I thought a moment. “Randy Jarvis?”
“Don’t know who else it could be. Tell you what. I’ll call the sheriff and tell him about Randy and slide in a mention of Agnes’s right-wing persuasion. What’s important isn’t the fact itself, but that she kept it a secret.”
“Thanks, Gus.”
I was opening the door when he said, “Are you going to the memorial service?”
“The what?”
“Didn’t you know? There’s a memorial service for Agnes tomorrow afternoon. I thought it was the PTA’s deal.”
“No.” I opened the door roughly. But I could guess whose idea it was.
I took care of the worst of Paoze’s clothing issues with safety pins and whip stitches. Once again, the Mom Sewing Kit saved the day. He was set to walk the five miles to Madison when I stopped him. “If you work until the end of the day, I’ll drive you home.”
“Mrs. Kennedy, you do not need to do this.”
“If you hadn’t been working here, your bike wouldn’t have been stolen. That makes it my responsibility.” He looked dubious, so I started making things up. “And I have to go to Madison tonight. I’m meeting a friend for dinner.” A little more arm-twisting, and I had him convinced. Come closing time, we companionably tallied the day’s receipts and locked the doors.
“But this is not the way to Madison.” Paoze frowned as I turned left instead of right.
“There’s a stop I need to make.”
A few minutes later, I pulled into the driveway and pushed the button to open the garage door.
“This is your house?” Paoze asked.
“For now.” As long as Richard kept up with the hefty child-support payments, the kids and I could stay. If, for whatever reason, the payments stopped coming, the house would be up for sale faster than water froze in January.
We walked into the garage, Paoze trailing behind. “Could you help me get this down?” I indicated the mountain bike on the wall, looming above a trio of bikes standing on the garage floor. Together, we wrestled it off the yellow hooks and bounced it onto the concrete.
I left Paoze holding the bike upright while I rummaged through a plastic bin of sports equipment. Down at the bottom, beneath the soccer balls and jump ropes and baseball gloves, I found a keyed bicycle lock with a key still in the slot. “Ha!” I pulled it out and handed it to Paoze. “That should do you.”
He held the lock with his arm straight out. “Mrs. Kennedy, I do not understand.”
“For you.” I waved at the lock and the bike. They were Richard’s castoffs. He’d bought new equipment last summer.
“I cannot take this.”
Paoze tried to hand me the lock, but I put my hands behind my back. “Your bike was stolen from my store, and it’s up to me to replace it.”
“That is not right.” Paoze put the lock back into the bin. “I cannot take this gift.”
“You can’t walk back and forth from Madison, and the bus schedule doesn’t fit store hours. If you don’t have a bike, you’ll have to quit, and I don’t want to lose you.”
“Mrs. Kennedy, I cannot.”
Stubborn kid. “Then think of it as a loan. If you get your bike back, you can return this.”
“A loan?” He looked at the bike. It was tricked out with more gears than anyone living five hundred miles from a mountain range needed. It also had a fancy computer that gave mileage, speed, elapsed time, and the time of day in Guam, for all I knew.
I saw him weakening, and I pressed the advantage. “A loan. If you decide you want to buy it, I can deduct something from your paychecks.”
“Deduct.” He stroked the handlebars with his index finger.
“Sure. We can agree on a price and I’ll divide it by, say, twenty-six, and subtract that amount out of every paycheck.” I watched him eye the gears. “But it’s an old bike”—all of four years old—“and it hasn’t been maintained at all the last year, so I can cut you a pretty good deal.”
A bolt of lightning cracked, and we both jumped. Automatically, I counted seconds. At four seconds a crash of thunder came, loud enough to rattle the glass in the garage window. The storm was close.
“Let’s get that bike in the car.” I made a come-along gesture and walked out into a strong wind. “The front wheel is quick release. Let me show you.”
Paoze clutched the handlebars tight. “Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy, but I can ride now. Thank you for the bicycle. I will—”
“You’ll put that bike in the car right now, is what you’ll do. Look at that sky. I wouldn’t put a dog out on a night like this.” Paoze looked at the dark clouds, masses of fast-moving black and gray. A fat drop of rain splattered on the driveway. “Hurry.” I opened the car door and popped the trunk. “You don’t want your new bike getting wet, do you?”
Rain pelted the windshield as we drove through the streets of Madison. The windshield wipers, even on high speed, weren’t keeping up with Mother Nature. I stayed off the busiest streets and tried to keep away from puddles and overflowing catch basins.
Paoze gave directions, almost shouting in order to be heard over the rain. “Please turn left. My street is there.”
I flipped on the turn signal and started down a street I’d never noticed before. The houses grew smaller and dingier. Peeling paint was ubiquitous, plywood covered random windows, and the tiny front yards were nothing but beaten earth.
“Here.” Paoze indicated a miserable-looking house. The roof was a shingle patchwork, not a single window was intact, and the spalling concrete front porch looked downright dangerous.
I didn’t want to look, yet I couldn’t look away. Paoze, the ever-helpful, always clean-cut young man, lived here? Appalled didn’t come close to what I was feeling. But what could I say? The kid was on tuition scholarship, but he had to come up with room and board. From what little he’d said about his parents, they were having a hard enough time paying their own bills, forget having anything left over for their son. If Paoze was paying rent and buying groceries solely on the paychecks I was signing, he must be eating a lot of macaroni and cheese.
He opened his door. “Thank you very much for the ride, Mrs. Kennedy. I will borrow the bicycle this time and consider purchasing.” And he was gone into the rain.
I popped open the trunk and felt the car move as he lifted out the bike. He shut the trunk lid and moved through the rain, carrying the bike’s loose front tire with one hand and hanging on to the handlebars with the other. Through the curtains of sweeping rain, I watched him reinstall the front tire, unlock the front door, and wheel the bike inside. The glimpse I got of the interior stairway was of stained carpet, warped paneling, and a bare bulb sticking out of the ceiling. Without even knowing, I could smell the mold, the cigarettes, and the greasy odor of old cooking.
The door shut. He hadn’t even waved good-bye.
I was halfway home when my cell phone rang. “Oh, hi, Beth. I didn’t expect you to answer.” The woman giggled. “I don’t know why, but I didn’t. Sometimes I have no idea why I do things.”
Pointless conversations give me headaches. I’d pulled over to the curb when the phone rang, and now I tapped the steering wheel as red taillights went wetly past. Conversations like this also brought out the worst in me.
“This is Beth Kennedy,” I said. “To whom am I speaking, please?”
“To whom?” she mimicked. “Never knew anyone to say ‘whom’ other than youm.” She giggled again. “This is Claudia. Claudia Wolff in case you know more than one Claudia.”
“Hi, Claudia. What can I do for you?”
“You can tell me you haven’t heard about the break-in at Tarver. Did you know? Someone smashed half the windows in the school. Sprayed graffiti all over and stole a bunch of computers.”