Still, he’d never, ever woken up entirely sure where he was. Joe and Debbie’s trailer, where he’d slept on the pullout couch in the living room, beer bottles and played-out butts on the end tables on either side of his pillow, half of them smeared red-black from Debbie’s lipstick. The county jail, top bunk, with the sprayed concrete ceiling only a foot from his face and the sounds of people hawking and snoring and farting in their sleep. Even his room in the back of his aunt and uncle’s house just off Front Street in Mount Mason, where the maple tree outside had grown so big that the room was dark day and night. Almost four years he’d lived in that room, after his father moved south, and four years he’d woken befuddled and adrift. He thought that maybe he’d known where he was when he’d lived in his parents’ house, before his mother died, when he was little. But he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything except that his bed had a quilt with a cowboy on it, riding a horse that was trying to throw the cowboy off. And that his mother hung her stockings to dry over the taps in the tub. And that his father had a strange little stand-up thing in the bedroom that he hung his shirt and pants on overnight. First the pants, then the shirt. Shoes at the bottom. It wasn’t a whole lot to remember. His whole childhood seemed to have gone up in smoke with the little Cape Cod where he grew up.
Skip’s pants were lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. He tried to get two days of wearing out of a pair of pants, since he wasn’t allowed to use the washer and dryer in the big house, and there wasn’t one in the rooms over the garage. Blessings garage had bays for five cars and a small but complete machine shop in the back, but no washer and dryer. Old Mr. Blessing had had big ideas when he bought the place in 1926 and hired Mr. Foster to run it. He’d had the carpenters build an apartment over the garage, not too big but big enough for Foster to move his family in, so that the caretaker was always around to see that the stone walls stayed straight, the paths stayed mowed, the roofs stayed sound, always around to fix the leaks and the cracks that came with a house with eight bedrooms and ten baths. After that first Foster got arthritis in his hands and gave in to his wife’s nagging about being closer to town, a second Foster, the first’s middle son, took over. His name was Tom, but everyone at Blessings just called him Foster, as they had his father. “Just like a plantation,” Sunny Blessing had murmured once. That Foster liked to work on cars and his wife cooked for Mrs. Blessing, meals that were always described as good plain food, which meant meatloaf, stew, and homemade pie. The couple had had three boys, and Edwin Blessing had died happy, thinking there would always be Fosters to keep the grass trim and the paint fresh. But those three grew up and got jobs in town and later buried their parents and carted some of their stuff away and gave the rest to the Goodwill or just abandoned it in the garage apartment.
Now Skip cooked with Mrs. Foster’s pots and pans, which the sons had left behind. When he cooked, which wasn’t often. Canned soup, mostly, that he ate in front of the little television he’d put in the living room at the end of the hallway, on an old steamer trunk that actually had hotel stickers on it. If he put his soup bowl dead center, at his right hand was a big blue-and-white sticker that said “Stateroom number,” then an 18 that someone had written in in black ink.
He put on his pants and ate a doughnut that had gone hard around the edges from a box on the kitchen counter. He wanted to get outside, to trim the hedges and weed around the plants in the vegetable garden he’d started behind the barn, to cut some more of the winter’s firewood into just the right length, long enough to stretch from one brass andiron to another in the living room fireplace, or the dining room fireplace, or the library fireplace, or the fireplaces in the bedrooms. He’d discovered that nothing made him feel better than a nice neat stack of wood.
He’d had the job at Blessings for a month and he liked almost everything about it. He had the inchoate and overwhelming love of the land that a boy has when he lives in the country but in a house in town, barely two arms’ length from the houses on either side. He had the love of the land that a boy has when he rides his bike through forest and fields, past streams and lakes, goes hunting and fishing, and then returns every night to a forty-by-eighty lot on a street where you can hear the guy next door fight with his wife through your wall as clear as if he were sitting on your sofa.
