HardScape Read Free Page B

famous?”
    â€œThat would be one reason to offer so much money.”
    Rose sighed elaborately, like a bored fight manager reminding a semiconscious client that his right was never his best lead. “I thought I already explained that Mr. Long pays for first-class service—Look, Abbott, I’ll tell you what. Make you a deal.”
    I waited.
    Rose winked. “If it turns out she’s screwing President Clinton or Robert Redford, don’t film ’em. If not, do the job, take the money, and give little Alison a break. She’ll thank you for the rest of her life.”
    I knew when I was beaten. So did Rose. He said, “They’ll be at the house, tonight.”
    â€œThen I’ll do it tonight.”
    â€œThat’s the spirit.”
    â€œSpirit’s got nothing to do with it. The moon’s getting full. Any brighter and they’ll spot me.”
    ***
    I walked Rose to his car and ran his money over to the bank. Then I called up John Butler and told him I was ready to insulate the barn.
    I had accepted the supper invitation from Alison’s mother with no illusions. Janet Mealy was a thin pale weary country girl of twenty-six, old beyond her years. She had borne Alison at fifteen, trading a drunken father for a drunken husband. She had worked waiting tables in a diner up on Route 4 and had had a few factory jobs in Torrington, a wolf-at-the-door existence where all could be lost with a single missed paycheck.
    For a brief interlude of hope and tranquility, her husband had landed a job driving a Newbury snowplow, only to get jailed soon after for stealing parts from the township garage. From there it was a quick tumble to welfare and sudden homelessness.
    I’d come across them last spring out on Route 7, hitchhiking, hoping to find work in a New Milford motel that I had already heard was going out of business. I was definitely not in the market for roommates. But the sight of Janet Mealy’s stringy hair turning dark in the rain, the bundle of plastic shopping bags at their feet, and her bone-white arm wrapped fearfully around Alison’s shoulder, pretty much eliminated any options in the matter. I took them home and put them in the barn, which had a crude whitewashed apartment last lived in by my great-grandfather’s stable hand, Haughton Moody.
    Janet was old New England, daughter of ten generations of hardscrabble farmers, and always addressed me as “Mr. Abbott” in deference to my family, my house on Main Street, and the social gulf that stretched between us. She expected me to call her “Mrs. Mealy” to honor her marriage and her hope that Alison’s father might one day come home sober. Alison, of course, called me “Ben” as soon as we became friends, but the quaint titles of courtesy her mother and I shared allowed “Mrs. Mealy” and “Mr. Abbott” their privacy and dignity.
    Talk around town ran the gamut nonetheless.
    Horny gossips said the barn was a front and Mrs. Mealy actually slept in my own fourposter, while busybodies with a Marxist bent claimed that she worked as a slave, cleaning the houses I tried to sell. The truth was it had been her idea to clean the empty houses I had on the market, which amounted to some light dusting. We would drive out in excruciating silence. She’d demolish spider webs while I mowed the lawns with the vague hope that some buyer would appear by magic, exclaiming, “What perfect grass! How well-dusted! We’ll buy it!”
    So I had no illusions about supper. Mrs. Mealy inclined toward prepared foods, like frozen baked potatoes. Gently as I could, I would try to demonstrate how two of them cost more than a five-pound sack of the real thing. But she was proud, or maybe the fancy packaging made her feel good. We ate frozen baked potatoes, fried pre-formed hamburger patties, and fresh spinach, which I had taught Alison to pick from my garden and rinse of sand. Dessert was