out in the never-to-be-filched gold tray on the bedside table. Mrs. Bradford liked to undress ahead of him for efficiency and waited now atop the sheet, which he’d dutifully wash afterward. He moved upstairs glancing at the pictures hung on the walls with their happy-family poses, with mother, father, son, and daughter alike staring just off to the right and smiling, of course. But every marriage in every house Eberling had ever cleaned had its own brand of dirt, unique as scent, as ingrained as a lifetime’s cooking. Thinking this is how he would move up the stairs at Marilyn’s next week, he could already smell the cigarette smoke and taste the ash and sugar in Mrs. Bradford’s mouth, on her long, cold tongue, the remnants of cherry in her teeth, a touch of lipstick smeared on an incisor like dried blood, his secret already bubbling up, his mind returning to his foster home, the Eberling farm, where after moving between five different families he finally grew up, where his foster mother, Christine, would crawl into his bed if he cried out from a dream and hold him until he slipped off to sleep, who in the middle of the night pulled his boy’s body on top of her as if in a trance, like the dream you sometimes have that the person beside you is someone else, who pressed his pajama bottoms down with her foot, his underwear clawed between her toes, her nails scratching his thin legs, and pulled her nightgown up, still trapped, Eberling was sure, in her lovely dream, telling him “slow, slow, slow,” and who afterward took his face by the ears—Eberling fearful of her strength—and pushed it between her legs as if the head itself were separate from him, holding it there, lifting it up and down, adjusting the pitch and angle of his outstretched tongue that she sometimes pinched between her thumb and index finger, who then wiped his mouth with her hand afterward, still asleep it seemed, and whispered in his ear that he was “precious and lovely,” though she never said his name, that he could “do anything he wanted,” which he thought meant with his life, that he “shouldn’t be afraid,” that he was her “special thing.”
Then: “And put your jammies on now.”
He slept.
In the mornings she was always up before him, making him breakfast. “Dickie, come down and eat.”
It was Christine’s fault, he thought to himself now. It was the reason he was nothing, was no Dr. Sam, but he could be. All wasn’t lost. You could still be surprised by life. Marilyn had proved this to him. He would tell her all this next week and she wouldn’t be afraid. Which was the key: finding one who wasn’t afraid, who believed in him. He was sure it was her. He could talk with her, could tell her his secret, and she could tell him hers. For everybody had one, didn’t they?
There was time after finishing at the Bradfords’ for lunch, so he drove back to Huntington Park, parking where he had that morning, the Sheppard house vacant so far as he could tell from here, and he suddenly felt anxious, full of doubt. He’d removed his prizes from his coveralls, from the pail, resting them on the dash to dry out, and though shiny and glinting they seemed paltry to him. Cheap. Marilyn would look at these things and not know what to say. They’d scare her. He would. The person in your mind, Eberling thought, isn’t the person in the world. He must realize this. He’d made that mistake many times before, with boys in the home who told on him when he touched their penises in the bathroom stalls. The girls he tried to kiss who ran screaming to the nurses. Why would Marilyn have anything to do with him in the first place? Downgrade from Dr. Sam? Sleep with the guy from Dick’s Cleaning Service? She had everything to lose, her boy and all that money, the nice house with that view, and all that unhappiness she hinted at was trumped by the previous three. He’d been a fool. He wouldn’t even bring his swim trunks on Wednesday, just arrive and go about his business. Maybe not even come. Tell her he’d completely forgotten. Maybe quit working for her altogether.
It made him mad that she’d suggested any