 
A Key to Paradise

by

Barry Rachin

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Published by:

Barry Rachin on Smashwords

A Key to Paradise

Copyright © 2010 by Barry Rachin

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For more information about available titles or general feedback, the author may be contacted directly at idealhc1@verizon.net.

A Key to Paradise

Part I

Grace Paulson took advantage of a free period at eleven forty-five and ran across the street to the Kentucky Fried Chicken. A colorful sign in the window trumpeted: 'Today's Special: Chicken Pot Pies only $2.55!' Inside another cardboard display propped on the counter repeated the bargain. A bleary-eyed youth behind the counter took her order. "Anything to drink?"

Grace might not have recognized the former student, Kenny Kirkland, but for the telltale, strawberry birthmark on his neck. During her first teaching assignment fresh out of college, Grace suffered through an entire year with Kenny and his utterly tasteless brand of pubescent humor. That was over ten years ago. She did some mental calculations; the youth had to be in his early twenties now.

Grace remembered the incident that soured her on Kenny. It was the week before Easter, and the class was studying modern poetry. She chose a short verse by e. e. cummings.

I thank God for most this

amazing day:

for the leaping greenly

spirit of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;

and for everything which is natural,

which is infinite, which is yes.

The teacher read the poem through slowly in a lilting, singsong cadence. The class listened attentively, a couple students even leaning forward in their chairs. This was why she chose education. A poem wasn't just black on white. It was spiritually sustenance. Grace read the poem a second time, focusing on the luscious, disjointed imagery. Reaching the final stanza, that's when Kenny bushwhacked e.e. cummings.

And for everything which is natural,

which is infinite, which is...

There was no exultant, primal 'yes'. In its place, Kenny Kirkland blew a humongous fart, a flatulent outrage that turned the class upside down. And what could Grace Paulson do? Sniggering behind his sleeve, the practical jokester stole the show. When the laughter died away, Grace erased the free verse from the board—every tender syllable—and told the class to review their vocabulary until the bell rang.

"Whadayawanna drink?" Kenny repeated, running all the syllables together in a semantic salad. He didn't even recognize his middle school teacher.

"Nothing, just the pie," Grace said. The former class clown sported a goatee. He was a lot heavier now, more dissolute than morbidly obese, with a mop of curly red hair.

He rang up the order. "That'll be 4.79." Grace pointed to the sign next to his elbow. The youth scowled and punched in the correct number on the keypad. No apology. Not even a hint of embarrassment.

It was a few minutes past noon when Grace returned, and most teachers at Brandenburg Middle School were eating lunch in the staff dining room. Ed Gray, Chairman of the English Department, entered. The man was a bit of an oddity at Brandenburg. Gaunt and high-strung, he kept apart from the rest of the staff but was not unfriendly. A real bookworm.

Under his left arm was a tattered, hard-covered volume which he placed on the table as he sat down next to Grace. The binding of the book was coming unglued, the spine just barely holding the frayed, yellowed pages together. "Didn't see that on the menu," Ed remarked with a wry grin, indicating the chicken pot pie.

Grace plunged a plastic fork through the flaky golden crust and speared a wedge of chicken floating in a creamy, vegetable broth. The previous Tuesday, the KFC was sold out of chicken pot pies well before noon and she had to settle for a plate of fried chicken with a side order of lukewarm potato wedges and crumbly biscuit. Bait and switch. Even something as simple as buying lunch was becoming a royal pain in the derriere. And who could you complain to? The pudgy, white-suited colonel was long dead and no one in the store, with the exception of Kenny 'the comedian' Kirkland, looked old enough to vote.

So, let's see. Kenney's been out of school five years now. Never pursued a career. Here he is working for minimum wage at a fast food joint. How sad! How utterly...

"How is it,... the pot pie?" Ed's voice jolted her back to reality.

"Actually, it's quite good," Grace replied nibbling on a succulent carrot. She told him about the incident at the KFC.

"An innocent mistake," he said. "The clerk probably forgot that the pies were on sale today."

"Perhaps," Grace countered, "but then he wasn't the least bit concerned about ringing up the wrong price and actually seemed offended when I pointed out his mistake."

Ed shrugged and pursed his lips but had nothing more to say about the matter. Grace, on the other hand, couldn't let it rest. She had a nagging suspicion that, out of pig-headed spitefulness, the next dozen customers to order the chicken pot pie would be charged full price.

She broke off a section of the papery crust, swirled it around in the thick broth and deposited the soggy dough on her tongue. Regardless of price, the pie was awfully tasty. "Now that's an ancient artifact," Grace gestured toward the damaged book. She was teaching eighth grade English and worked with Ed on the curriculum committee during the summer.

"A collection of Pushkin's short stories," Ed replied, turning his attention to the food on his plate.

Grace wracked her brains. She had a decent grounding in Russian literature—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. She's even read some Turgenev and a smattering of Gogol but no Pushkin.

After a moment Ed raised his head and noticed Carl, the janitor's helper, staring at the clothbound object by his tray. "It's quite good," Ed said. His thin, delicate fingers danced over the torn binding.

