CHAPTER 21

Charlie McGrath’s hands seemed to be made for tools. Despite the fact that he’d quit his job at the town dump to work in his son’s bakery more than a year ago, his hands were still callused. Sean wondered idly if he’d been born that way. George had growled at the older man when he’d arrived, but Kevin gave her the Chtch! sound, and the dog slunk back to the shade of the red maple to maintain her surveillance of the situation.

“See, ya got all this crap in the carburetor here,” Mr. McGrath told Kevin when the dismembered mower lay in pieces by the shed.

Kevin blinked and nodded. Living with women, Sean suspected he wasn’t used to hearing adults use coarse language as easily as if they were ordering lunch.

“Goddamned thing’s full of gunk.” Mr. McGrath shook his head and eyed Sean.

“Don’t look at me, I just got here.” Sean laughed.

Mr. McGrath chuckled. “Yeah, well, wherever you’re off to next, make sure you get home to maintain your gear occasionally, would ya?”

Sean made a mental note to try to convince Aunt Vivvy to go back to her lawn service.

He and Kevin watched Mr. McGrath clean the crap out of the goddamned carburetor and reassemble the machine. The older man had a gravelly voice and a range of expletives that belied his tenderness. Sean remembered how kind Mr. McGrath had been to him as his father made less and less of an effort to get home. “Door’s always open,” he would growl at Sean, “even for a young scalawag like you.”

In fact, Mr. McGrath often reminded him of his father. They were both blue-collar guys, stocky, and Irish, though the difference in their heights had to be close to a foot. Mr. McGrath didn’t speak with a brogue, but he had a strong Boston accent, the brogue’s descendant. Both men valued their toughness. It wouldn’t do to be caught getting sentimental. And yet Sean knew them both to shed a private tear over the troubles of others.

Martin Doran had lost the privacy of his tears, though. Gritting his teeth in a vain effort to control himself, he would weep in church after his wife died, head bowed, shoulders shaking. Sean remembered how embarrassed he’d felt.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Mr. McGrath told Kevin. “Hand me that wrench.” Kevin jumped up to retrieve the tool resting in the grass where the older man had tossed it. “There’s a good boy.” He grabbed the wrench with one hand and tousled Kevin’s hair with the other. Kevin appeared slightly confused by these contradictory gestures, but it didn’t keep him from hovering over Mr. McGrath’s battle-scarred hands as they performed mechanical CPR on the mower.

“And what are you doing with yourself when you’re not lollygagging around, letting others do your work for you?” Mr. McGrath demanded of Kevin.

“Uh . . .” Kevin squinted uncertainly at Sean for a moment. “Well, I’m going to Boy Scout camp in a week.”

“Boy Scout camp!” Mr. McGrath exclaimed, and it was hard to know if it was with disgust or approval until he went on to say, “I was a Boy Scout!”

“You were? Are you an Eagle?”

“Nah, I only made it to Star, and then I started gettin’ interested in girls.” He landed a beefy hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “Take my advice, don’t let some goddamned silly thing get in your path. I’m seventy-four years old, and to this day I regret not making Eagle.”

* * *

After Mr. McGrath left, Kevin was to mow the lawn. But he went into the shed first and came out wearing a set of old headphones, big clonking things the size of cinnamon buns, with the curling cord dangling down his back.

“Where’d you get those?” asked Sean.

“My dad.”

It still startled Sean sometimes to hear Kevin refer to Hugh this way. The happy-go-lucky rascal Sean had known, and the man who had brought Kevin into the world and cared for him, were almost two different people in his mind.

Kevin must have noticed Sean’s discomposure. “They’re not ­supposed to be for mowing,” he said quickly. “They went to a tape player he had. And when everything got too”—Kevin grimaced and wiggled his hands around—“he’d put them on me and play this really quiet music.”

“Oh.” Sean nodded, as if the headphones had been the question all along. “Where’s the tape player?”

“It broke and Auntie Vivvy threw it away. She said I wore it out. But I grabbed the headphones before she went to the dump—they still keep the sound out even if they’re not attached to anything.” He reached down and pulled the cord on the mower and the engine let out its introductory roar before settling into an aggravated growl. Kevin flinched at the noise. Then he let go of the brake and started across the lawn.

A wave of sadness washed over Sean as he watched the boy, who was not much bigger than the mower he was attempting to control. It surprised him, the intensity of the sorrow seeming to far outweigh the visual. He generally only felt like this when he lost a patient he’d grown particularly fond of.

Viv’s getting that lawn service if I have to pay for it myself, he thought, and went into the house to confront her.

She was in the den, papers scattered across the burled maple desk like the detritus of a parade. She looked up when Sean came in, her eyes ablaze with fury. “I can’t do it,” she said tightly. “I can’t remember what I’ve done, what’s been paid . . . any of it.”

His anger toward her, the image of the broken tape recorder and the boy with the beastlike mower, receded from the foreground of his mind. “Any of it?”

She remained silent, which was as good as shouting the answer.

“I’ll go through it with you,” he offered. “Some of it might look familiar if we go slowly.”

Her arm came out and with a sudden jerk she swatted the bills away from her, several of them cascading to the floor. He’d never seen her do anything so childish.

Loss of impulse control, he thought. Sudden outbursts. Instinctively he put a hand on her shoulder, as he’d done so many times with melting-down patients. It said, You are not alone and You are not allowed to go ballistic in one efficient gesture.

He half expected her to shrug away his touch with a sharp, imperious comment. That was the Vivian Preston he knew. Instead she put her hands to her face and wept. The only thing that had ever worried Sean more was seeing his father do the same thing.

Holy shit, he thought. We are screwed.