Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [46]
But Martin hadn’t always been so fortunate. Immediately following high school and up until his mother’s death a dozen years ago, he had lived in a series of apartments and rooms for rent, and these locales had posed serious problems for one who valued discretion as much as he. His last apartment, a second-floor, two-bedroom place on Willard Avenue in the neighboring town of Newington, had been extremely troublesome, especially since his client list had begun to expand during that time. Lacking an attached garage, he had already been doing all of his grocery shopping on Tuesday mornings at 3:00 a.m. at the twenty-four-hour Stop & Shop on Fenn Road, in an effort to ensure that his shopping habits wouldn’t become his neighbors’ latest topic of conversation. But after building a lengthy client list (about half its current size) and increasing his acquisitions each week, Martin had been forced to dramatically adjust his schedule to accommodate the success of his new business. After completing his morning and afternoon visits to clients, he would eat dinner, clean up, and go to bed around seven, waking up each morning at three in order to transport his acquisitions from his car into the apartment under the cover of dark. These logistical problems also prevented Martin from acquiring most refrigerated and frozen foods in the warmer months, as these acquisitions would often sit inside his car for hours before it was safe to relocate them. The move to his mother’s home, with its gloriously insulating garage, had been an enormous boon to his already thriving business.
Taking a moment to breathe in the pine-scented air that he enjoyed so much, Martin turned in a slow, 360-degree arc, admiring the space that he had created for himself and relishing the safety it afforded. Just being inside the garage had allowed him to relax a bit, to slow his breathing and return his body to a state of equilibrium. Routine and regularity were proving to be his mental salvation, beginning with the garage.
The walls were covered with orderly rows of tools used in lawn maintenance: clippers, shovels, rakes, hoes, and many of the smaller, handheld tools used for gardening. Each tool looked as if it had hardly been used, but Martin in fact used his tools quite often and was meticulous in his cleaning of each one after use. Following an afternoon of yard work, for example, a soiled shovel would be hosed down, wiped clean, and dried before being returned to its assigned location, a process that Jim considered odd but one that Martin thought made perfect sense. The process took very little time and yielded excellent results. It eliminated the opportunity for rust to form and kept dirt from entering his otherwise pristine garage. The hooks suspending the tools stretched across the walls in rows that were perfectly straight and parallel with the ground, a fact to which Martin’s laser-guided level could readily attest. When he first moved back into the home following his mother’s heart attack, one of his first chores was to remove the nails that his former stepfather had pounded willy-nilly into the wall years ago, and replace them with polished silver hooks, straightening out each row as he did.
Below the hooks stood the snowblower and lawn mower that Martin had also inherited with the house, and each of these also looked new, though they had required considerably