Carl's face went blank and then the hint of a smile formed at the corners of his lips. The smile faded just as quickly as it had appeared. "I'm familiar with Pushkin."

There was an uncomfortable pause, as though some code of etiquette had been breached and no one in the dining room quite knew how to set things right. Ed Gray smeared the watery brown gravy from his meat loaf onto the mash potatoes with the flat side of his knife. "You're familiar with Pushkin?" He repeated the man's words without bothering to look up."

"The father of modern Russian writing."

Tapping his fingers in rhythmic staccato a second time, the Chairman of the English Department opened the front cover of the book and began turning pages at random. His forehead furrowed and lips tightened in a thin, bloodless line. "But that's not possible," Ed countered in a slightly petulant tone. "Pushkin wrote in the early eighteen hundreds. There was nothing modern about his prose. Perhaps you have him confused with someone else."

Carl glanced up at a florescent light that had been flickering erratically then resetting itself throughout the meal. The corners of the bulb had turned a sickly bluish-orange; there was no more life left in the mottled tube. "Pushkin broke with the romantic tradition. Everything changed after that."

Dead silence. Those teachers who, for the sake of propriety, had averted their eyes, now stared intently at the janitor in the blue coveralls. Ed Gray blanched; he had the look of a man free falling through space. No one spoke for the remainder of the meal.

Grace finished her chicken pot pie, sopping up the last remaining peas and carrots with a piece of crust. She glanced curiously at the janitor's helper. How long had Carl been employed there? She couldn't recall when the wiry man first appeared at Brandenburg Middle School. It may have been in the spring of 2004, a particularly cold year with many snow storms and an endless series of illness that thinned the classes by half on any given week. Or it might have been the following September. No one really noticed. Nor did they care.

The janitor's helper. Teachers sometimes used the term interchangeably with his name but not in a mean-spirited way. There was technically no such thing as a janitor's helper. But the man was too old, in his late thirties, to be a career-minded new recruit. He swept the floors, scraped and painted old furniture. He washed the windows and emptied the trash. He did whatever Bob Watson, the head janitor for the past fourteen years, told him to do. He did his job quietly, unobtrusively. Hardworking and dependable, you saw him and didn't see him at the same time.

A nonentity to most of the staff, Carl brought a sandwich and a piece of fruit to work in an old-fashioned lunch pail and sat in the far corner of the lunch room, most days, with the cafeteria workers and bus monitors. Lean and muscular with a perpetual scowl, he ate his food without looking up or taking part in the general conversation. Neither liked nor disliked by the rest of the staff at Brandenburg Middle School, he was the janitor's helper.

When the meal was done, Carl rose abruptly and grabbed his lunch pail. "After we set the gap on the boiler," he said over his shoulder, directing the remark at Bob Watson, "I'll change that dead bulb."

"No hurry," Bob replied with a dry grin. "Whenever you get to it."

******

Once word got out that Ed Gray, head of the English Department, had been bested, one-upped, made a fool of \- take your pick - by Carl Solomon, the teaching staff were divided in their loyalties. Those who disliked Ed and saw him as a pretentious windbag got a sadistic satisfaction out of the incident, while strangely refusing to admit that the janitor's helper could score any higher than dull normal on a Stanford-Binet.

Those who supported Ed Gray, which was most of the senior teaching staff and the head librarian, Miss Curson, felt that Ed had been duped; in all likelihood, Carl was talking off the top of his head and had never read a damn thing worthy of literary consideration.

"You know that custodian, Carl, ...the janitor's helper," Grace spoke in a casual tone, as though the information was of no great importance.

Pam Sullivan, the office manager, raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips by way of a response. "You sure are desperate for a date."

Grace winced. She told her about the incident with Ed Gray and Pam's mouth eased into a wicked grin. "Serves him right, the arrogant snot!" As a part of the office staff she had no allegiances to the head of the English Department and felt free to speak her mind. Unlocking a file cabinet, Pam fingered through a stack of manila folders. "Carl Solomon... lives over on East Ave. Whenever I call over there some old lady with a foreign accent answers the phone."

"His mother?"

Pam shrugged. The door opened. A boy with jet black hair and Hispanic features dropped off an early release form. He waited patiently while Pam checked the signature. Pam always nabbed the underage forgers. She knew where a stepfather habitually lifted the pen off the paper in the middle of a signature or crossed the t's with a downward slash. The boy sauntered off down the corridor in the direction of the entrance. A bell rang shrilly. Students spilled out into the hallways and began rushing pell-mell off to their next class. Grace ran her tongue over her lips. "How long has Carl been working at Brandenburg?"

"Damned if I know. A couple years at least." She grinned again. "Seems like we got ourselves a real mystery here."

Grace didn't like where the conversation was going. "Maybe the incident was nothing at all. A tempest in a teapot."

"A what in a who?" At the far end of the hall, Principal Skinner exited a classroom with a teacher's aide and was moving in their direction.

Grace reached for the door. "Gotta run."

