Even as I took her hand, it took me several seconds to find my tongue and mutter, “Frances... Carter? I don’t think that you... you’re not on my... list.”
“You’re not our regular boy, are you?” she said, still smiling; apparently I amused her. “The name would be under Sophie Carter. That’s my sister. She recently passed away.” She looked back at the house. “Twenty-three Sanctuary Drive?” Then, with her hand still in mine, she looked at me through her pale lashes.
And I was Smitten. Captured. Caught like a fish, but not with the hook snagged in my mouth, but dragged straight through my heart.
“Can you get the cat out of the tree, or not?” the other woman snarled.
“Jean,” she cautioned the woman with a soft laugh, then looking down where I still held her hand, said, “May I have it back?”
So I got the cat out of the tree. The sycamore tree was not quite old enough to be showing the mottled white and brown bark that comes with age, but it was still large, its trunk a foot in diameter, and at one time it had been pruned, which left a few fist-sized knobs low enough to grab onto. So getting up had been effortless. Not so effortless had been reaching out to Sammy, or Samson, who bolted the moment I touched him. He ran down my arm and across my back, then he leaped onto the ground and up into the bushes at the front of the house.
“I really must call your mother and apologize,” Frances said as she tended to the scratches on my arm. “Sammy’s cut right through this shirt, and your sweatshirt.” Her big fat cat had got me good, but I was doing a pretty heroic job masking my pain. I couldn’t help but wince, though, as I sat at her kitchen table and she applied peroxide to the marks.
“So Danny walked out on you,” Jean was muttering at the kitchen door, cigarette in hand as she turned to watch us. “I told Sophie he was no good.” She walked back our way, surveying the room critically as she did. “Something fishy about him, if you ask me. I told you how his friend came looking for him right after Sophie died?”
“Daniel wasn’t stealing from me, or from Sophie either,” Frances said gently. “I told you, Jean, nothing is missing from the house. Daniel was a drifter and he just...” Her blue eyes met mine. “...drifted away.”
“Well, if you plan to live here year-round, Fran, you’re going to need help. You need...” The older woman’s tiny, piercing eyes fell on me. “What about him?” She gestured with her cigarette hand at me.
Up until then I hadn’t said much. I was just the paper boy. I’d stopped and done a favor, for which I was now paying in blood. But now it seemed my turn to speak up: “Look, this is nothing. I get scratched...” I tried to roll my shirtsleeve down, but Frances, small as she was, was very firm; she pushed my hand away, shaking her head. The light in the kitchen wasn’t very good; in fact, the entire room was pretty dingy: dirty curtains; faded tabletop; and countertops cluttered with dishes, pots and pans, and an assortment of crates and boxes. Someone was either doing a cleanup job in here or the place had just been trashed. “...all the time,” I finished.
“I insist on paying for your damaged clothes,” she said to me.
“He’s perfect, Franny.” The older woman was suddenly there between us, hands down on the scuffed tabletop. “He’s not very big but strong enough by the looks.” Then to me, “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“There you go,” the woman said, “fifteen, and probably not working. That right?”
“I don’t have a regular job, no.”
“Can you rake, mow, clean up this place? She’s looking. Her handyman just up and left her after Sophie died.”
“Jean...” Frances protested.
Jean, ignoring the younger woman, said to me: “What’s your name?”
“Herb... Herbert Sawyer, ma’am.”
“My God,” Jean Pritchard said, standing back. “You’re the son of that woman who tried to kill herself.”
I wasn’t crazy about Mrs. Jean Pritchard. She was nosy, bossy, unsubtle, and outspoken, but it was her I had to thank for my current position. Caretaker. Handyman. One-boy clean-up crew for Miss Frances Carter, who had insisted from the start I call her Frances. I figured she was somewhere near my mother’s age, and my mother was thirty-six, so Frances had to be maybe thirty-three, thirty-four. But she had done everything right, called and spoken to Jake, then my Aunt Clem, and even my school, just to “be on the safe side, you understand.”
“Police detective.” Frances had been impressed by Jake’s credentials.
“Yeah, he’s a friend of my mother’s,” I’d said. “I mean, they dated... for a while.”
“He was kind enough to move in with you,” she’d said. We’d been at her kitchen table; she had insisted I have a cup of tea. It was my first day on the job, one in which I had single-handedly transformed her front and side yards from looking like an overgrown vacant lot to something fairly respectable. But she insisted I needed a break after working so hard. “Because it must be difficult...” she’d said gently, “with your mother... away.”
I hadn’t wanted to talk about my mother. With the preliminary investigation over, she felt safe hiring me. Now I just wanted to talk about scraping down her porch railings and pulling up the rotted floorboards on the front steps. I wanted to ask how she wanted her hedges trimmed and if I should pull up the black-eyed Susans that had overtaken her flower garden. I was the outside help and felt uncomfortable sitting at the worn kitchen table in her grubby little kitchen.
“This is pretty bad, too, isn’t it?” she’d asked unexpectedly. I guess I’d been too quiet, or she sensed my uneasiness. Maybe I’d been looking around at her kitchen too long: at the grease-stained stove, the broken light fixtures. My own home was small and plain, a kitchen-living room combination with two bedrooms down and an unfinished second floor. But it was clean and orderly and there were windows and light everywhere. This kitchen was basic black and white, with an old-fashioned sink with exposed plumbing, an ancient gas stove, and glass-paneled cabinets with many of the panels missing. Years ago, with copper pots gleaming from the ceiling and polished floors and woodwork, the room was probably pretty special, but today...
“No, needs a little work, is all.” I shrugged. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass her. I’d known her only two days but already I had a pretty high opinion of her. Maybe too high.
“I’m not living here yet. I’m staying at a motel,” she informed me. “The house is warm enough, but the furnace is incredibly noisy. I’m looking for someone to come and work on it.” She shook her head and smiled. “Maybe when you’re done with the outside work...” She leaned toward me, one hand on my arm for emphasis. She was so composed; nothing she did or said ever seemed too forward or improper. “Or am I expecting too much?” she asked. “I don’t want to take up all your time, Herbie. It’s just that when Sophie died...” She sighed and sat back, hands in her lap. “My sister left me comfortably well off, but she didn’t take good care of this place, did she? It was her summer home; she hadn’t lived here in years.”
“I’d be glad to help inside,” I’d told her. “Whatever you want.”
Her whole face grew animated. “Oh, you’re too good, too accommodating! And they say the younger generation is selfish. Slackers — isn’t that the current term?”
“It’s one of them.”
So I worked like a bear those next two weeks, every day after school, often long into the evenings. I raked and mowed, trimmed and pruned, scraped and painted. I pushed wheelbarrows of leaves and branches, sticks and weeds out to the back yard where I built a small bonfire and got rid of it all. It was exactly what I needed: hard physical work, and lots of it.