Blessings Read Free Page A

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