******

The rest of the day went by in a blur. Several students stayed after for extra help with an essay assignment: WHAT I WOULD DO IF I WON THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE LOTTERY. One freckle-faced, floppy-eared boy, Benny Finnegan, reminded Grace in a twisted sort of way of Alfred E Newman from Mad Magazine. The public health nurse visited the Finnegan family in October after an outbreak of head lice and an older sister, Nadine, had been treated for rickets.

Benny said he would spend at least a hundred grand on Play Station 3 video games. "Yes, well let's see if we can get that down in print," Grace suggested. She tried to picture the gawky youth as a middle-aged homeowner burdened with a mortgage and family obligations, but her mind balked at the effort. What if this silly kid ended up marrying the girl of his dreams and his life unfolded a huge success? Grace's life over the past few years had spun out of control, her dreams gone up in acrid smoke.

"A comma after the dependent clause, Benny," she said gesturing to a spot on the page. The boy lifted his head. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down like an elevator circulating randomly between floors. Then he smiled, a goofy, endearing gesture. With a knot welling up in her throat, Grace smiled back.

Another bell rang. The clock on the wall registered three-thirty. Grace and her daughter would be on the road to Cape Cod by six. They had her cousin's cabin for the weekend. A minivacation in Mashpee. No matter that the weather had turned abruptly colder with frost on the early morning ground. The Cape was especially beautiful this time of year free of summer tourists and gridlock. And she definitely needed to get away.

Bob, the head Janitor, stuck his head in the door. "Pam said you were looking for me."

"I need construction paper. Two reams." Because of a tight budget and dwindling resources, art supplies were kept under lock and key in a closet off the boiler room.

"I can get that for you now," he replied.

Everybody was fond of Bob, both students and faculty alike. Short and heavy set, he lumbered about the school with a pokey, low-keyed authority. When the rear door got damaged by an errant delivery truck, he rebuilt the frame from scratch and hung the new door. During outdoor recess, Grace had watched him shim the jamb using cedar shakes, plumbing each side with a 48-inch level. When the new door was finally hung, it swung freely and closed tighter than the original. Once finished, Bob packed his tools and went back to collecting adolescent trash and cleaning heel marks.

"Here we are." Bob held the boiler room door open for her and they were both were greeted with a blast of warm air. "Need anything else?"

"Just the paper," Grace replied.

Bob removed a key from a box perched on a cluttered desk and disappeared into the supply room. Almost a foot tall, the box was egg-shaped with two, sleek drawers which followed the sloping contour of the wood. Grace stepped closer and ran a finger over the coffee colored surface, which was smooth as a freshly powdered, newborn's bottom. The box wasn't so much a container to store small objects as a work of art, a sensuous, freeform sculpture. Grace shook her head in disbelief. "Your talents are endless," she said as Bob came up behind her with the reams of paper.

"Black walnut," he remarked shyly, indicating the carcass, "with red birch handles."

Grace pulled a drawer gently open. "And this?" She gestured at the orangey wood with paisley swirls ranging from blood red to lemony yellow.

"Amboyna burl from Cambodia," Bob removed the delicate drawer and handed it to her. The inside was lined with emerald flocking. "The tricky part is gluing the amboyna directly to the walnut." He caressed the burnished wood with a stubby finger. "The surface is wet-sanded with tung oil through eight, separate grades of sand paper. It takes a week or so for the finish to properly cure. Then it's rubbed out to a high luster with rottenstone and beeswax."

The boiler suddenly fired up with a loud swoosh. Grace's nostrils tingled with the faint odor of fuel oil. "The box belongs in a museum not a boiler-room."

"That's not for me to say," the janitor replied with a mischievous grin.

Grace handed the drawer back to him. "What?"

"Carl Solomon built the box. He's the artisan." Bob Watson shook his head emphatically. "This stuff is so far out of my league..." He left the sentence unfinished. The boiler clicked off and a pump turned over making a rhythmic, whirring noise. "If you want to see more of his handiwork, Carl has another box on display at the Brandenburg Art Center through the holidays."

Grace felt the breath catch in her throat. Something inchoate rumbled deep down in her solar plexus sending waves of indefinable emotion rippling up to the surface. Bob returned the key to the delicate drawer and inserted it in the box. "And yes, despite all rumors to the contrary, he does read Russian literature."

******

If you wish to appeal this decision, please notify the Brandenburg District Court within fourteen days of receipt... Grace crumpled the letter from the district court and flung it in the trash.

The Toyota dealership had promoted her ex-husband, Stewart, to assistant manager in June. Now he cruised about in a fully-loaded Camry XLE—a twenty-five thousand dollar car with heated outside mirrors, chrome-tipped dual exhaust, a rear lip spoiler and leather-wrapped steering wheel. All this extravagance, yet the state of Massachusetts couldn't see fit to increase his child support by twenty-five, lousy bucks.

And that was only half the problem.

