“Oh my God,” Amy said when she could finally speak. “Is that him?”
“Seems likely.” I put the eggs down on the stove and joined her at the window, Chad appeared to have decided he was at the right place. He pulled a lightweight jacket out from behind the front seat, slipped it on, and started up the walk to the front door.
Amy bolted for her room. It was a little after nine and she’d been out of bed for an hour, though she hadn’t showered and cleaned up yet. She stopped at the stairs and pointed to me emphatically. “Do not tell him I’m up,” she stage-whispered. “Tell him I was out late last night and I’m sleeping in.” She charged up the stairs two at a time, like a little kid, her pale-blue, wrinkled sleepshirt billowing out behind her.
I went out to meet him, and whatever anxieties I had about housing the son of a gangster dissipated quickly. He had a sweet smile and the kind of good looks that charmed even an old guy like me, who had essentially been ordered to give him summer work, as well as a place to stay. Not that I was actually given an order. Ollie Lundsford, the trainer who accounted for virtually all of my farm’s business, had asked me to do him a favor. Every Friday night, I played poker with Ollie and a bunch of characters from the track, and I saw him just about every day. When he asked me to hire Chad, I didn’t think twice. I hired someone every summer anyway. Still, there was something in the tone of his voice that suggested an urgency to the request that couldn’t really be refused. “I need you to do me a favor,” he had said — and the word “need” had carried a ton of weight. Chad offered me his hand. “Mr. Deegan?”
I nodded, we shook hands, and I invited him in for coffee. In the kitchen he sat at the table and commented on the huge copy of Shakespeare’s collected plays that was propped up and open on the counter next to the stove so I could read while I was cooking. He asked me if I was reading Shakespeare; I told him I was, and he told me he had read him for the first time in his English classes. He was twenty-two and had just finished his first year of college after working odd jobs out of high school. He liked sports, especially basketball and football, both of which he played on intramural teams. By the time I called up the stairs for Amy to join us, I wasn’t worried anymore about this kid being the son of Jimmy Smoke, which is what the papers called his dad.
“Amy,” I yelled from the foot of the stairs, holding the skillet in my hand and scrambling her eggs. “Come on down here and meet our guest.”
A moment later Amy came into the kitchen wearing apple-green velvet-trimmed pajamas that looked more like elegant evening attire than something you might sleep in. Her shoulders were bare and her breasts were prominently outlined under a flimsy camisole before she covered herself — to my great relief — by buttoning a matching cardigan. Her hair was brushed, and she had make-up on.
Chad stood up when she entered the room, and they shook hands politely. “Pleasure to meet you, Amy,” he said in a tone of voice downright avuncular, which pleased me.
“Uh-oh,” Amy said, gesturing toward Chad’s eggs, toast, and orange juice. “I see my father’s started taking care of you already.” She sat next to Chad at the table. “You got to watch out for him,” she whispered, as if I couldn’t hear her. “If you let him, he’ll be tucking you into bed at night.”
“Amy thinks I’m overprotective.” I put her eggs and toast on the table in front of her, and buttered her toast and dipped it in egg before she figured out the joke and slapped my hand away.
Chad laughed. He said, “You guys are pretty funny.”
“We’re a team,” I said. “Me and Amy.”
“Oh, please,” Amy rolled her eyes. “I can’t wait to get out of here and go to college. This is like hell, living in the middle of Nowhere, USA. You know how far you have to drive to get to a decent music store? Two hours. You know—”
“Amy,” I said. “I’m sure Chad wants to hear about how miserable your life is.” I picked up Chad’s plate and gestured for him to join me. “Time to see the farm.”
Outside, the early summer weather had turned the land into an expanse of mud and grass. Everything that wasn’t green was brown and muddy — and a lot of what was green was muddy too. Things would remain that way until July, when the heat finally baked the ground dry. In the anteroom, two pairs of galoshes stood upright and waiting. I picked up my pair and directed Chad to a closet, where old galoshes and boots were piled in a corner. “I hope you don’t mind mud,” I said. “You’ll be living with it for the next month.” On the brick walk, I looked up and drew in a deep breath of fresh air and let the sun warm my face. “So,” I said, when he came up beside me, “you have a girlfriend?”
“Several,” he answered, grinning in a way that was supposed to be a between-men thing, as if he expected me to pat him on the back for being such a hotshot.
“I’ll show you the barns first,” I said.
Chad followed along quietly while I gave him the tour. He seemed troubled by the mud, which he sank into up to his calves at one point, muddying his clean denims. There were a handful of fractious racehorses on the farm, and I pointed them out to him first. At the stud barn, we stopped in front of His Majesty’s stall. HM was the worst of the lot. “This one,” I said, pointing to HM, who had come to the front of the stall to check out Chad, “stay away from him. I’d put him down if it was up to me, but Ollie insists on keeping him.”
Chad moved to the stall. “He doesn’t look mean,” he said. “He doesn’t look any different from the others.”
“Take my word for it,” I said. I moved him along.
Just out of the barn, he stopped suddenly and looked around, as if he were actually seeing the place for the first time. He looked up toward the mountain ridges, which were already lush and green, and his eyes followed the satiny folds of hollows and rises down to the green pastureland of the farm, which was divided and enclosed by white fences. Inside the farm’s corrals, horses grazed lazily.
“Not a bad place to spend your summer,” I said. “As long as you don’t mind working some.”
“I don’t mind,” he said.
At his cabin, he leaned against the door frame to pull off his boots.
I opened the door for him. “It’s hardly luxury,” I said. “But it’s cozy enough.”
He looked through the doorway at the single bed with its brass headboard, at the oval, cord rug in the center of the wood floor, and at the red-and-white-checked curtains over the windows on the back and side walls. “It’s nice,” he said. “It looks good.”
I opened an old ball-foot armoire I had dragged over from the storage barn and cleaned up a few days earlier. “This is your closet,” I said, and then I pointed to the bathroom, which was directly across from the bed. “I thought about putting a door on the bathroom for you, but then I figured, it’s only you in here, so—”
Chad nodded. “Be fine.”
“Okay, then. I’ll send Amy to get you for lunch.” I started for the door.
“Mr. Deegan,” he said, stopping me. “I didn’t mean, before, what I said about having girlfriends... I didn’t mean to sound like some sort of loverboy or something. It’s not like that.”
“That’s good,” I said, “because—” I was standing in the doorway and moved back inside the cabin and closed the door. “Because Amy’s at that age now where she’s still a kid but doesn’t want to be one anymore. It’s a dangerous age for a young girl.”