Then suddenly he was on the bladed gravel of the snowplow turnaround and then on the pretty new asphalt of Oakpine Mountain Drive, the smoothest surface all night, his footfall a whisper, with only five or six blocks winding up into the new development of two-acre lots and the smell of scrub oak rich around him, along with the smell of rain, which the wind now delivered, having caught up with him again as he crossed the property line and turned and walked backward up the expansive well-made driveway, regarding the lights of all the lives below, and he said it. “I ran around the town.”
Upstairs in his room in the new-carpet-smelling house, Larry felt a catch in his breath or an ache in his breastbone, and he looked out his window and saw the town again, glittering, and he saw the two yellow lights at the trestle where he had run forty minutes ago and all the dark houses he had circled, and he said, “What is it?” And then he knew that he wouldn’t stay. He’d known he was going to go out of state to college, either to Wisconsin or Michigan, but now he knew he wasn’t coming back. He sat on his bed in the space that they had painted Bay Blue from the big paint book, and he looked around at the bare walls, his few pictures still leaning here and there waiting to be hung, and he felt old now knowing the first long season in his life was over. He would play football and finish at Oakpine High in the spring and then go. So funny. He loved the town and was done with it. “There’s your paradox, Mrs. Argyle,” he said, invoking his English teacher’s name, as in this year she had become audience and arbiter of his monologues, though she would never know it. “There’s your ineffable conundrum, you gorgeous old lady, you mistress of the vocabulary cabinet.”
His door opened and his mother in her robe said, “What?”
“Nothing, Mother, Nice robe. Lovely robe. You should wear it all the time,” Larry said. He felt kindly for her now with his secret. “Come in for a moment and tell me to clean up my room and get to bed, and I’ll say, ‘Oh Ma,’ and you say ‘I’m going to talk to your father about this,’ and I say ‘Good night, Ma,’ and ‘I love you, Ma,’ and you say, ‘What a strange kid.’”
His mother looked at him, and then the smile. She shook her head as if it were too full to stay still.
“Goodnight,” he said again. “You can go, so I can throw my clothes on the floor.”
“Goodnight, Larry.”
• • •
It took three weeks at the end of summer for them to complete the garage. Larry was a careful worker, fast but careful, but though he was handy and methodical, he wasn’t keen on a life of projects the way his father was. He was worried by what he was beginning to hear when he was in the store and drove the weekend delivery truck; people were expecting him to come into the store, three generations of a hardware family, and what a good thing it all was for everybody. Craig never said anything to the folks who made the remarks, and he had seen from the beginning that the store wasn’t a fit for Larry. The boy could go his own way and should. But the expectation was between them in the air as they worked; Craig could feel it unsaid.
But there was a lot of good labor in revamping the old garage: lifting and some clean drywall work, and the boy was running for football, and he took it all as a kind of muscular play and fell to the work with rapacity. It was easy after all the projects they’d done on their house. First they’d had to get Mr. Brand’s boat out of the garage, a new old boat. The boat from the story. It was thirty years old and hadn’t been used for thirty, a red and white MerCruiser that was packed in amid boxes and house goods in such a way that when Craig and Larry finally pried the old garage door open, it looked like a wall of stuff and no boat at all. They moved every box, crate, and lamp into the backyard. There was a lot of gear and half an inch of velvet dust on everything. Then they found the boat trailer’s tires flat and rotten at the folds. Craig didn’t even tell Mrs. Brand about that because it would have seemed a cruel expense for her to have to replace them. He robbed the outside tires from the worn-out horse trailer behind his place, and he and Larry, pulling like mules, inched the pretty boat and its fine fur coat of dust into the daylight for the first time in thirty years. When they’d got the bow outside, Craig stood to wipe his brow, and he saw Mr. Edgar Brand standing at the back door watching them.