gave a perfunctory knock and walked in. “Hey, guys.”
Russell stood as she entered. Her brother kept playing, his eyes closed and his whole body swaying.
“Manny’s ready to go,” she said.
They stood together a moment and Nestor’s keyboard faded out. He walked over to his desk, picked up an envelope and handed it to Russell.
“Good to see you again, man.” He slapped him on the back. “Come on out here and see me again before you leave town. We should talk more.”
As they stepped out of the gazebo, Nestor pointed at the envelope and said, “That’s a little souvenir from dinner for you.”
Carmela and Russell caught up with Manny near the front porch, where he stood talking to a middle-aged man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Three other hatted men stood in an adjacent cluster, talking amongst themselves. Manny noticed their approach and hailed them.
“Russ, here, meet Arturo.”
Russell took a couple of steps forward to shake hands with the man, who looked him up and down and asked, “You work?”
Manny put his arm around Russell’s shoulder. “I told Art you were looking for work. He’s the lead man on a field crew. Turns out he needs a few new hands.”
Arturo again addressed Russell. “You work hard? It’s hard work. Out in the sun. Sunrise to sunset. Forty dollars a day, paid cash at the end of the week.”
“Work for a month and you’ll more than double your roll,” Manny nudged him. “Keep you moving a lot longer.”
Arturo continued explaining the terms of employment. “You start Monday. Be at the Five Star parking lot at five-thirty. Truck takes you out, brings you back. We got water. Bring a bottle to carry with you. Bring food. You’ll burn out there, so bring a hat.”
Russell nodded, not knowing how to get out of this without looking like a shirker.
“OK. You be there Monday at five-thirty.”
“All right,” said Manny as they walked to the car. “I feel better about that now.”
They drove slowly past the handsome estates on one of the town’s wide boulevards. Most dated from the nineteenth century: spacious old mansions set among towering maples and sycamores. Russell thought about the families and all the generations that had inhabited them, about stories told and lives lived.
“Hey, take him by the free house,” Carmela said.
Manny took an abrupt right.
“Free house?” Russell asked.
“Yeah, free if you can move it. You tell it, Manny.”
“I heard from some guys at work about this guy, Jim Ryan I think his name is, a businessman—”
Carmela interrupted with a little snort.
“What?” Manny asked.
She tried to explain. “Businessman. That word is funny to me.”
“What’s so funny about it?’” Manny wanted to know.
Russell gave her a knowing look and said, “Time zone.” They both giggled.
“What?” Manny said again, thoroughly perplexed. “You two talking in some kind of weird code now?”
“Some words are just funny,” Carmela said.
“Businessman,” Russell repeated, and she snickered.
Manny glanced at them and continued where he left off. “Anyway, this businessman—go ahead and laugh—he, well, owns a business, and he wants to expand to the next lot. So he buys it, but there’s this old house on it. Needs some work, nobody’s lived in it for a while, but it’s a nice old house and he really doesn’t want to tear it down. So he put out the word that anyone who’ll move it off the property can have it for free. He’s not going to expand till September, so someone’s got to take him up on it before then.”
They pulled up and idled in front of a peeling but proud Victorian house sitting in the middle of a yard gone to seed.
“How much to move it?” Russell asked.
“I heard someone say forty grand just to jack it up, then you have to move the utility lines, and haul it at, like, five miles an hour to wherever it’s going to go. It’d be pretty cool to see. Hell, I’d take it if I had a place to put it.”
Carmela liked that idea. “Oh, that’s good. You know how some people have cars up on blocks in their front yards? We could have houses up on blocks in our front yard! Lots of ‘em!”
They drove away and headed toward the center of town.
“Can you believe they wanted to tear down the train depot?” Carmela said as they passed by the stately old building.
“No,” Russell gasped. “Why did they want to do that?”
“Parking,” she responded with a disgusted tone. “This town is obsessed with parking. Tear it all down and pave it over!”
“Well,” Manny interjected, “the traffic is getting pretty bad. Sometimes you can’t find a decent spot anywhere.”
Carmela raised a finger. “But we can’t keep losing nice old houses and tearing down things like the train depot. Too much is getting bulldozed lately without too much getting said about it, if you ask me.”
“Run for office,” Manny said, as though they’d had this conversation before. “Run for mayor. I’d vote for you. I’d even work on your campaign a little.”
They cruised along Lincoln Way for a few blocks, then turned and went past the Masonic Temple and the old Rumacher Hotel.
“Now there’s something they’ve done right,” Manny said with civic pride. “Remember it used to be all worn down? Complete restoration, inside and out. It’s beautiful in that lobby, man. Go in there sometime and just sit. They’ve got these murals on the walls that tell the whole history of the region. It’s cool.”
“That was a good move,” Carmela agreed.
They continued meandering through the town. Russell took out his pocket watch, but it had stopped. He reset it and wound it.
“Got someplace to be?” Manny asked.
“Oh, no. I thought if it was earlier I’d ask to get back to your guys’ place so I could call Helen, but it’s too late to call now.” He sighed, disappointed in himself for blowing her off, even if it was inadvertent.
“Helen?” Carmela asked. “Didn’t you call her from Mom and Dad’s?”
Russell frowned. “I tried, only I didn’t
