A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [38]
“You’re pretty good at this,” Neil said. “Is this the kind of thing they teach you there?”
“I used to help my father a lot,” Gordon said quietly.
“Just the opposite of me and my dad. They never wanted me wasting my time around here. I think I was supposed to be a big-time accountant or lawyer or something, I forget. But thank God they never sold the farm!” he declared with a bitter sweep of his arm. “Where the hell would I be without it?”
Gordon kept tapping the crowbar, to drive it deeper behind the cabinet frame.
“Just so you’ll know,” Neil continued. “I haven’t said anything. I mean, about you, back then. I haven’t told anyone.”
Shoulder braced to the wall, Gordon wrenched the heavy bar back and forth. A persuader, his father used to call it. A persuader. They didn’t know. Not yet. In a way it would be a relief to get it over with.
“I mean, what’s the point? You know what I mean, they’ll just get all worked up. The girls, I mean. They’ll start thinking weird things, you know, like . . . like . . . maybe they can’t be alone back here with you or something. But then how long can you keep a secret like that? It must’ve been hell, huh, just a kid and being locked up all that time? I never could’ve done it. I would’ve checked out my first night there—broken glass, sheets, something. You ever try anything like that?”
The crowbar fell to the floor. Grunting, Gordon pulled as hard as he could.
“You must’ve thought of it, though, huh? You must’ve.” Neil’s harsh breathing scratched at the silence. “Hey, I saw you get picked up the other day. Pretty lady. You must be making up for a lot of lost time, huh? I mean, twenty-five years! Jesus Christ, what does a big, healthy guy like you do? You gotta have something more than a warm hand, right?”
The rank dust of food-fouled wood exploded into the air as the cabinet gave way.
“You probably did what you had to do, right? Well, anyway, I haven’t said anything to anybody.” Neil sighed. “I just wanted you to know that.”
It was Friday, and Gordon was on his way home from work, still hoping Jilly Cross might call. In his bag there was an angel food cake, a pint of strawberries, and a can of real whipped cream for dessert tonight. He was surprised to be looking forward to dinner at Delores’s. He was tired of his own pathetic attempts at cooking. Nothing ever came out right. Last night’s steak had been so dry and tough, he’d had to cut it into slivers to chew it.
The phone was ringing as he unlocked the door. “Hello! Hello!” he shouted into the dial tone. Reading from Jilly’s business card, he dialed the first three numbers, then hung up. It didn’t seem right, asking to see condos he would never buy. But if she called him—well, that was different.
He waited by the phone a moment more in case it rang again. When it didn’t he went down the narrow wooden stairs into the cellar. He stripped off his soiled, sweaty clothes and put them into the washing machine so they’d be clean for tomorrow. It hadn’t occurred to him he needed more clothes until June asked the other day if that blue sweatshirt and pants were all he had.
He was lathering his arms in the shower now and trying to remember the last time he had actually bought clothes in a store. Vague images rose through the steam: his elbows banging into tiny dressing-room walls as he hurried to undress before the curtain parted, then crouching from the gash of light as his mother handed in a shirt with sleeves inches short of his wrists and pants with cuffs she would tear out and then hem in her long, clumsy stitches. The first woman in her family not to do piecework in the mills, she had been proud of her ineptitude with needle and thread.
He put on the chinos and yellow shirt Dennis had gotten for him to wear home from Fortley. As he sat on the edge of the bed, tying his shoes, he could see down into Mrs. Jukas’s backyard. In the full swell of late-afternoon sun, the trees seemed even thicker with leaves than this morning and the grass darker in the deepening shadows. The only trees