Geography was destiny in Mount Mason. The kids with a little money, whose parents were teachers or contractors or accountants, lived in the neat suburbs that had grown up just outside of town after World War II. The designated dirtbags, who had transitory or seasonal jobs, plowing snow or cleaning houses, lived in one of two places: in the sagging old frame houses ranged around the center of the shabby downtown, or way out on the country roads, in trailers at the end of gravel tracks, with old cars scattered around the patches of dirt and grass like lawn ornaments, and Christmas lights that never came down. Skip had moved from one to the other, from way out to downtown, during the course of his Mount Mason boyhood. Then somehow he’d landed at Blessings, the most beautiful place in town.
He’d never had a job he’d liked before. The drive-through window at Burger King. The night-shift cleaning at the mall, mainly popcorn cemented to the floor of the multiplex with congealing soda and blots of ice cream, or tissues you didn’t even want to look at, much less touch. Laundry at the county jail, better than doing push-ups all day next to the bunks, but it was hell on the hands, cracks in your fingers that burned all the time, so that if you picked up a fry with salt on it your skin sang for an hour after.
He went down the stairs that led from the apartment down the side of the garage and out onto the driveway. There were no cars in the garage except for the old lady’s black Cadillac, ten years old with barely five thousand miles on it. But there was the riding mower, the tractor, the old red truck. “Jesus Christ,” Joe had said when he helped Skip move his four boxes of stuff in. “It looks like the antique farm show at the county fair. Except for the mower, man. That’s a nice mower.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Skip said.
“Fuck you, man. I go reminding you of your mistakes?”
“Don’t go talking around town, either,” Skip had said. He thought about how his uncle always said there were two types of people, leaders and followers. Joe had always been a follower, from the time he started following Chris around in first grade. Chris had called him Snotty then because of Joe’s allergies. Joe still sniffed all the time, and he still told Chris anything he thought would pique his interest. Of the four of them who had been hanging out together since they were kids, Chris was the one who qualified as a leader, Skip knew that for certain and for always.
“How much you getting paid for this job?” Joe said. “Jesus, you stepped in shit with this one.”
“It’s about time,” Skip had said.
He hadn’t had Joe back to the place since, and he hadn’t even seen Ed, or Chris. Especially Chris. The old lady had lousy locks on the door, for all that there was a security system. It would be like meat to a dog for Chris. It was like he couldn’t help himself, even when they were little and there wasn’t a whole lot any of them wanted anyway, besides Butterfingers and Blow Pops. They’d go into the Newberry’s on Main Street for loose-leaf paper just before Labor Day, quarters from their parents rattling around in their jeans, and when they got to the bench at the bus stop Chris would unload his pockets, and there it would be, his senseless booty: a bottle of cologne, a paper of hairpins, a box of playing cards, plastic earrings, breath mints, baby aspirin.
“Drive us over to the Quik-Stop, man,” he’d said to Skip a year ago Memorial Day weekend, Joe walking behind him, and the next thing Skip knew, he was doing 364 days in county jail and grateful for the deal, because it meant he wouldn’t go to the state prison at Wissahonick. Chris had slid on that old ski mask. That’s how Skip knew, when they pulled into the lot and Chris pulled that mask out of the bag. He’d stolen the mask, too, one day when they’d been in a sporting goods store buying a mitt so they could play in
the McGuire’s Tavern summer league. “Don’t even think about driving away,” Chris had said in the lot at the Quik-Stop, with that sudden cold violence to his voice that made people step back from him. So Skip just sat outside, sweating and swearing and thinking about what a chump he was, and the surveillance camera read his license plate as plain as the lottery number at the bottom of your TV screen on Tuesday nights. But Skip didn’t give Chris up, or Joe either, even when the sheriff’s office offered him a walk. He just didn’t think it was right. It was only because he didn’t have any priors that he’d gotten a deal that kept him in county. He’d been let out in just under ten months for good behavior.
