Blessings Read Free Page B

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 ofthem 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.