Whitechurch by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online

all around the house like a carpet, like a snow flurry in hell. The natural color of the wood siding, streaked with the red, looks almost better than a full coat of paint would. But there is a lot of rot.
    “Gonna take a lot of work, replacing so many clapboards,” I say to nobody in particular as I hand out the coffees.
    Various disgusted splutters of laughter come back to me from the crew.
    “Where’d you get this rube, Pauly?” Dizzy asks, and claps me fondly on the back. “I buy ’em to sell ’em, kid. I’m not interested in making the thing livable, just sellable. I don’t worry what’s under the paint.”
    I look to Pauly, who’s got that look on his face like he’s busy taking mental notes. The wrong notes, I fear.
    We haven’t done much more than look the place over, shift tools and ladders from one spot to another, and listen to Dizzy wisdom by the time the boss declares lunch break. It is obvious now we are here mainly to be his audience. Again he wants us to go with him, but this time we’re staying.
    Pauly follows his uncle to the car. “I really want to show you, Dizzy, what I got. So what I figure is I’ll be your foreman while you’re away,” Pauly says. “Making sure everything’s proceeding—being like, you, in your absence. So why don’t you gimme the phone, the keys to the house … and these shades.” He reaches out and takes the sunglasses, which are hanging on a chain around Dizzy’s neck. Dizzy gives it all up good-naturedly.
    “Okay,” he says, “go on and show me then.”
    As Dizzy roars away in the car, the crew silently goes back to business. It is like Pauly and I are not even there. We head for the front door. Pauly puts on the glasses and starts dialing the phone with his thumb, like a pro. He’s got his other arm slung like an anaconda across my shoulders.
    He refuses to remove his arm from me as he unlocks the door. So I kind of lurch forward and down, as his key hand pulls close to the cracking oak door. Forehead to the big beveled window that takes up a third of the door, I see me right up close.
    Furrowed brow and squinted eyes, the Oakley I see doesn’t know who he’s seeing.
    It’s quite a maneuver for me to twist up and get a look at Pauly, but I do it, managing not to disturb the grip he’s got on me because when they happen those grips mean something and breaking them too would sure as hell mean something.
    I’m looking up at my man Paul, in the stupid opaque shades, with the phone in his ear and the key in the door, his friend—his only friend, but you didn’t hear it from me—under his arm and a key in the door of a place he’s got no business going into. And a smile of smile of smiles slashed across his face.
    “I’m gonna make it happen, Oakley,” he says, and he is simultaneously killer serious and near giddy with joy. “Dizzy’s gonna make me his partner when he sees what I can do. This is my big chance. This house is gonna be finished when he gets back from lunch.”
    I try to rewind.
    “What, exactly, is going to be finished, Pauly?”
    He’s now paying closer attention to the phone than to me. “Why doesn’t she answer?” he asks.
    “Why don’t you answer?” I ask.
    “What?”
    “What is going to be finished by the end of lunch? The front of the house? The prep work? What?”
    Please, I’m thinking, let him give me the right answer. Please, I pray, though I do not pray unless absolutely necessary.
    The key will not move in the door. No worry. No hurry.
    “My house,” he says, smiling, confident. “That really is a good crew out there. You see those guys bustin’ tail, Oakley?”
    It may very well be, I realize, that the reason I don’t seem to be able to invest my heart in much of anything is that I fight it, and him, and myself. I am equal parts excited by the possibility and convinced, of the old futility. “Oh Pauly,” I say. “Pauly, that can’t—”
    “So while those guys are getting the outside done, and