“So, Luke,” Maggie said, “how do you like working with Sam?”
Luke shifted uncomfortably near the edge of the blanket.
“I like it,” he said.
“Well you must be doing a good job. You’re the only person Sam ever let work with him.” Luke looked over at me as though to test the validity of this statement and I nodded. I had seen Maggie flatter him for little things, like being on time, or combing his hair. She was trying to boost his selfesteem, and draw him out, but the praise was so over-the-top that I wondered if it made him uneasy.
I leaned back on my elbows. Behind the chain link fence was a basketball court. A couple of kids were goofing around, running at the backboard and leaping in the air, trying to grab the rim.
Maggie said, “Did you know that Luke was quite a basketball player in his day?”
“He never mentioned,” I said.
“He was the best on his team, all the way through junior high.”
Luke was sitting in front of us hugging his knees to his chest. He rocked slightly from side to side. Maggie leaned in close and put her lips next to my ear. “He was a good student, too,” she whispered, “before he started getting in trouble. My parents want him to take a few classes this fall.”
I heard a noise like a giant bottle rocket and watched as the first firework shot into the air, its tail slashing a white tear through the dark sky. It reached its pinnacle and hung there before exploding in a giant burst of sparks that fell like the leaves of a weeping willow. The explosion echoed across the field and Maggie squeezed my arm where I hadn’t even noticed she was holding it. On the blanket in front of us, a little boy jumped into his mother’s arms, and somewhere a baby began to cry. Behind us two groups of boys had congregated at opposite sides of the basketball court and were firing Roman Candles at each other, screaming wildly as they dodged tiny balls of fire in an eerily miniaturized imitation of war. I looked at Luke, hoping to gauge his reaction to the fireworks, and found him trying to light a cigarette, shielding a match from the breeze with a cupped hand.
We left before the show ended, the three of us walking slowly through the smoky night. Along the road that led back to my neighborhood were some of the buildings that made up the college, low brick structures with glass entrances that glowed like blank television screens. I tried to imagine Luke walking in and out of those buildings, a book bag strapped to his back. I tried to envision him talking to girls in the quad, or throwing a football with his friends, or sitting in a classroom, taking notes as he listened to his professors tell him how the world was supposed to work. But it was hard to picture him there, not just because of what I knew about him, but because of all I didn’t know about places like that. And for some reason, that made me want it for him even more.
A week later I got the kind of job that could set me up for the whole year, one that would pay my bills with enough left over to take Maggie for a weekend at one of the fancy B&Bs that sat along the lake in Northeast. The place was a mansion on South Shore Drive, the area of town where all of Erie’s real money lived; the owner, a widow, told me over the phone that her husband would have wanted her to keep the place looking good. South Shore Drive was a half-mile long stretch of mansions set on a cliff above Presque Isle Bay. A couple hundred feet below was the Erie Yacht Club with its cream-colored lighthouse and rows of slips occupied by six-figure sailboats. Most of the homeowners were old people who rarely went out, so the traffic was mainly comprised of the landscapers who spent their days planting annuals and trimming hedges. The rest of the traffic was made up of people driving to Sunset Point, a narrowly paved pull off at the end of the street. People drove there to watch the sun bleed its colors across the sky before falling into the lake. The day after the woman answered my ad in the yellow pages, Luke and I drove over for a walk around.
The place was huge, a two-story off-white structure with Roman columns and a fountain in the center of the yard. A concrete path led to the front door, and as we approached, we saw that the columns were crumbling near the base, some shingles hung loosely from the edge of the roof, and several of the window sashes were rotted. Before I could knock, the door opened to reveal a tall, sturdy woman, probably in her seventies, wearing black trousers and a matching sweater set. She wore a silver crucifix and had the elegant, neatly managed hairstyle of a politician’s wife. She reached out to shake my hand before I had the chance to offer it.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Curtze, but please call me Peggy.” She moved past me and shook Luke’s hand.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.
“Please, call me Peggy.”
Luke hesitated and then said, “Nice to meet you, Peggy.” For a couple of weeks Luke had been straight when I’d arrived to pick him up. His eyes had begun to take on a lucid quality, as though everything that had clouded them was finally being flushed from his system. He worked faster and our trips to and from jobs were no longer silent, but filled with small talk, the kind of loose chatter I suspected people in office buildings exchanged during coffee breaks. The only negative side effect of his sobriety was his smoking. When I’d first hired him he went through a pack a day, but now, if he bought a carton of Camel Wides on Monday it was gone by Thursday, and more than once I’d had to make an emergency stop in between jobsites. The tips of his fingers turned as yellow as scorched grass and he kept an empty Dutch Boy can near wherever he was working to use as an ashtray.
“Would either of you like something to eat or drink?” Peggy asked.
“No thank you. We just finished breakfast,” I said, which wasn’t true. We’d stopped at a Country Fair gas station on our way over where all I’d bought was coffee while Luke waited in the truck and smoked. But something about Peggy, maybe the fact that she was rich or old or both, made me think she’d look down upon two men skipping breakfast, and I didn’t want that. I wanted her to like us.
Peggy led us around the house, pointing out where time and weather had done their work, showing us where the paint had begun to peel away in short curls like pencil shavings. The back of the house faced the bay and was in the worst shape of all. Most of the trim was gone and entire strips of siding had been exposed. Luke pulled a piece of paint from the corner of the house and examined it.
“It’s lead-based,” he said.
“Is that bad?” Peggy asked.
“It’s toxic,” Luke said. “They don’t even use it anymore.”
“Oh my,” Peggy said, as though Luke were a doctor who’d just diagnosed her with some fatal disease. “Will you be able to remove it?”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “We’ll just have to be careful stripping it. Do you know when the house was built?”
“We bought it in ’87, but I’m not sure when it was built. The early sixties maybe? My husband was the one who kept track of all that.” She smiled at me sheepishly as though embarrassed that she couldn’t answer my question. “Albert passed away last year.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
Luke dropped the piece of paint, and watched as the wind sent it skittering along the short grass. Near the edge of the lawn was a wooden deck with a staircase at one end that disappeared over the side of the cliff. “Have you found any dead animals around the outside of your house lately?” Luke asked.
Peggy looked shocked. “No, I mean, not that I know of, but the gardener takes care of everything outdoors.”
“‘Cause lead paint can kill them,” he said. “Children too, if they get into it.”
Peggy’s face took on a look of genuine concern. “Oh my goodness,” she said.