He sharpened the clippers on the whetstone, and filled the bird feeder, and watched the watery early morning light get warmer, less pastel. He washed his hands at the deep soapstone sink. Both Mrs. Fosters had done the family laundry there, hung it way back on the line hidden behind the garage while their husbands were mending the furnace or dredging the viscous end of the pond. The old lady didn’t want anyone driving up and seeing laundry flapping in the breeze. Skip took his laundry to the Wash-N-Dry in town. He washed his hands again.
“Ah, hell, let’s get it over with,” he said, the same thing, in the same tone of voice, that his uncle had said as he took off his belt when he was going to whip Skip’s butt in the basement.
“I’m washing my hands of you,” his uncle had said when Skip got busted for the Quik-Stop holdup.
Skip went around to the side of the big house, to the basement door that gave out onto the drive. “This way,” Nadine, the housekeeper, had said to him, her mouth drawn up tight when she’d had to tell him what to do, and, more important, what not to do. Don’t use the front door. Don’t use the back door. Come up through the basement. Wipe your feet on the mat. Don’t make any noise. Don’t wake up Miz Blessing. That’s how she said it, Miz, like one of those old movies and Nadine was the mammy. Or maybe it was just that weird way Nadine talked, as though she were wearing a retainer like the one Skip had worn to pull his snaggled front teeth into line, the one he’d lost and his father said there was no money to replace. Nadine’s name had been something else once, and her language something else, too, that she still talked to herself, under her breath, when she was angry, which was often. But that had been when she still lived in Korea, before she came over with their little girl to marry Mr. Foster’s nephew Craig, who got her the job at Blessings.
“First grind beans,” Nadine had said. “Not too small, not too big. Just right. Consistency of cornmeal.” The old lady must have said that to Nadine. In a million years Nadine never would have thought to say that herself: “consistency of cornmeal.” The words themselves sounded more like “con me” in Nadine’s mouth. Skip didn’t think he’d ever actually seen cornmeal. When Nadine said “consistency,” it sounded like someone whistling with a toothpick in her teeth.
He thought he must be getting the hang of it. A cupful of black beans, shiny as onyx beads, sealed in brown bags with the name of someplace in New York City stamped in black on them. The growl of the little motor in the grinder, the slow hiccuping of the old percolator behind him as he went back down the cellar stairs. He never knew what happened after he left. He never knew if Mrs. Blessing came downstairs herself as soon as she heard the cellar door close to pour a cup of coffee, or if she stayed in bed, sleeping the long satisfied sleep Skip imagined was the birthright of people who owned as much land as the whole town was built on and just let the land lie there, sleeping, too. Maybe she waited until Nadine came in at eight-thirty. Maybe Nadine brought her breakfast and coffee on a tray, and Mrs. Blessing took a sip and lifted those pale blue eyes to the sky that was the same color, the way she did when she was aggravated, and said, “Too weak” or “Too strong.” Maybe he was one bad pot of coffee away from sleeping back in Joe’s combination living room–dining room–kitchen and listening to Debbie yell “Oh, JoeJoeJoeJoe” through the particle-board wall.
He loved the goddamned job but he hated making the coffee every morning, and he couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was because he didn’t understand the point of it. He could understand cleaning the pumps in the frog ponds, or spraying the paper wasps that set up noisy housekeeping in the corner of the porch and the boathouse roofs. If he could just work like that, outside from morning until night, sweaty, sunburned, fixing the screens, mulching the plants, keeping the lawn as smooth and even and green as the felt on the pool table at McGuire’s, his life would be perfect. He’d like somebody to sleep with, too, but he wasn’t going to make any more mistakes. And a washing machine. Maybe he’d buy himself a washer, once he’d saved enough money.
The big barn cat was sitting smugly outside the basement door, a mole on the ground at its feet. The cat followed him across the circular driveway that separated the big house from the garage. At the center of the circle was a maple tree four stories high. Maybe today Skip would trim the lower branches and prune the holly that flanked the flagstone path to the apartment door, the one he never used, that came out by the side of the pond. He looked toward it and saw a cardboard box lying at the foot of the steps.