Grace got home from school around five-thirty. Her daughter, Angie, arrived two hours earlier. The sixteen year-old collected the mail and laid it out—sales fliers, junk mail, credit card applications, magazines and assorted bills—on the kitchen table along with the court letter perched conspicuously on top of the pile. Angie was sure to ask about the letter, and Grace would be compelled to tell her. To tell her what? Your father, the congenital philanderer who favors blustery lies over simple truths, is a skinflint. He begrudges his own flesh and blood an extra hundred bucks a month.

Grace climbed the stairs and entered her daughter's bedroom. Angie was curled up on the bed reading a paperback. On the cover of the book was a picture of a bearded Hindu poised in full lotus position. A chalkboard hung from the mystic's neck by a piece of string. "Is that required reading, or are you off on another weird adventure?"

With the breakup of her parent's marriage, Angie developed a spiritual wanderlust. There was a short flirtation with Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists. Trips to a musty reading room on Huntington Avenue and an occasional Sunday service—that lasted a sum total of three months. Later Grace found several Hari Krishna brochures wedged under her daughter's bed. They were wrapped in a furry tangle of dust bunnies. She never broached the issue.

More recently, Angie had gone off with a friend to spend the weekend at a Sufi commune in upstate New York. The teens drove the entire length of the Massachusetts Turnpike, through the scenic Berkshires crossing over the state line heading westerly toward the Catskills. Nothing came of that either. There were no metaphysical earthquakes. The girl returned from the land of the whirling dervishes with a bad case of diarrhea and craving for junk food. Angie threw the book aside. "I'm hungry. Could you make me a crazy omelet?"

In the kitchen Grace cracked a couple eggs and scrambled them briskly with a fork. She diced some sweet onion together with green pepper and warmed them in a pan until the translucent onions turned pearly. While the vegetables were cooking she laid a row of sliced pepperoni on the edge of a plate and opened a bag of cheddar cheese. Angie hadn't mentioned the letter from the court and that was good.

"Gina Grabowski accused the gym teacher of trying to look down her blouse while she was tying her sneakers."

"Really!" She added a dash of salt and pepper. When the vegetables were sufficiently caramelized, Grace slid them directly from the pan into the egg then poured the batter back into the pan. She drizzled the cheese over the egg, topping the concoction with a layer of pepperoni. When the egg began to sizzle, she added a splash of water and covered the pan, steaming the omelet. That was the trick. The bottom never burned and it came out perfect every time.

Grace could imagine a half dozen over-sexed male teachers who might (the operative word here was 'might') ogle Gina Grabowski's smallish boobs, but the gym teacher was not on the list. Kurt Smiley was a deacon at Saint Phillip's Church and taught CCD classes two nights a week. Grace lifted the lid. A cloud of sweet smelling steam floated toward the ceiling. She folded the sides of the omelet toward the middle, added another tablespoon of water then lowered the lid.

"As I recall, Gina accused a male teacher of a similar indiscretion last year." The spicy odor of the pepperoni and cheddar billowed through the kitchen. She slid the egg onto a plate, placed a dollop of sour cream on top of the omelet then rounded off the creation with a splash of mild salsa.

Angie was big boned with a fleshy nose and bronze complexion. Not pretty in the traditional sense but attractive, sensuous even, in her quirky, understated way. Grace bore little physical resemblance to her daughter. She had a reasonably good figure, but you would never know it by the way her clothes hung on her angular frame. Her hair was dark and straight. She never knew what to do with it. If she grew it long, the wispy strands hung limply. An act of desperation, she had her stylist trim it short over the summer. The page boy was suppose to make the lanky woman who turned forty on Tuesday look mod, hip, svelte, cool—not like Tinker Bell in a midlife crisis. Over the years, the body had seen a bit of wear and tear—a handful of birthing stretch marks around the lower belly and, more recently, a smattering of crow's feet about the eyes. The not-so-subtle indignities of aging. "This is wicked good!" Angie smeared more salsa on what was left of the omelet. The oils from the pepperoni bled into the egg staining it with an orange glow.

"About the book," Grace pressed.

"It's no big deal!" Angie said abruptly, showing no willingness to pursue the matter, but after a moment she added, "The swami got disillusioned with the material world and took a vow of silence."

"Language being corrosive to the spirit," Grace added.

"He communicated by scribbling brief messages on a chalk board then, after a couple years, announced that he'd put away his chalkboard and begin speaking again. But when the moment arrived, he had a change of heart, went into spiritual seclusion and never spoke another word for the remainder of his worldly existence."

Grace squirted a stream of dish detergent into the sink and let the water fill. "You're not planning..."

"Cripes," Angie exploded, "it's just some dopey book!"

Grace tapped her daughter on the wrist. "Are you packed for the trip?"

"All set." Angie rose from the table and began putting food away. They were only taking the bare necessities - a couple changes of underwear, towels, sheets and a few cosmetics. There was no one Grace had to impress on the island. She had budgeted the trip as down time - a chance to decompress, recharge her emotional battery.

"The Village Idiot got kicked off the school bus," Angie said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.

