“I’m not sure.”
“You think she really just wants you to build a bed for her son?”
“I think it’s like you said. They don’t meet many deaf people.”
He didn’t know whether the director bought that, or whether he had noticed Manus hadn’t really answered the question.
“Well,” the director said after a moment spent stroking his chin, “on balance, I think it’s good she seems comfortable with you and… receptive to you. If you have the opportunity, engage her about her work. I doubt she’d open up very much to a stranger — certainly she shouldn’t — but I’d like to know if she seems troubled or conflicted. Whether she’s happy. Whether she’s considering a change of career. Anything like that. She’s doing some quite sensitive work right now, and she’s at a delicate stage in terms of her feelings about her role here. Anything you can provide might be important.”
Manus nodded, relieved that to the director it all seemed so uncomplicated.
“But please,” the director continued, “no more stunts like that thing with the baseball, all right? I’ve had six teams out scrubbing the footage from YouTube and the phones and computers of the people who uploaded it. And we had to call in a few favors from the media, too. You’re lucky you don’t have all the networks chasing you, wanting to interview the Samaritan who gave the winning ball to the deaf boy. My God, Marvin, you might have made yourself a celebrity.”
Manus knew the director was only half serious. But the comment embarrassed him regardless. He still wasn’t sure exactly why he’d given the ball to the boy. It had just happened. Though he supposed some good had come out of it. At least the director had seemed pleased.
He bought the lumber he needed at a local Home Depot, and showed up at the woman’s apartment at one in the afternoon, as she’d requested. She was wearing jeans and an oversized button-down shirt, and Manus was intensely aware of the warmth of her palm as she shook his hand in greeting, and of the shape of her body beneath her clothes. He made sure he didn’t look at that spot above the top button of the shirt, though preventing himself wasn’t easy.
The woman and the boy were barefoot, and the woman asked Manus if he wouldn’t mind taking off his boots, as well. Manus liked that they didn’t wear shoes inside, though he wasn’t sure why. It made the small apartment feel separate from the world, somehow, more a personal space for the woman and the boy, more a home.
The boy told Manus he wanted to help with everything, and they started by carrying in the lumber from the pickup. The boy seemed so eager about the whole project that Manus wondered if maybe the woman’s call had been aboveboard after all. The baseball, Manus was weirdly touched to see, occupied pride of place in the center of the dresser in the boy’s room, surrounded like a shrine by other, lesser baseball totems.
Manus explained the basic design — how the legs would each be stabilized on the short ends by a strut attached to the frame, which would leave the front end open for easy access; why a two-by-four was stronger turned on its side than it was lying flat; why they were depending more on bolts than on nails. He showed Dash how to use the basic tools of carpentry: tape measure, combination square, bubble level; marking pen and utility knife; hammer, screwdriver, crosscut saw, power drill. The boy wanted to choke up on the hammer and tap nails down in increments, but Manus showed him that no, if he held the handle low and flexed his wrist on the downswing, he could blast a nail into place with a single blow. And the handsaw — no, not a short, vibrating motion, but rather a long, end-to-end stroke, pushing down at the beginning, drawing up at the finish. The boy wanted to know where Manus had learned all this. Manus told him he’d been taught by his father, which was not entirely a lie, though for the most part the skills had come from years in the juvenile facility’s woodshop.
The job would have gone more quickly without a novice doing so much of it, but Manus didn’t mind. It was strangely satisfying to teach the boy, who was a fast and enthusiastic learner. Periodically, the woman would poke her head in to ask if they needed anything, or to bring them a snack or soda, and Manus was struck repeatedly by that way she looked at her son, the pleasure in her expression, the pride, the protectiveness.
At a little past seven, the woman asked Manus if he’d like to stay for dinner — just pizza, nothing fancy. The loft was nearly done, and Manus reflexively signed that he didn’t want to be a bother. To which Dash immediately insisted that he had to stay, it was La Pizza Banca, his favorite, and did Marvin like Italian sausage? Because La Pizza Banca had the best. Manus hesitated, thinking he hadn’t had a chance to talk to the woman alone, the way the director wanted, and that maybe it would be good to stay after all. The thought made him feel both pleased and concerned, though he wasn’t sure where to assign either emotion, and while he grappled with his conflicted feelings, the woman smiled and signed that it was no bother at all, the least they could do was provide him with a little nourishment after he’d spent most of the day teaching Dash carpentry. So Manus relented, glad and guilty at the same time.
The pizza was as good as the boy had promised, the sausage especially, the sweet and spicy taste of which stirred memories from a long time before. Or maybe it was just the environment, the feeling of being in someone’s home, welcome in someone’s home, with people who seemed comfortable with him and unafraid of him. The woman opened a bottle of wine, and though Manus didn’t drink much wine, he enjoyed it. The boy seemed especially energized by the work they’d done and carried a lot of the conversation, but it was fine talking with the woman, too, who asked a lot of questions about where Manus grew up and who had taught him carpentry and how he enjoyed living in the area. The answers were all second nature to him; he’d been living the legend so long it felt like the truth. Which was good, because the protectiveness he sensed in the woman made Manus suspect she’d already done her research on the Internet, and probably via some unauthorized searches of NSA databases, as well.
After dinner, they finished bolting together the loft and built a ladder. Manus put the boy’s mattress, which had been on the floor with no bed frame, on top of the structure, and helped them rearrange the rest of the furniture in the room. They both thanked him profusely, the boy’s delight focused primarily on having his bed so high up, the woman’s on how much space they had created in the small room. The boy attached a clip-on lamp to one of the railings so he could read in bed; Manus collected wood scraps and his tools; and the woman vacuumed up the sawdust they’d created. The boy wanted to hang towels and turn the loft into a fort, but the woman insisted no, it was a school night and already past bedtime, the boy needed to go to sleep. The fort could wait until tomorrow. The simultaneous firmness and gentleness in her manner gave Manus that strange feeling again, a recollection, a longing, another life.
They stepped outside and closed the door so the boy could get ready for bed. A moment later, he emerged wearing pajamas and headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth. The woman ruffled his hair as he passed, then signed to Manus, What do I owe you for the work?
The thought of having her pay him when he was supposed to be spying on her made him feel uneasy, though of course that was ridiculous. He had a cover and he had to live it.
I don’t know, he signed. How about two hundred dollars?
Two hundred dollars? You’ve been here all afternoon! And what about all that lumber?