“I don’t know,” she said, laying out rashers of bacon on a broiling pan. They were going to make bacon crumble to sprinkle on top of a pan of fettucine. “He was a skinny little kid, much smaller even into high school than his brother, Matt, and he was bookish, I guess, and the teachers said he had an imagination. He skipped a grade, and we didn’t know if that was good or bad.” Mrs. Brand laughed. “We knew it was good. Then he got involved with the music and the band for the year before he left, but I knew he was writing. Like you, he had notebooks.”
There were narrow pages of pasta laid out on waxed paper on the counter, and Wendy began to construct the layers in the glass pan. “It must have been hard to read some of his books, the ones about Oakpine.”
“It was only for a minute, and then I saw that it was his way of sorting it out, making a kind of sense of the terrible accident, and I could read them. I read all of them.”
“That’s amazing.”
“And now you’re talking to him about writing?”
“I am.” Wendy looked down at their huge creation. It was always like this. They made ten times more food than Jimmy would ever eat. If a dish had an extra feature or the possibility of one, they included it. Mrs. Brand’s fridge was full.
“I feel lucky about this fall, Mrs. Brand. I’ve never learned so much.”
“I’m glad he’s here too,” Jimmy’s mother said.
• • •
The garage at Mason’s house was in mean shape, great deep stains in the concrete floor, and the walls were bare splintered wood, also for some reason lathered with oil spills, the whole room dark as if burned in a fire, and the two old doors sprung on the ruined steel plate hinges. Mason retrieved the ladder and went up into the garage rafters and pulled down long sheets of aluminum siding and a dozen ruined bicycle tires and twenty greasy fan belts stretched and cracking and coils of wire nailed to the rafters and four old cardboard cases of empty cans, rusted through, and the cracked plastic windshield of a motorcycle. As the pile grew in the center of the floor, Mason got more and more committed to his plan. He knifed the windowpanes so they could be reglazed, and he tied his kerchief around his nose and mouth and used the broom to brush the walls, and then he swept up the floor using the old snow shovel as a dustpan, and he threw all the junk into the Dumpster. It was only noon. He could feel the backs of his legs burning a little from toeing that ladder; it felt good. He came out into the fall day and again took in the gigantic trees on the old street. He could hear the motor of the paint sprayer in the house. Something moved between the trees, and Mason stepped clear so he could see. It was two great lines of sandhill cranes in long V’s flying south. They were silent in the distance, as if something observed on a remote screen. There was a motion out front of the house, and the hardware van crossed onto the driveway and parked in front of the Dumpster. “Lunch!” Larry Ralston called, jumping from the driver’s seat with a white paper bag.
Mason waved at the boy to come over.
“You’re gutting the place,” Larry said.
Craig came out the back door, pulling off his paper-painting mask. “I see reinforcements are here,” he said.
“Not really,” the boy said. “You’re still on your own. I’m off to other deliveries, and then my life as a teenager. Perhaps you remember that era, then again, perhaps not.’
“Enough!” Craig said, looking into the bag and extracting a beautiful baguette. “Are there drinks?”
“As ordered,” Larry said, running back to the vehicle and returning with two huge paper cups of soda. “See you soon.”
Mason said, “Larry, bring me back a mop and charcoal lighter. Any.” And as the boy waved and departed, Mason stepped over and sat on the grass in the dappled shade, and Craig joined him. “I’m halfway inside, and I will say it is white, but not too white.”