The Village Idiot was Dwight Goober, a twelfth grader who lived two streets over. He'd been in trouble with the law since elementary school when he defaced the brand new playground at Lexington Park with graffiti. Dwight, who always struggled with academics, couldn't even get the spelling of the four-letter words right. That's how the police knew it was him. Who else could be so dimwitted? And he readily admitted vandalizing the playground as though it was a badge of honor. The court put him on juvenile probation and his mother had to pay a fine. Over the years his penchant for petty crime and mayhem reached legendary proportions.

"What did he do," Grace asked.

"Punched a kid." Angie pulled on a wind breaker but thought better of it and switched to a warmer jacket. She stuffed the windbreaker in her overnight bag. "Ellen Barrows."

"Nice girl. What about Ellen?" Grace asked distractedly.

"Ellen Barrows —that's the girl Dwight clobbered.

Grace retrieved her car keys and checked the time. She hoped to reach the Cape Cod Canal before sunset. "You didn't say he hit a girl."

"You didn't ask." Angie grinned but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. "When they passed out brains, Dwight thought they meant 'trains' and said 'I'll wait and catch the next one'."

"The Village Idiot has to live in Brandenburg." Grace set the security alarm and they went out the door.

******

The drive to Cape Cod was uneventful. Few people were heading south this late in the season. The maples and oaks gradually gave way to scrub pine rooted in bleached soil. A huge hawk sat far up in a tree just outside of Fall River. As they sped past, the bird spread its massive wings and flew off to the north, on an updraft of frigid air lifting the bird high above the earth.

"Your father's stopping by to see you Tuesday," Grace said. The predatory bird had nudged her memory, a free association of sorts.

"Whatever." Angie curled up in a fetal position next to her mother with her knees jammed up against the dash. They reached the Bourne Bridge that took them across the waterway in record time. Halfway around the rotary, they picked up route 6 that meandered all the way to Hyannis, where the Kennedys lived and, still further north, to the gay and lesbian populations of Provincetown.

Grace spotted a diner up ahead. She must have traveled this route a hundred times or more and never noticed the brown, clapboard structure. A dozen cars lined the front of the building. "Hungry?"

"Not really, but there won't be any food at the cabin."

Grace pulled the Volvo off the road into the parking lot. Most of the patrons were Indian. Some wore braided hair and cowboy shirts. One man with prominent cheekbones sported a string tie fastened with a turquoise clasp. All the customers seemed to know each other. Behind them, the door opened and more smiling Indians straggled into the diner. "Mashpee," Grace spoke softly. "They've lived in this region for centuries."

These were the descendents of the legendary Indians who greeted the Pilgrims when the first settlers arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600's. The Wampanoag Tribe presently numbered about 1500 on the Cape. Each July 4th they joined with other tribes from across the country to celebrate their traditional customs, folklore and dance. Grace and her family had attended the Mashpee Wampanoag Powwow often when she was a young girl. They feasted on fried dough and clam cakes, listened to the tribal drumming and chants. The highlight of the three-day event was the fireball contest held at dusk on Saturday night where a flaming, kerosene soaked rag ball was kicked and tossed about in an attempt to score points. Soccer with a decidedly homicidal flair!

The restaurant smelled of fried clams, coleslaw and fresh-ground coffee. They found a booth near the door and the waitress, a dark-skinned woman with a braid of hair that hung down to the small of her wide back, took their order and hurried off.

"How we mistreated the Indians is a black mark on American history." Grace said. "Trail of Tears, Little Big Horn, the Seminoles in Florida - all a part of our shameful past." But only fifteen minutes later, Grace leaned forward and whispered, "Angie, didn't you order a cheeseburger with fries?"

"Sure did."

"That fellow with the cowboy hat came in ten minutes after us and he's being served a cheeseburger with fries."

"With my tossed salad and blue cheese dressing," Angie rested her chin on the edge of the table and blew out her cheeks in protest. "This stinks!"

The waitress came out of the kitchen with a spaghetti dinner, which she place in front of a man seated at the counter. The pudgy waitress freshened his coffee then began a leisurely conversation. "That fellow," Angie was furious now, "came in no more than five minutes ago. How do you figure it?"

"Trail of Tears, Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Seminoles in Florida," her mother replied. "It doesn't appear they've forgiven past indignities."

Grace's blood was beginning to percolate. An inconvenience was one thing. What if they had no intention to serve white people? She could complain, draw attention to the fact that half a dozen customers who arrived after they did were already eating and maybe—hocus pocus—the food would suddenly appear. Or maybe, out of shear vindictiveness, the cook would push their order back by another half hour. Grace wished she had a kerosene-soaked rag ball to kick toward the front of the restaurant.

The food arrived. Arranging the plates on the table, the round-faced waitress smiled. It wasn't so much a nasty smile as one of bland indifference. Cheeseburgers and fries. The fries were burnt and greasy; the burgers undercooked.

"Well, we're off to a good start," Angie muttered.

******

Back on the road they picked up route 151 heading east and entered the outskirts of Mashpee. The sun was almost down. "Bastards!" Angie spit the word out, an explosion of hatefulness. "Stinking Indians!"

