2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

10:30 A.M

The first thing Ray asks when he answers the phone is whether the roof he installed in 1985 is intact. When Lorca assures him it is, Ray delivers a sermon on The Importance of a Sturdy Roof. “… The plumbing will rot, the floors will join them, but I used the best materials money could buy on that roof.” Lorca listens, sitting amid the wreckage of Gus’s model plane. Flaps, wheels, the fuselage, emergency doors. Ray runs a construction company in Reading that employs wanderers and harmless crooks. “I loved your father a lot. Jackie?” Ray interrupts himself. “How much trouble are you in?”

“Am I that obvious?” Lorca says.

Lorca hears laughing, then the unmistakable sound of nose spray. “Only one reason to call Reading.”

Lorca tells him about the citation and asks for the money.

“Can’t do it, buddy,” Ray says. “They slaughtered me.”

Blood evacuates Lorca’s ears and cheeks. He doesn’t know who “they” are. They could be the government, the union, the clattering aunts on Ray’s wife’s side who take dazed, hospitalizing falls twice a year.

“I always thought it’d be Max who’d run the club into the ground,” Ray says. “Always disappearing. Showing up with this girl or that.”

“That would have been what they call a safe bet,” Lorca says.

“At least you don’t have to spray a boatload of chemicals up your nose every second,” Ray says. “Be thankful for your health. And Alex and Louisa. You still smoking?”

Lorca says he is.

“Maybe quit. Do you pray?”

“I don’t,” Lorca says.

“Maybe start.” More coughing. This time Ray is laughing. “Why did the cop come today?” he says. “As opposed to last week, or never?”

Lorca rolls a plane wheel over the table. “Last night,” he says. “We set fire to Gus’s drum set and someone called the cops.”

The purgatory of his uncle’s silence follows. “Why would you do something like set fire to a drum set?”

Lorca wants to bring his fist down in the middle of the table and send the plane’s pieces hurtling into the dirty walls. The tail is separate from the body. The cockpit arranged at an awkward angle to dry. Lorca has asked Gus several times to get rid of the plane. He gets nervous around delicate things.

“Louisa left,” Lorca says. “I wanted to see something”—he rests his forehead against the hard wood of the table—“bright.”