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  When Buck’s engine started it almost always woke up Florence on the third floor, and by the time she had bathed, dressed, and settled into her chair, her thick glasses perched on the end of her nose, Dart was there with breakfast and chamomile tea. When Dart and Ivan first arrived, Florence had eaten only sardines and raisin toast, but Dart told her that simply wouldn’t do. “Not on my watch,” she said.

  Dart ate breakfast with Florence. She sat beside her, with just a small folding table between them. No one else was to come into Florence’s room while they were having breakfast.

  In fact, nobody cared. Everyone else was either sleeping or trying to sleep. And their breakfast lasted only about fifteen minutes, anyway. After that, Dart came back down to the kitchen and set out fruit, yogurt, granola, oatmeal, toast, low-fat butter, coffee, and more tea. Only on Sunday morning were there eggs, pancakes, ham, and fried potatoes, or something else.

  Amy Roebuck usually got up next. She ate breakfast in the kitchen while talking to Dart about work that day. If Kevin was too tired to get out of bed, she ate with Kevin and the nurse. But Kevin usually came to the kitchen to frown and watch Ivan’s mother out of the corner of his eyes.

  Wally and Ivan were usually up last. They sat at the kitchen counter. Wally drank black coffee and told Ivan what he’d dreamed about, if he could remember. Ivan ate cereal with jam, honey, or sugar. Meanwhile, Kevin slumped at the table next to the window, where he could pick at his fruit and yogurt and get a good view of the sink.

  At that point Dart would begin doing the dishes, but she was still usually available for conversation. And breakfast time was often good for conversation. Lately, Quiet Shoes wanted to talk about the prisoner who worked for August’s dad. She remembered him from before. He was crazy reckless, she said, and hard to get along with. She imagined being in prison had probably made him worse. “It’s best to stay away from him,” she said.

  “People catch diseases in prison,” Kevin added. “It’s second only to hospitals in spreading infections.”

  Amy said everyone deserved a second chance, but Dart disagreed. Prisoners should never be released, she said. Once they proved they couldn’t be trusted, they should be left in the clink.

  Quiet Shoes said the prisoner was out on account of August’s mom. Everyone knew it was her doing, she added, and the people in her church weren’t happy about it.

  Wally said churchgoers were never happy about anything. That’s why they were in church. He knew August’s mom and liked her. “Pastor Winnie just thinks people could be better than they are. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Look, I’m not against trying to do good,” said Dart. “But people who do good should stay out of other people’s business.”

  Quiet Shoes asked Dart if she had known Blake before he went to prison. Dart said she didn’t remember meeting him. But later, when Quiet Shoes said he had reddish hair, Dart corrected her. “No, he didn’t,” she said. “It was black.” And then she quickly added, “Or at least that’s what I heard.”

  Wally remembered that Nathaniel Bookchester, the prisoner’s father, had driven trucks for Roebuck Construction a long time ago. Then he took a different job after his wife ran off and he needed to be home more. Quiet Shoes said he wasn’t home enough, even so, but Wally replied that it was hard when you had to make a living and take care of a child on your own. He remembered that Blake had later worked in the foundry and raced motorcycles. “The kid had grit,” he said.

  “Blake’s bike was quicker than spit, and nobody ever outran him except Skeeter Skelton,” said Dart. “And nobody ever beat Skeeter Skelton. I mean, that’s what I heard.”

  Everyone agreed. Skeeter Skelton must have been born on a motorcycle. For many years he did tricks in the foundry parking lot at lunch, and the workers—even the office workers—came out and watched. He could ride standing on the tank, do wheelies all the way across the lot, tilt the bike up on the front tire and pivot around, cut figure eights in the asphalt, and get off the bike while it was still moving, then catch up to it ten or twenty yards later and get back on. After he was done, they would put dollar bills in his helmet. He once rode ten miles of railroad—a single rail between Grange and Luster. Nobody ever beat Skeeter. He had so many trophies he began giving them back to the clubs so they could use them again. Around Grange, Red Plain, and Luster, Skeeter was a legend, said Dart.