Grace wasn't quite sure how she felt. Were the Indians to fault or was it just the same old same old? Another drop in the never ending pitter-patter of life's disappointments. Too many shitty experiences like the Mashpee diner cobbled together with a never ending mishmash of false starts and shattered dreams could wreck your faith in humanity. In recent months, she felt her purpose in life frittering away and that frightened her. "Those Indians made us cool our heels and the food was crap." Grace spoke without rancor. "Lesson learned. Next time we visit Mashpee we don't break bread with the Redman."

Finally they reached the causeway that connected the island where the cabin was situated. "What the heck is that?" Angie pointed to a large bushy object perched on top of a telephone pole. The pole was forty feet tall and tilted at a queer angle. A short, chirping whistle filtered down to the marshy wetlands.

"Osprey nest." Grace replied. With their white breast and belly, Ospreys were one of the largest birds of prey in North America. The wingspan alone could reach well over five feet. "Osprey feed almost exclusively on fish," Grace explained. "The birds are protected under the endangered species act. And with good reason."

A large bird suddenly appeared, soaring in from the bay and landed on top of the rickety structure. "They look like they can fend for themselves," Angie replied.

Grace shook her head. The species had gone into a steady decline since the early 1950's due to pesticide poisoning. But after the ban on DDT, the massive birds bounced back. They built their nests frequently on manmade structures like telephone poles, duck blinds and even channel markers.

Grace eased passed the pole on the thin slip of roadway and found the cabin a short distance nestled between a row of holly and slender birch trees. What little light was left quickly bled out of the sky and the New England night arrived serene and darkly beautiful. From the upstairs bedroom they looked out over a calm bay. Too far away to be seen, the island of Martha's Vineyard rose out of the Atlantic waters due south. Nantucket, the former whaling center, sat only a handful of mile off to the east.

The women quickly arranged the linen, washed up and got ready for bed. Angie shuffled into the bedroom barefoot. She kissed her mother's cheek. "I didn't mean what I said about the Indians."

Grace sighed and pulled her daughter close, rubbing the nape of her neck. "The strangest thing happened to me today." She pulled Angie down on the side of the bed next to her and told her about Carl, Pushkin and the amboyna burl box.

When she finished, Angie asked, "What else do you know about the guy?"

"Nothing."

"A regular mystery man."

Grace blinked. That was the same thing the receptionist, Pam, had said. "For the time being, yes."

She squeezed her mother's hand. "I'm tired. Goodnight."

When she was gone, Grace thought, "A thousand questions in search of a thousand and one answers." It was an old Arabic saying she had read somewhere, possibly in graduate school - the implication being that a person, no matter how sincere and earnest, can search a lifetime and still come up short. Grace listened to her daughter's steady breathing. Deep, serene and unencumbered. The sleep of a youth with little to no excess emotional baggage. As tired as she was from the drive south, Grace hovered on the edge of sleep but could not slip across the threshold. Some bit of unfinished business?

Wait. She did know something else about the enigmatic Carl Solomon. But it was really only more of the same, one more bit of ephemeral nothingness. A thousand-and-one questions in search of a thousand-and-two illusive answers.

A little more than a year ago, the teachers at Brandenburg were negotiating a new contract with the school committee, and the meetings were going poorly. In December just before the holidays, a number of staff refused to attend a parent-teacher conference. The act of defiance, which was written up in the local press, backfired and was interpreted as a slap in the community's face. Many parents who previously were sympathetic toward the teachers, felt betrayed. Between the staff who attended the conference and those who stayed away, a rift developed; best friends were no longer on talking terms, and an ugly mood settled over the school unlike anything Grace could remember.

She saw little of Carl during this time. He seldom ate his lunch in the staff dining room and was either working snow removal or doing repairs in some other wing of the building. One afternoon when the children had been sent home on early release, the janitor's helper came quietly into her classroom. He walked with the weight of his body far back on his heels - the strong, earthy gait of a man used to doing heavy, physical labor. His expression was flat, opaque. "Floor needs washing. Did you want me to come back?"

Grace looked up from the pile of papers she was correcting. His face was framed in the habitual scowl, but the tone of voice was unmistakably neutral and polite. Almost but not quite friendly. "No. That won't be necessary. I'll be out of your way before you get to the front of the room.

Stacking the chairs and desks to one side, he left the room and returned with a mop and pail of water. His eyes shrouded over, turned dull and inward as he leaned into his work. Rinsing the water after each pass, he swabbed the floor down with smooth, muscular strokes, paying special attention to the baseboards and space under the heating vents. When half the floor was washed, he dragged the dirty liquid out of the room and returned with a bucket of clean water. Moving all the furniture to the other side, he repeated the process.

"You're getting a new floor," he said leaning on the mop handle at the far end of the room. The entire length of floor between them was still quite wet. For the second time, Grace put her pencil down and looked up. The classroom floor was covered in linoleum tile, except for a smaller section toward the rear of the room that was solid oak. The wood was originally installed as a purely decorative feature - decorative and utterly impractical. Over the years, the finish had been eaten away and the damaged boards reduced to an eyesore.

