CHAPTER TWELVE

BENEATH THE SOFFIT David could see the rain falling, absent its usual rhythm. Who thinks like this? David wondered. But he couldn’t deny his senses. One could smell dryness blowing in—one could see the leaves rising to look upward like a boxer released from the corner, and one could notice in the puddles how the rings were able to spread farther apart before another falling drop destroyed them—how the puddles no longer rattled, electrified by raindrops.

But he still remained tightly pressed against the house, beneath the soffit and the rusted gutter punched with decayed holes, dripping. He gripped the flag he had stashed beneath his shirt and pulled it out to arrange it quickly. If the weather had permitted, he might have succumbed to his rebellious heart and hung the flag upside down to set his father off. Instead he clipped the top left corner to the top hook on the flagpole and secured the bottom with a tight pull of the string. He wrapped the excess tie around a cleat fastened to the side of the house.

Across the street a mailbox squeaked closed. David peered over his shoulder and saw Mr. Hopkins thumbing through his mail. To David, his body looked as though he’d surrendered to the brutality of everything—a gust of wind, a rainstorm, cracked sidewalks. But as he watched Mr. Hopkins flip defiantly through the letters, he felt something like hope swell inside him. Old age had melted off the man’s armor. But he was somehow still armed.

He liked the old man, as much as he didn’t want to cede the point to his father. To David, Hopkins lived the encyclopedias he himself read in the library. He knew even now that the moment Mr. Hopkins saw him he’d quiz him on a fact, or invite him over to watch a show his grandson had taped for him on the Phoenicians, or the history of denim. David liked that he could still sometimes surprise the old man—liked that there was an infinite number of facts to know, and nobody could live long enough to know everything.

David cleared his throat, though there was nothing in it, and it was enough to grab Mr. Hopkins’s attention. He turned and held up a trembling yellow hand in the diminished light. David waved back.

“The largest organ on the human body is the skin,” Mr. Hopkins called across the street.

“Everyone knows that,” David answered. The old man was slipping.

“Unfortunately it’s not always the thickest,” Mr. Hopkins added. “Come over here; I have something I want to show you.”

“I got to get ready for this thing I’m going to,” David said, jerking a thumb toward his house.

“It will haunt you, when you get to my age, the things you refused to witness.” He was already turning back toward his house, waving David over, knowing he’d come.

* * *

Mr. Hopkins had a basement he’d turned into a smoking lounge. The sweet smell of pipe smoke seemed to coat the wooden paneling. Standing alone on a small table stood a statue of Buddha’s head with an elongated left ear that served ginger ale out of the pierced lobe. Duck decoys lined a shelf on the far end of the room. A deck of cards collected dust on the nightstand beside Mr. Hopkins’s orange recliner. There was a bar fully stocked just behind the recliner and Mr. Hopkins led David to it.

He opened a drawer and pulled out a cigar box. Inside the box was a piece of red cloth, and when Mr. Hopkins unfolded it, David saw a round, shiny piece of metal—some type of coin he couldn’t quite identify.

“My son won this at some auction. He knew I’d fall in love with it.”

“What is it?” David asked, as Mr. Hopkins placed it into his palm.

“This is a silver half-dollar piece from 1861.”

David took the coin delicately between his thumb and forefinger and turned it over. A woman draped in a toga sat on a rock holding a flag and a shield that read, Liberty. She was looking over her shoulder. She seemed afraid. David felt like he knew her.

“A rare opportunity to do what you’re doing,” Mr. Hopkins said. “To think that may have been used to pay a shoeshine boy working on the boots of Abraham Lincoln.”

“The month of February 1865 was the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon,” David said, raising the coin to his eyes to inspect what he might have missed. The edges were serrated by age. The center, nicked with small divots. Perhaps the bite marks of distrust.

“Lincoln’s not impressive enough for you?” Mr. Hopkins asked, grinning.

David took his eyes off the coin and made a face. “I’m more interested in the shoeshine boy,” he said, dropping the coin into the red cloth Mr. Hopkins was holding out.

“A rotting piece of nonhistory, the boy.” Mr. Hopkins patted a porcelain statue of a foot waiter donned in a red overcoat, smiling. David felt a chill.

“While I have you here, would you mind moving this chair over to that corner?”

And now the true purpose of calling me over is revealed, thought David. He marveled at Mr. Hopkins’s knack for getting people to do things he needed done. David smiled to himself and gripped the backrest firmly, lifting it a foot off the ground.

“You know, it didn’t take long for me to get used to not being able to do these sorts of things anymore,” Mr. Hopkins said as he followed David across the room.

David waddled the chair into place, and as soon as Mr. Hopkins was satisfied, David dropped it.

“What I’m saying is, when I got older, what bugged me the most, what kept me up some nights, were the things I didn’t do that I regret.”

“How do you regret something you didn’t do?” David asked. The old man was trying to stuff a twenty-dollar bill into David’s pocket, but David kept covering it with his hand.

“You’ll see, David. It’s funny, but on a long enough timeline, the things you didn’t do haunt you more than the things you did.”

“So I get to spend the first half of my life regretting the stupid things I do, and then the last half envying the stupid things I wished I’d done?”

“And happiness is a thing in the corner of your eye that moves aside every time you try to look at it.”

“Not me,” David said, handing Mr. Hopkins back the twenty. “I’m going to do everything I set out to do. No regrets.”

“You’ll need money for that.” Mr. Hopkins waved the twenty in and out of the light that glared from a sconce behind him.

“Money means nothing,” David mumbled.

“Say the people who never have any,” Mr. Hopkins replied, and, for the final time, stuffed the twenty into David’s front pocket without meeting protest. “When you make the big bucks off your art, David, you’ll become aware of the things that not having money took away from you. Let’s have a drink.” He gestured to the Buddha-head ginger ale dispenser.

David shook his head. “That thing creeps me out. Like I’m drinking his ear wax.”

“See, now I’m brokenhearted over things passed. A couple years ago you could hardly control your laughter when I poured you a drink.”

David let the comment linger between them like a moment of silence for a dead friend. He looked at his shoes. Mr. Hopkins shrugged and David glanced up at him. “A fresh egg will sink in water, but a rotten one will float,” he said finally.

At the front door, David thanked Mr. Hopkins for the money and glanced up at the sky, which was now tattered with holes of sunlight. Rays draped over David’s house. It looked peaceful. As he walked down Mr. Hopkins’s driveway, he allowed himself to wonder if the remorse he felt for banging on Julia’s door would eventually turn to anger that he hadn’t done something more.