WE NEVER REALLY KNEW OUR CUSTOMERS. Sometimes the driveways we were building were going onto houses that hadn’t even been sold yet. Everything was empty out there. Like a ghost town in the middle of a field, but full of mansions. Once in a while we’d get a renovation job back in the old part of the city and when we came back to the normal streets we could see all the differences. There was traffic and all the houses were different shapes and there were kids and dogs everywhere.
We were doing a job like that when the old lady who hired us recognized Robbie.
“Is that you Robert,” she said. You could tell she was uncertain, kind of like she couldn’t believe it.
All of us looked up at the same time because it was strange to have a customer talking right to us. But here was this lady and she was calling him Robert. He smiled at her.
“Yes, it’s me,” he said. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m good, I’m good,” she said. “Just coming back from the school. Getting ready for the new year. Lots of preparation to do, you know.” She had a bag full of papers.
“This is it for you, right?” she said. “You’ll be graduating this year.”
“Yes,” Robbie said. “This is it. One year left.”
In the back of my head I always knew that Robbie and most of the other kids who worked with us were still only in high school, but I never really thought about it before. It threw me a bit, seeing him talk to that lady about graduating and school sports teams and calculus classes. I looked over at JC and then at Tom. I thought about JC saying his prayers at night and how Tom and I would go home and cook ourselves a dinner and then sit there in front of the TV and watch a ball game. For me, it’d been like that for so long, I think I stopped wondering about how it could be different for anybody else. Robbie was probably seventeen years old. What did a kid like that do when he went home? You could spend all this time working with a guy and still be totally different inside. I thought about how we were all stuck, all of us put in our places. I thought about how your life could be like a brick and how it was hard to move it once you got settled into the same place for a couple years.
“So this is your summer job, then,” the lady said.
She looked at us and smiled and then she said to JC — like she was joking with him — “I hope you fellas aren’t working him too hard. Robert is one of the best. You take care of him, okay?”
“We will,” JC said quickly. He talked in that same over-keen way that people use when they’re trying to impress their teachers. “We’ll take care of him.”
She went into her house and then five minutes later she came out with a big pitcher of lemonade for all of us.
“Robert,” she said. “When you have your break, why don’t you come inside for a bite of lunch?”
He stopped for a second, but it wasn’t like he needed to think about it. Everything that came out of that boy’s mouth came out natural.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I can only come if we all go.”
She was a little surprised, but she was quick on her feet and she rolled right along with it.
“Oh of course, of course,” she said. “That’s what I meant. There’s room for all of you.”
And that’s how it happened. Robbie and me and JC and Tom ended up sitting around the kitchen table with this old lady. Eating her tuna fish sandwiches with the crusts cut off and the Oreo cookies and the big glasses of milk. JC got down on his knees and said grace beside the table. He thanked God for the food and for bringing us all together and for keeping us healthy. And the lady kept filling up our glasses and bringing more cookies. Every once in a while, Robbie and I would glance back at each other smiling our heads off. Tom just sat there, completely quiet. I think he was wishing for his little red cooler. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. Quite the scene. We were like the opposite of one big happy family.
ON THE LAST FRIDAY that Robbie worked with us, we all decided to quit early. We’d been going like mad for nearly three months, six or seven days a week, and Garlatti decided that we could take the half-day. So we knocked off right at twelve noon and we decided that we’d take Robbie out for lunch because we didn’t know when we were going to see him again. He was starting school again the next week.
“If you ever need a job, we got one for you,” Tom said. It was probably the only nice thing I ever heard him say.
“You can make good money in this business,” he said. It was like he was trying to convince himself.
“There’s lots of side jobs, lots of under-the-table stuff. Opportunities all around. You should think about it.”
Robbie said that he would.
We took him to this bar called the Silver Bullet. Tom picked the place. He said they had good lunch specials. The sign for the Silver Bullet had a cartoon girl wearing a little skimpy bikini top and she was riding on a big silver bullet. She had a cowboy hat that she waved in the air while she smiled her big smile. They didn’t charge us anything, or even check Robbie for ID, because it was still so early and that kind of business didn’t get going until much later on. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the mirrors and the strobe lighting and the rest of it. It took a while before I could see.
The only other people in there were the staff and then this other big group of guys wearing matching blue coveralls. I think they were a road crew because their clothes were all covered in black tar and they smelled like asphalt. There were probably ten of them.
“City workers,” Tom said and he snorted. “They need twenty guys to fill in a pot hole.”
We ordered some food and JC bought everybody a round of beer and a ginger ale for me. We sat there all quiet. It was like none of us even knew how to talk. There was an afternoon ball game on so we watched that and once in a while somebody would say something after a nice catch or a double play. We ate the burgers, and they drank their beers. And then Tom bought a round, and I bought a round, and even Robbie bought a round. Then it started again. The waitress kept bringing the bottles and taking them away. After a while I started to feel a little rough because I can’t sit in a bar for too long. They had all the hard stuff right out in the open. The bottles were lined up behind the counter. I watched Robbie drinking his beers and laughing with those guys and it made me feel kind of sick, like I was doing something wrong. I was just jumpy, I suppose, but I could tell it wasn’t good.
Then Tom got up to go to the john. When he walked past the guys from the road crew, I saw him lean over their table and say something to them. I knew right then that there was going to be trouble. There were more of them than us, they’d been here longer than us, and they’d gone through more rounds.
One of the guys on the other side of the table got up and he started waving and shouting at Tom, telling him to fuck off and just move along. I prayed that Tom would just shut up but I knew he couldn’t. With Tom, it was instinct. He was like a Pitbull. It didn’t matter how long he’d been nice because one day he’d just have turn on you. There was a pure meanness inside of him that he couldn’t do anything about.
I heard Tom say something about the union and about how these guys had never done a day of real work in their lives. He spit on the floor. Then two more of the men were standing up and they were trying to separate Tom from the guy who was yelling at him. They each tried to take hold of one of his arms and lead him away. Another guy looked over at us and kind of waved so that we’d come and get him. But it was too late. Tom pushed one of those guys off him and he tripped and fell into the table and the glasses spilled and bottles were breaking.