That was just the kind of thing the old lady would see from the upstairs back hallway window and give him hell about. Not give him hell directly, no, she’d tell Nadine, who would tell him, which would make him feel low, like a boy, like nobody, nothing. “Miz Blessing say …” Like he was too low for her to talk to directly. She talked to him directly only when she thought the task was too complicated to explain to Nadine, which probably made Nadine feel like nothing, too.
The cat bounded ahead, the mole dangling limply from the side of its mouth, and sniffed the corner of the box, and cried. Skip bent down to pick up the box and carried it to the tool bench in the garage. He could tell by the weight that there was something inside.
There were a couple of times in his life when he’d felt his mind slow down almost to a dead halt, when it seemed like his brain had to tell the rest of his body what was happening, slow, in words of one syllable, the way Mr. Keller had talked to them in American history when he was annoyed because too many of them had failed a test. When his father sat in the driveway, his head down on the steering wheel, just home from seeing his mother at the hospital, and Skip could see him out the window—that was one time. And when his uncle had come by to tell Skip that he was to move in with him and Aunt Betty, that his father’s trip to Florida had turned into a life in Florida—that was another. “It’s warm down here,” his father had said on the phone, as though that explained everything.
After that he’d learned to recognize the feeling, like moving underwater in the river when the current sucked you down and you had to push with your hands and kick with your feet, working with all your strength just to stay still. The time he’d broken his leg falling off his bike and seen the bone poking like a birch branch through the rent in the skin. The moment when he’d seen Chris pull on that ski mask on his way into the Quik-Stop. The day after he got out of the county jail in April and went to Shelly’s back door and saw her belly jutting out beneath the T-shirt and the half-sheepish, half-truculent look on her face. Counting out the months he’d spent in jail in his head, trying to make ten months come out somehow to less than nine, turning around and walking without saying anything, Shelly calling to him, “It’s not like we were that serious, Skipper.” Which he guessed meant that she’d been screwing around even before he went to jail.
Skip felt that feeling when he opened the cardboard box and looked inside. “A baby,” he said, as though if he spoke it he’d believe it. He was an only child, the last healthy thing his mother had managed before she faltered and faded into a life of vague physical complaints that ended with the big finale of breast cancer. He’d been one of the few kids at the high school who didn’t have a first or second cousin in his class, one of the few who wasn’t from the kind of big Mount Mason family that meant you had to be real careful about who you felt up in the basement at a party. He knew a lot mor
e about machinery than he did about babies, but even he could tell that the baby in the box was more or less newborn. Its maroon skin was streaked with a motley mask of dried blood and mucus, and its small fist pushed into its face as though it were trying to shield itself from the glare of even a half-lit garage.
“Eh-eh-eh,” it was wheezing, its tiny, ugly baked apple of a face contorted by fear or frustration or hunger or something else that Skip couldn’t understand. The baby’s body was wrapped tight in an old flannel shirt, the sleeves wound round and tied beneath the chin. Swaddling clothes, Skip thought to himself. He’d never been able to figure out exactly what that meant. Swaddling clothes. It was hot outside, and there was a sheen of sweat on the skull, crystalline drops in the pale, colorless down that covered the baby’s head. The cat licked the down with its rough tongue. “Go away,” Skip said, knocking the animal off the bench. “Get. Get.”
Skip wiped his hands on his jeans and slid them under the baby. lifting it out of the box. There was a wet spot on the cardboard where the baby’s butt had been, and another about even with its mouth. Its head wobbled as he lifted it onto his shoulder the way he’d seen people do easily and effortlessly so many times. It was a lot harder than it looked; he wasn’t sure exactly where to put his hands. The small head bounced forward, then back. The wheezing went on, then a bark of a cough.
“Oh, man,” he said as he started up the inside stairs to the apartment above the garage, the light weight somehow heavy against his shoulder. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” He didn’t know why, but halfway up he turned around and went back for the box.