  Ivan liked breakfast time, especially when they had waffles with strawberries, syrup, and whipped cream. There was even maple syrup at the Roebucks’—the real stuff. Wally had made it several winters ago and put up jars and jars of it in the pantry. He showed Ivan the trees he bored. That’s what he called it—boring, with a big drill. Ivan could stick his fingers right into the old holes. It didn’t hurt the trees one bit, Wally said. They sealed up good as new.

  After he bored the trees, Wally put in spiels and the sap dripped out into buckets. It ran faster, he said, when there was a hard freeze the night before, followed by clear skies. That’s when the buds on the branches sucked hardest, filling the trunk and limbs with sap. He told Ivan he could sometimes collect a whole bucket from one tree in a single day. It ran out clear. Then he poured the buckets of sap into a long, flat pan sitting on concrete blocks with a fire underneath. The clear sap boiled down until it was brown and thick.

  You had to be real careful, he said, not to boil the liquid down so far that the bottom of the pan showed through. Then it would burn and you had to throw the whole batch away. So you kept adding more sap to the boiling pan. It took a long time to do it right, and a lot of firewood. He said Ivan could help him make syrup next winter.

  Wally told Ivan about a night years ago. He and his wife stayed up all night boiling out sap in the sugar bush. As morning came on, the thickening syrup was getting just about right. They added another log to the fire and more sap to the pan, then watched real close to make sure the sugar didn’t burn. That’s when a black bear walked up a path out of the woods and came right over and looked at them. Wally told Ivan that meeting a bear taught him everything he ever needed to know about humility. He bowed and backed away slowly. “Easy now, easy,” he said. But his wife wouldn’t leave. She stayed with the boiling sap. “No old bear is getting this,” she said. When the bear rose up on his back legs, she waved the long spoon she’d been stirring with in his face. Then the bear got down on all fours, growled, and went away.

  “Is that story true?” Ivan asked.

  “Yes,” he said, and went on to explain that something had happened between the bear, the spoon, and his wife—something that might never be repeated. He said life was full of things like that, but most people chose not to think that way. They liked everything standard.

  After the breakfast dishes were done, Dart usually started making some kind of soup for lunch. Unlike other foods, she said, soup filled up all the little empty cracks. Then she would get a load of laundry going and begin cleaning. And if it was a shopping day, she would set out early, so she could be back in time to finish making lunch. Ivan would go with her if he wasn’t doing something else.

  Amy Roebuck wanted the house to look just the way it did when she was a girl. All the furniture was old-fashioned, and everything had to look just so—the floors, ceiling, walls, even the lights and light switches.

  Ivan’s mother helped her and sometimes Ivan did too. It was really boring work, especially scraping and sanding some crusty old bureau or chest. There was also gardening to do, because Mrs. Roebuck wanted peonies and irises to grow along the sidewalk. Her grandmother had had peonies and irises and she wanted rows of them just the same.

  One afternoon, Amy and Dart were putting up wallpaper in the dining room. They called it “hanging” but there was nothing hung that Ivan could see. They used paste to stick it to the wall. While they were working on a long piece along the doorway, Dart slipped on the ladder and a big blob of paste fell into Amy’s hair. “Oh crap,” Dart said, and climbed down from the ladder. For some reason this got t
hem both to laughing so hard they couldn’t stop. Then they went after each other, throwing paste.

  “Get away from me!” yelled Dart.

  “Don’t you dare!” howled Amy.

  “Stop,” said Dart, giggling. “You stop.”

  “Dart, put that down right now.” Amy laughed. “Let go of me.”

  “Look what I’ve got for you, Mrs. Roebuck.”

  “If you call me Mrs. Roebuck again—okay, now you’re really going to get it.”