"This oak," he said tapping the floor with the head of the mop, "may look a mess, but it's in reasonably good shape. This weekend I'll be sanding away the stains and dirt to the bare wood. Come Monday morning, you'll have a brand new floor." Carl rubbed his chin meditatively. "We're using a water-based sealer that dries real fast and leaves very little odor."

He lugged the filthy water back out into the hallway and disappeared. In the morning the children would be back with their dirty feet and untidy habits. Once more the scuff marks, bits of scrap paper torn haphazardly from spiral binders and other bits of educational debris would litter the floor \- the disorder and chaos of half-formed minds.

On Monday as Carl had promised, the classroom floor near the coat racks in the back of the room had a bright new look. All the scrapes, gouges and discolorations were gone. The oak had lightened to the color of golden wheat. There was an odor from the high gloss finish but it was slight and inoffensive. Even the blackened stain - India ink - near the water cooler was mysteriously erased, the wood fiber sanded flush then finally bleached back to its original color before the final, satiny film was applied.

Later in the day when the children were gone, Grace sat for the longest time staring at the new floor and wondering at the hidden allegory: the dirt and dust swept clean; the blemishes and discolorations undone; the multi-textured grain of each, thin board stripped, restored, made whole again.

A new floor. A new life.

******

The clock on the bedside table registered two a.m.. Grace's brain was shutting down. Like a ship coming untethered from a dockside mooring, her body was drifting off to sleep. Her last conscious recollection was an image of Carl's deadpan face and cryptic, oddly visceral body language which kept floating back to her with obsessive force. Then with equal insistence, another image presented itself: that of Ed Gray, the neurasthenic Chairman of the English Department. Grace imagined him dressed in blue coveralls and steel-toed work boots laboriously swinging a mop back and forth across the classroom floor. With his wire-rimmed bifocals perched on the tip of his nose and the tattered copy of Pushkin's short stories protruding from his back pocket, the middle-aged academic flailed away with the string mop, splattering water in every direction.

Where this bizarre imagery came from or what it meant, she hadn't a clue. For sure, Ed Gray was an odd duck, but he wasn't a bad person. He certainly wasn't malicious like some people.

Like Stewart.

Stewart could be hateful and cruel. When they married, he seemed so full of enthusiasm and spunk. Misdirected enthusiasm. Self-serving, opportunistic spunk. A thousand-and-two questions in search of a thousand-and-three answers.

******

In the morning they watched the harbormaster cruise up the channel from the breakwater. During the summer he would be checking permits for anyone digging clams, but this late in the season it was just a routine patrol. Locals waded out waist deep with a wire clam rake, which they scraped along the sandy bottom. When they hit a hard object, they scooped it up. Mussels, smallish clams, succulent quahogs, even spiny starfish were all fair game.

They drove back across the narrow slip of land that connected the island to the mainland. Wild lilies, yellow with speckled mouths and lavender-fringed blossoms fading toward porcelain centers, rimmed the inland grasses. High up in the telephone pole, the osprey was feeding her young. Grace pulled off the road onto the stiff marsh grass so they could get a better view. "Osprey eggs seldom hatch at the same time," Grace said. "There could be a lapse of five days between the first born and the last chicks.

The women craned their heads far back but all they could see was the huge basket-shaped nest fashioned from twigs and branches. "The older chick dominates the younger ones. If hunting is good, there's no problem among the chicks. But if food is scarce, the older ones won't share even to the point of starvation."

They ate breakfast at a bagel shop near the rotary then drove out to South Cape Beach. The beach was empty except for an older couple searching for sea glass and an occasional surf caster. The bluefish had been running since late September and sea bass were also plentiful.

The twosome headed off down the wintry beach. A flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. Near a hillock in the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed close by a marshy wetland where phragmites grass rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. Angie meandered near the shallow surf, dodging stranded horseshoe crabs and rubbery stalks of seaweed. A pale jellyfish floated by, sucked in toward shore then thrust back to sea by the whimsical currents. They skirted a cove and, on the far end, found a middle-aged man laying out the frame of a smallish kite on a terrycloth beach towel. Thirty feet away a team of three men was flying similar bat-shaped kites in precision drill.

"Those are synchronized flying kites," Grace said. With a hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun, she stared up into the sky. "Very expensive."

Angie followed the trio of kites as they pirouetted in a perfect figure-eight then hovered motionless for a fraction of a second before darting off in another combination of twists and turns "Next month there's an oceanfront festival off Newport. Kite clubs from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey will be competing. My parents and I use to go every year." The festival featured teams from all over New England. The more sophisticated models were constructed of lightweight, space-age metals and colorful fabrics. Four-member groups took turns running through a series of choreographed maneuvers, with the team leader calling out directions seconds in advance of each, new routine.

