Whitechurch by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

way by. But that’s okay.
    We poke our heads into each of the other three bedrooms, similar cozy but shabbified bedrooms. Somebody else’s bedrooms. The last one, at the end of the hall, the corner room, with windows on two sides, that is the one Pauly names his bedroom.
    “Yup,” he says, bouncing on the bed. He dials.
    I leave him and go exploring down the narrow yellow-walled rear staircase. Wind up in the grease-stained yellow kitchen. I would never eat in this kitchen. I would never eat anything that had been prepared in this kitchen. I wouldn’t shake hands with anyone who had eaten in this kitchen. It looks almost as if there was a fire, and the people of this house had to flee in the middle of a meal. Two years ago. Crumbs and smears and drops of stuff—unfathomable stuff, after all this time—spill out of boxes in open cupboards, off plates at a perfectly set table, and cover the countertops, stove, and floor. The refrigerator, which I wouldn’t open on a bet, is the fat old-style Frigidaire. The stove is a gigantic iron thing with two huge ovens suitable for cooking a whole entire person, if that’s what you’re into. The chairs and table are thick solid oaky things, dark-oiled and heavy-looking. Goofy cartoony curtains hang at the windows, with cats chasing butterflies all over them. All the shelves and drawers are covered in shiny orange shelf paper. You could write your name in the thick grease that covers every bit of wall, and the entire place is a mouse-turd plantation.
    It is a great room. If I were a painter I would paint this room. Not that kind of painting the room, the kind I’m actually here to do and which I am not doing, but the other kind of painting, the kind artists do. This is a room for that. It talks , this room does.
    I am about to explore further when I hear Pauly in the room above me. He’s talking, but then not. You can hear pretty well through these walls and floors.
    I quick-step it back up the stairs and round right back into the room where I left him.
    He’s talking on the phone. He’s talking, lying on his back, rolling side to side.
    “It’s it,” he says, the pitch of his voice climbing out of his real range. “It’s it, Lilly, it’s the it. This is the score … my uncle and me … he’s going to let me in all the way once I prove myself. The whole real estate thing, we’re gonna do it together, the buying and selling and rehabbing … and I got, for you, a huge huge surprise….”
    He’s still got the sunglasses on. He’s got his free hand on his head as if he cannot believe his great fortune. He’s writhing there on the bed.
    “So call, huh, when you get this message. Wanna talk to you, Lil, wanna talk to you, sweetie….”
    I don’t know if it’s not apparent to Paul what was apparent to me, or if it simply does not matter to him. We go on. BAU, as he likes to say. Business As Usual. That’s a Pauly joke, see. We wouldn’t recognize usual if it flew up our noses.
    “I love this house,” Pauly says. “This house is gonna be my house, Oakley. How you fuckin’ like that? It’s gonna be mine , can you believe it? Then I’m gonna, after it’s mine, gonna give it to Lilly.”
    I’m listening. Wishing and hoping and all that, but mostly listening. And smiling and nodding.
    “Big house. Big enough, way,” Pauly says. “You wanna live here with us, Oak? You can, y’know. Like, rent free. What am I saying, of course ya do. Just help me here and there with the fixin’ up. You shouldn’t wanna live in that divey place above the coffee crap place anymore. You live with me. Lilly and me and you. Fuckin’ ay, Oak, huh?”
    I have to remind myself that I am supposed to be the level-headed one. That this scheme should hold nothing but terror for me. That the idea should be not only impractical but deeply unsettling.
    Yet for an instant I get none of that, and instead feel a warm shot of something through my belly.
    I wait a couple beats. I know these