  They were running around, tossing paste and paper, and shoving each other and hollering like wild monkeys in the jungle. The ladder fell over and Ivan’s mother jumped over it. When Kevin came in to see what was going on, the two women were lying on the floor next to each other, laughing uncontrollably. The room looked as if a Tasmanian devil had just gone through it.

  When Dart saw Kevin she turned white, jumped up, peeled a piece of the wallpaper off the front of her shirt, and began to clean up. Amy stayed on the floor laughing, spread out as if she were floating in water.

  Then Kevin spoke up in his jittery old-person voice. “Mom, what are you doing? Mom?”

  “It’s all right, Kevin,” she replied. “You don’t need to worry.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

  “I guess we weren’t thinking,” she said. “We were just doing.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Kevin. He was talking to his mother, but looking at Dart.

  Amy climbed slowly to her feet and wiped some paste from her cheek. “Well, Kevin,” she said, “this isn’t something you need to like.” And then her laughing face disappeared into her normal expression.

  At that point Quiet Shoes came in, sighed loudly, and joined the other women in cleaning up.

  Kevin scowled at Ivan, and Ivan felt more embarrassed than he could ever remember. His mother had never done anything like that before, and from that moment on, every time he saw Amy Roebuck he remembered her laughing and lying there on the floor.

  Everyone wanted Ivan to be friends with Kevin, but it wasn’t easy. Kevin was crabby. It was as if someone had kicked the kid out of a fourteen-year-old and put a jittery old man inside. He hardly ever left home except to visit doctors, and he knew way too much about hospitals, infections, pills, and disease—at least according to Dart. Nobody that young should know that much about unpleasant things, she said.

  Kevin loved video games, and sometimes he let Ivan play them with him. Kevin was much better, but Ivan still liked to play, and sometimes they played together until Kevin got too tired and went back to bed.

  As the days continued and he felt more and more at home at the Roebucks’, Ivan found himself spending more of his free time with Wally. Being with him was often easier than being with anyone else, depending on what everyone was doing.

  Wally carried a pocket notebook in whatever drooping shirt he was wearing, and from time to time he scribbled in it. He was making a list of all the things he’d miss after he was gone—two lists, really, one short, one long. The long list included items like lightning bugs, early light, the smell of grease in the alley behind a restaurant, water running from roofs, barred owls, holding a shovel, clear skies, listening to a crowded swimming pool on a hot afternoon, leaves, wavy windows, snow piled on limbs, coffee, putting on a clean undershirt fresh from the dryer, moss on stumps, the sound of a well-hit nail, paths in the woods, women talking far away, spiderwebs with dew, the moon, and fish.

  The short list had things like Buck, Flo, and night air.

  “Night air?” asked Ivan.

  “Night air is just what it says,” replied Wally. “It’s the way it feels when you step outdoors at night.”

  “Sure,” said Ivan, “but that isn’t air, it’s the dark.”

  “Night air means dark and it also means cool. And it means anything can happen.”

  Then Ivan told Wally what August said once: “Words don’t always say what they mean.” Ivan went on to explain who August was, and Wally said he must be a good friend, to say something like that and for Ivan to remember it.

  A couple of days after they’d moved in, Florence explained to him what part of Jesus’s life each bead in a rosary stood for. Then she paused and asked, at the speed of ice melting on the North Pole, “Are you satisfied with your new accommodations, Ivan?”

  Ivan said he was, and to illustrate the point he described a few of the very worst things about their old apartment above the meat locker. He also told her how he and his mother had once lived in the Bronco for six months, after they got kicked out of an even worse apartment. At that moment his mother came in, looking as if she’d just been stabbed with a dull knife, and said that in fact they had never lived in the Bronco.

  That wasn’t true, of course, and Florence didn’t believe it either. She understood that Dart was really saying something like “I feel ugly when people know we lived in the Bronco, and I’d like to kill my son for telling you about it.”

  Florence smiled, slid her glasses down her nose until only the very tip bumped out, and tugged a red bead along the string to its place above the plastic cross. “I see.”

