“Sold some of my dad’s stuff.” He began wrapping each speaker in bubble wrap and then fiddled with a complicated packing-tape dispenser, gave up trying to make it work, and scratched the end up from the roll of tape. “Congrats on the promotion,” he said. Doing whatever it is you do, but for more money. “What’s the new gig?”
She did something involving “brand positioning,” developed “brand voices” for her clients, doing image and messaging revamps for fashion designers. Solving for a brand’s “challenge,” delivering an “impactful” message, working on the engagement strategy and developing actionable plans to deliver agreed-upon goals.
Or some such mumbo jumbo. It was all just verbal Styrofoam anyway. Packing peanuts of meaninglessness. It was a job, something that paid the rent between modeling gigs, which weren’t all that plentiful in the Boston market. Her company’s motto was brilliantly stupid: “Simplify.” Maybe he should have paid more attention: When it came to their relationship, her “engagement strategy” had been to simplify him out of her life.
“I’ll be-” she started. Then: “Like you’re actually interested.”
“Of course I’m interested.” A car alarm went off somewhere nearby.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s a lot more responsibility and a thirty percent bump in pay, and I get to move back to Miami so I can be there to help out Mom.”
“How is Jackie doing? Is the lupus flaring up again?”
“Rick, okay, you can stop now.”
“Stop what?” He slid the hand truck’s nose plate under one bubble-swathed speaker and realized this was going to take two trips out to the car.
“Pretending you ever gave a shit.”
“Not this again,” he said with a groan.
“I’m sorry, Rick, but you were so not ready for marriage. I have no idea why you even proposed.” She’d sold the diamond engagement ring for not much money to a jeweler downtown. He thought they should have at least split the proceeds, but he was too demoralized to wage battle over it.
“Because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. Which, by the way, you were totally into until the paychecks stopped.”
“Oh, please.” She put one hand on her slender waist. She was in even better shape than when they lived together. Mourning their engagement obviously hadn’t kept her from Pilates. “You couldn’t have been less interested in my inner life. I was an… accessory. Every time we walked into a party or a fund-raiser it was so clear I was just your arm candy. You were so into the way other people were looking at me. You showed me off like I was your goddamned fire engine-red midlife-crisis Ferrari Testarossa. Eat your heart out, look who I’m tapping.”
He bristled a bit. “You just didn’t want to live in poverty, and you finally figured that out.”
“No, Rick, I figured you out. You were always clocking who’s up and who’s down. I was that tall blonde who looks great in tennis whites. You loved the idea of making other people jealous.”
“That’s not true. I loved you.”
“No, Rick. You loved that.”
He shook his head and scowled, but something acid at the back of his throat told Rick she might have a point.
8
Music was blasting from the house on Clayton Street by the time Rick pulled up in his red BMW the next morning, angry-sounding rap, so loud it was distorted. He parked behind an old Ford flatbed truck, a beater with DEMO KING TRASH-A-WAY painted on its side, and not by a professional.
The front door was wedged open. Plaster dust was everywhere. Three guys in white polypropylene coveralls and white plastic helmets, wearing respirators, were tearing off chunks of wall. Plaster chips were flying. The floors were covered with Masonite panels duct-taped together. A gray plastic trash barrel was heaped with scrolls of ancient wallpaper and scraps of lumber with nails sticking out.
A radio blared: You ain’t gotta like it ’cuz the hood gone love it.
“What the hell?” Rick said, but the guys in the white suits didn’t hear him. One of them was prying off a door casing, the nails screeching a protest as they pulled out.
I’mma kill it… I buy a morgue in a minute.
“There he is! You better put one of these on.” Jeff handed Rick a dust mask, a white cup with elastic loops. “You don’t want to breathe that shit.”
“Where’s all the furniture?”
“DeShawn and Marlon and Santiago have been working since seven-they moved stuff into the basement. Put tarps on it and all that.” He reached down and shut off the radio or CD player. The guys in the white suits turned to look. “DeShawn, Santiago, Marlon, this is Mr. Hoffman. He’s the owner.”
The three workers were huge, tatted guys, two black and one Hispanic, one bigger than the next. One of the black guys thrust out his hand. “Marlon.”
“Rick.”
The other two just nodded, regarding him suspiciously.
“Demo crew?” Rick asked Jeff.
“Construction, too. They do everything for me. I don’t use subs. Keeps the costs down.” He pointed toward one of the trash barrels. “You see the black mold on that plaster? It’s bad.” Then he pointed to a big section of the wall that was open. “The old lath-and-plaster construction. They put horsehair in the plaster, which makes it a real pain in the ass when it comes to demo. I get hives.”
“How long is this going to take?”
“Demo, a week, maybe. Most of the house gets left intact. But you’re not staying here. I, uh… I notice you didn’t spend the night here.”
“Glad I didn’t.”
“Back to your apartment across the river?”
“I stayed… with a friend. You got a minute? We need to talk.”
Jeff looked at him curiously, shrugged. “Sure.”
One of the guys, either DeShawn or Santiago, flicked the boom box back on. The angry rap blasted: Get out the way, bitch, get out the way. They resumed hurling chunks of plasterboard and scraps of timber out of the second-floor window into the Dumpster below.
Rick signaled outside and they stepped onto the front porch.
“I signed the contract,” he said, “but that wasn’t our deal.” Rick wanted it out in the open. He wanted Jeff to acknowledge it.
“These guys need to be paid,” Jeff said.
“I thought you were planning to front the money.”
“I don’t normally do that, front the money. Anyway, things have changed.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Look, I didn’t want to say anything about this, but you know, we’ve been helping out your family for years. All those years, Meghan and I kept an eye on your house. When you had those sketchy renters, we let you guys know. I used to shovel the driveway when the snowplow service didn’t show up.”
Rick blinked a few times, surprised. He knew Jeff and his medical-receptionist wife, Meghan, had been vaguely helpful, but didn’t know the specifics. He wondered if this was going where he feared it might be going.
“I appreciate all that, Jeff. A lot. You guys have been great.”
“I’m just saying. All these years, we never said anything about it. Plus the guys. They need to be paid.”
“What happened to our arrangement?”
“Like I said, things have changed. You can afford a hell of a lot more than forty thousand bucks for the job, and you know it.”
“Jeff, I don’t know how much you-”
“You really want to have this conversation?” Jeff’s eyes glittered, as if maybe he did.
Rick felt his stomach flip over. He heaved a sigh.
“I’m thinking maybe I’m owed a little… consideration,” Jeff said.