Early Autumn

CHAPTER 22

“You want the studs to be sixteen inches on center,” I said, “so that four-by-eight sheating and stuff will fall right. You’ll see when we get the walls up.”

We were building the wall frames on the ground. “When we get them built we’ll set them up on the platform and tie them together,” I said.

“How do you know they’ll fit right?” Paul said.

“I measured.”

“How can you be sure your measurement is right?”

“It usually is. You learn to trust it, why wouldn’t it be right?”

Paul shrugged; a gesture from the past. He began to drive a nail into one of the two-by-four studs. He held the hammer midway up the middle. His index finger was pointed along the handle toward the head. He took small strokes.

“Don’t choke up on the handle,” I said. “Hold it at the end. Don’t stick your finger out. Take a full swing.”

“I can’t hit the nail that way,” he said.

“You’ll learn. Just like you did with the speed bag. But you won’t learn if you do it that way.”

He took a full swing and missed the nail altogether.

“See,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter. Keep at it. In a while it’ll be easy. That way you let the hammer do the work.”

By midafternoon we had three walls studded in. I showed Paul how to cut a length of two-by-four the proper size for a sixteen-inch on-center spacing so he didn’t have to measure each time.

“What about windows?” he said as we started on the fourth wall.

“When we get the walls up, we’ll frame them in, and the doors.”

We were finishing up the fourth wall and getting ready to raise them when Patty Giacomin’s Audi bumped in from the road and parked beside the Bronco.

When Paul saw her he stopped and stared at the car. He was wearing a hammer holster on his belt and a nailing apron tied around his waist His bare upper body was sweaty and speckled with sawdust. There was sawdust in his hair too. As his mother got out of the car he put the hammer in its holster.

Patty Giacomin walked from her car toward us. She was awkward walking in slingback high-heeled shoes over the uncivilized ground.

“Paul,” she said. “It’s time to come home.”

Paul looked at me. There was no expression on his face.

“Hello,” she said to me. “I’ve come to take Paul home.” To Paul she said, “Boy, don’t you look grown-up with your hammer and everything.”

I said, “Things straightened out between you and your husband, are they?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we’ve worked out a good compromise, I think.”

Paul took his hammer out of the holster, turned, knelt beside the wall we were studding, and began to drive a nail into the next stud.

“Paul,” his mother said, “get your things. I want to get back. Spenser, if you’ll bill me, I’ll send you a check.”

I said, “What kind of arrangement have you worked out?”

“With Mel? Oh, I’ve agreed to let Paul stay with him for a while.”

I raised my eyebrows. She smiled. “I know, it seems like such an about-face, doesn’t it?” she said. “But a boy needs a father. If it were a daughter, well, that’s different.”

Paul hammered at the studs, holding four or five nails in his teeth, apparently concentrating entirely on the job.

“Surprising you just thought of that,” I said.

“I suppose I’ve been selfish,” she said.

I folded my arms on my chest and pursed my lips and looked at her face.

“Paul,” she said, “for heaven’s sake stop that damned hammering and get your stuff.”

Paul didn’t look up. I looked at her face some more.

“Paul.” She was impatient.

I said, “Patty. This needs some discussion.”

Her head snapped around, “Now just one minute, mister. I hired you to look out for Paul, that’s all. I don’t need to explain things to you.”

“Clever rhyme,” I said.

“Rhyme?”

“Paul and all. Cute.”

She shook her head shortly. I kept looking at her with my arms folded.

She said, “Why are you doing that?”

I said. “There’s a credibility problem here. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“You mean you don’t believe me?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You been living with Stevie Elegant?”

“I’ve been staying with Stephen, yes.”

“You running out of money to pay me?”

“I’ll pay you what I owe you. Just send me a bill.”

“But you can’t afford to keep paying me.”

“Not forever, of course not, who could?”

“Would you like to keep staying with the disco prince?”

“I don’t see why you have to talk about Stephen that way.”

“Would you?”

“I’m very fond of Stephen, and he cares for me. Yes. I’d like to share his life.”

I nodded. “You want to move in with the spiffy one on a permanent basis. But he won’t take the kid. You can’t keep paying me to baby-sit, so you’re going to ship him off to the old man.”

“It’s not the way you make it sound.”