  Buck was almost always gone during the day, and when he was home the phone rang all the time. Some nights after dinner he had to go out again, and when he did, Ivan often asked Buck if he could go with him.

  These requests usually prompted Buck to ask Dart. “Excuse me, Ms. Workhouse,” he would say, “I have to go back to the office for a couple minutes. Would it be all right with you if Ivan came along? You have my word that we won’t be longer than an hour.”

  At first Dart said no, there was work for Ivan to do.

  The second time he asked, she was standing barefoot in the hallway, holding an armload of laundry in front of her. “Okay,” she said, then turned around and walked away. Buck watched her until she turned into the laundry room.

  “Let’s go,” he said. When he opened the front door for Ivan, a herd of moths flapped inside. Buck’s hand shot out and caught one.

  “How’d you do that?” Ivan asked, trying six times and missing.

  “Practice,” he said, and blammo he caught another one.

  “It helps to have a catcher’s mitt on the end of both arms,” Ivan said.

  “That too,” said Buck, and laughed in a way that felt good to both of them.

  On the way down the sidewalk, Ivan asked if Buck had ever known someone called July Montgomery. Buck said he had, but not very well.

  Ivan told him what August said about July Montgomery being stronger than anyone else, and asked if Buck thought that was true.

  “Strength is an odd thing,” Buck said. “The strongest men sometimes have no strength at all, and even those with hardly any strength will sometimes surprise you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Ivan.

  “It means a man might be strong one day, but not the next. So it’s hard to say who is and who isn’t. It changes.”

  “Is it true that July Montgomery was murdered in cold blood?”

  “I don’t know, Ivan. I hope not.”

  Buck’s red pickup had a step-up super cab and suicide doors. It was hard to find a place to sit inside because of all the wiring, hard hats, tool cases, chains, electrical boxes, clipboards, and other things that Ivan didn’t recognize. Buck had an even more difficult time, and scrunched up behind the wheel like a rabbit too big for his cage.

  On the road, the cab seats rode a lot higher up than in the Bronco. Ivan asked if Buck had ever thought about getting monster tires. Buck said, “No, not really.”

  When they got to the office in Grange and parked in front of the brick building, Buck climbed out and said he’d be just a couple minutes. Then he went inside and Ivan could see him through the window talking to an older woman behind the counter. They passed some papers back and forth. Buck wrote something on a couple of them, then she handed him a telephone. He talked into it and then hung up. More papers.

  Ivan went in and sat in one of the
chairs. Buck introduced him to the woman, his bookkeeper, and she smiled a tired, worn-out smile.

  “This may take a couple minutes longer than I thought,” said Buck. He tugged his billfold out of his back pocket, which remained fastened to him with a chain, and handed Ivan a five-dollar bill. It looked like Monopoly money in his hand.

  “Here, Ivan, go across the street and get some ice cream.”

  Ivan went out. There was a Deep Freeze on the corner. The sign with a grinning ice cream cone had been turned off, but it was still open. When the guy in the window asked what Ivan wanted he ordered three Chunky Shakes and slid the five dollars over the counter.

  The man with the paper hat said that wasn’t enough, and Ivan said it was for Mr. Roebuck, across the street.

  The man looked out, saw Buck’s truck, and gave Ivan three Chunky Shakes for free.

  When Ivan carried them into the office Buck looked surprised to see him for some reason. The bookkeeper didn’t. She looked tired and hungry.

  “What is this?” Buck asked, taking a bite of his.

  “A Chunky,” said Ivan.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Ice cream and chopped-up cookies.”

  Ivan handed the five dollars back to Buck and explained how the man had given them the shakes.

  “Really?” said Buck. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who works over there?” Buck asked the bookkeeper.

  “Williams from Lake Street.”

  “Oh, Bob,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  Buck looked over three papers and signed them as the bookkeeper gulped down her Chunky, scraping the bottom with the green plastic spoon like a mouse in a wall.