white paint lines on his way back from the store, an old green Ford had plowed through his neatly arrayed body—was justified. Still, his death, like many things he had done, launched a wave of public wonder at the Openmeyers, and an investigation into the affairs of the road agent, whose job it was to keep the crosswalks of sunny Burgandese in top condition. Maybe, his friends mused, if the crosswalk had been more clearly marked, the car would have seen it and stopped. However, the driver of the car was a notably unstable local tough guy who might have committed the accident on purpose. A trial was scheduled for July.

It was somewhat ironic to Orrin Openmeyer’s family and close friends that a jar of peanut butter, bought for sandwiches for the lunch his eleven-year son would eat the next day at his exclusive soccer camp, had been his last purchase; that Openmeyer, a high-profile stock trader and notoriously not a family man, should die in the act of purchasing something so petty, so familiar, as a jar of peanut butter was so uncharacteristic. Indeed, his parents noted, Orrin had never really been “at home” unless he was at work.

He was a restless child until he was allowed to go to school; he arranged the toys on his shelves neatly to one side when he was nearly eighteen months old, preferring instead to flip the pages of an upside-down volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His parents noted an especial abundance of wear on page 252 of the eighth volume, and, when his choice of career was made, wondered if it had been a premonition, a foreshadowing of what was to come. In any event, young Openmeyer was proficient in school. It was not so much that he was brilliant as that he was diligent, but, by the time graduation rolled around, he was first in his class. His valediction was short and to the point; it wished his classmates well on the paths they chose to follow. He attended university; once again, he graduated first in his class. It was generally known among his peers that Openmeyer was too focused to have time for lady friends, and in fact he never even joined a fraternity. The salutatorian, a jovial, stout, brilliant young woman whose major was marine studies, was a bit put off by Orrin, and was held as honorary valedictorian by the majority of their classmates, who were more often graced by her company.

Orrin Openmeyer surprised many when he got married, seven years after graduating and working his way up the hierarchy of stock traders. The ceremony was brief and formal, little more than a meeting of family in the town clerk’s office. He and his wife settled down in a rich part of town, and lived indulgently but not flagrantly. The community was shocked once again to find that Openmeyer spent just as many long overtime hours at his downtown office after he got married as before, but two years after—and one before his promotion—his marriage, his wife had a son, whom they named Oscar. There was little question in Orrin’s mind that he loved his son deeply, but the rest of the town wasn’t sure. Although they were the spitting image of each other, there was little sign of affection between the young son and the father. That Orrin’s final act would be in performing a service, however slight, for his son, was the subject of discussion in the town for about a year. And then, like the paint of the fateful crosswalk barely visible on the steaming hot pavement the hot June day, the public memory began to fade away, until Orrin Openmeyer became just another businessman in the town, successful, with a wife and a young son.