“So in effect your ex-husband is being asked to do you a favor. Does he know that?”

“I don’t see…”

“He doesn’t, does he? He thinks you’ve just been beaten down and have given up.”

She shrugged.

“What do you suppose he’ll do when he finds out he’s doing you a favor?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s spent the last six months trying to get the kid away from you because he thought you wanted to keep him and you’ve spent the last six months trying to keep him from getting the kid because you thought he wanted him. But he doesn’t and you don’t. When he finds out that you’re glad he’s got the kid he’ll want to give him back. You’ll spend the next six months trying to give him to each other.”

“For God’s sake, Spenser, not in front of Paul.”

“Why not? You do it in front of Paul. Why shouldn’t I talk about it in front of him. Neither one of you is interested in the goddamned kid. Neither one of you wants him. And both of you are so hateful that you’ll use the kid in whatever way is available to hurt the other.”

“That is simply not true,” Patty said. Her voice sounded a little shaky. “You have no right to talk that way to me. Paul is my son and I’ll decide what’s best for him. He’s coming home with me now and he’s going to live with his father.”

Paul had stopped nailing and was kneeling, his head turned toward us, listening. I looked at him. “What do you think, kid?” I said.

He shook his head.

“You want to go?” I said.

“No.”

I looked back at Patty Giacomin.

“Kid doesn’t want to go,” I said.

“Well, he’ll just have to,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Patty said.

“No,” I said. “He’s not going. He’s staying here.”

Patty opened her mouth and closed it. A big, fuzzy, yellow-and-black bumblebee moved in a lazy circle near my head and then planed off in a big looping arch down toward the lake.

“That’s illegal,” Patty said.

I didn’t say anything.

“You can’t take a child away from its parents.”

The bee found no sustenance near the lake and buzzed back, circling around Patty Giacomin, fixing on her perfume. She shrank away from it. I batted it lightly with my open hand and it bounced in the air, staggered, stabilized, and zipped off into the trees.

“I’ll have the police come and get him.”

“We get into a court custody procedure and it will be a mess. I’ll try to prove both of you unfit,” I said. “I bet I can.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I didn’t say anything. She looked at Paul.

“Will you come?” she said.

He shook his head. She looked at me. “Don’t expect a cent of money from me,” she said. Then she turned and marched back across the uneven leaf mold, wobbling slightly on her inapt shoes, stumbling once as a heel sank into soft earth. She got into the car, started up, yanked it around, and spun the wheels on the dirt road as she drove away.

Paul said, “We only got three studs to go and the last wall is finished.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it. Then we’ll knock off for supper.”

He nodded and began to drive a tenpenny nail into a new white two-by-four. The sound of his mother’s car disappeared. Ours was the only human noise left.

When the last wall was studded we leaned it against its end of the foundation and went and got two beers and sat down on the steps of the old cabin to drink them. The clearing smelled strongly of sawdust and fresh lumber, with a quieter sense of the lake and the forest lurking behind the big smells.

Paul sipped at his beer. Some starlings hopped in the clearing near the new foundation. Two squirrels spiraled up the trunk of a tree, one chasing the other. The distance between them remained the same as if one didn’t want to get away and the other didn’t want to catch it.

“‘Ever will thou love and she be fair,’” I said.

“What?”

I shook my head. “It’s a line from Keats. Those two squirrels made me think of it.”

“What two squirrels?”

“Never mind. It’s pointless if you didn’t see the squirrels.”

I finished my beer. Paul got me another one. He didn’t get one for himself. He still sipped at his first can. The starlings found nothing but sawdust by the foundation. They flew away. Some mourning doves came and sat on the tree limb just above the speed bag. Something plopped in the lake. There was a locust hum like background music.

“What’s going to happen?” Paul said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Can they make me come back?”

“They can try.”

“Could you get in trouble?”

“I have refused to give a fifteen-year-old boy back to his mother and father. There are people who would call that kidnapping.”

“I’m almost sixteen.”

I nodded.

“I want to stay with you,” he said.

I nodded again.

“Can I?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. I got up from the steps and walked down toward the lake. The wind had died as the sun settled and the lake was nearly motionless. In the middle of it the loon made his noise again.

I gestured toward him with my beer can.

“Right on, brother,” I said to the loon.