"Too bad!" Angie said, gesturing with her eyes. The end kite on the far left suddenly veered off in the wrong direction from the other three. "He missed the call." Angie had never seen anything quite like it. The kites dived and soared in perfect - or, as in the previous, botched effort, near perfect - unison, covering a span of a hundred feet out toward the ocean.

"See how they adjust the height and direction," Grace said, "by moving their hands."

Her daughter had been too busy enjoying the acrobatics to notice how the men handled the strings. But now she could see, as the kites tacked in a new direction, the three sets of hands moving in and out, up and down, accordingly.

"Kites are easy," Grace thought on the walk back. Angie was skipping about in the tumbling surf. "Something goes wrong with the routine,... you adjust the line or check the metal kite frame. With human nature it's not so simple."

Grace glanced over her shoulder at her daughter bringing up the rear. Angie looked up and smiled - a quirky, darkly beautiful expression that pulled all her malleable features at cross-purposes. "There was a letter from the court," Angie said.

Up ahead a tall man in his thirties was surfcasting with a metal lure that sailed far out over the breaking surf in a looping arc. "I asked the judge for a few extra dollars, but it wasn't meant to be."

Angie put her hands inside the pouch on her windbreaker. "Why didn't you just ask dad directly?" Grace had asked him on several occasions. More like begged. "He doesn't get it, does he?" Angie said, anticipating her mother's thoughts.

"No, I guess not."

Monkey syndrome. That's what Grace called Stewart's affliction. Baby monkeys developed at the same rate as humans up to a point. Then the primates hit an intellectual brick wall and stopped learning. Stewart might have been an ace at the Toyota dealership, but as a parent his potential petered out shortly after his daughter was born. Now, strangely enough, Angie had come into her own and outstripped her father in subtle, undemonstrative ways that Stewart would never comprehend.

They hung back to the left of the surfcaster, watching him heave the monofilament line out over the water. "Any luck?" Grace asked.

"Not today." He kept jerking at the rod with a spastic pumping action to simulate an injured minnow on the end of the line. "Fish aren't cooperating." He gestured with his head so they could pass safely.

"Dad's got this new girl friend," Angie said.

"What happened to Gloria?" Angie shrugged. "What's the new one like?"

Angie flicked her hair back over a shoulder. The sun caught the blond highlights in the dusky, chestnut colored strands. She didn't answer right away. "She's nice enough."

Another unwitting victim. When an Osprey caught a fish, it always carried the prey back to the nest tail down so its flight was unencumbered. Grace imagined Stewart carrying his romantic quarry back to the domestic nest in a similar fashion, but kept the thought to herself. A soft breeze was blowing now diagonally across the beach. They could smell the pebbly seaweed drying in the damp sand. Up ahead, another fisherman was threading a sea worm onto a barbed hook. The worm was blood red and slimy, its tiny legs and pincers writhing in agony. In a pail next to the fishing gear was a half dozen flounder, flat and smooth.

"I'm going to take a vow of silence," Grace spoke in a confidential tone. "Show up to school on Monday morning with a chalkboard on a string."

"And how exactly are you going teach eighth-grade English?"

"Don't know. Haven't thought that far ahead yet."

A chalkboard and a string. Grace was talking nonsense, but behind the silly blather hid a darker reality. The brown-skinned holy man could parade around with a goofy chalkboard dangling from his scrawny neck. But maybe he was a colossal faker - that's faker, not 'fakir', as in religious mendicant - and who would know the difference? He never spoke a solitary word just smiled incessantly. Enlightened soul or simpleton? Besides levitation, mind travel to distant cosmic galaxies and sleeping on a bed on rusty nails, did the mystic possess any practical skills? Could he teacher eighth graders how to conjugate a verb? Make an amboyna burl box? Grace was tired of all the phony baloney. The verisimilitude. The appearance of truth. The sham. Maybe the bearded yogi in the geriatric diaper was on to something. Or just maybe he was laughing at humanity behind his silvery beard.

******

On Sunday morning an icy chill gripped the air, but the sun quickly rose over the bay nudging the temperature up to a reasonable forty degrees. Crossing the inlet, the Osprey were feasting on the remains of a large fish. The mother held the mangled body in her beak while the fledglings ripped the flesh to pieces.

They cruised south on Route 28 into the center of Hyannis where the harbor was filled with private yachts and sailboats. On the main square that meandered along the wharf, they found a few boutiques still open this late in the season but came away empty handed. But for the cool weather, they could just as easily been on Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive. They bought cappuccinos and croissants at a gourmet pastry shop and lounged outside on metal folding chairs with their food. From her handbag, Grace pulled a small brochure she picked up at the visitor's bureau. "In 1602," she read, "Captain Bartholomew Gosnold was the first of the Old World explorers to view the area now known as Hyannis. Settlers from England incorporated the Town of Barnstable in 1639."

"Scintillating." Angie smeared butter on the flaky crust and sipped at her coffee.

"In 1666 Nicholas Davis, first settler and businessman, built his warehouse for pickling oysters in brine on Lewis Bay at the foot of what is now Pleasant Street." "It says here," she scanned further down on the pamphlet, "that, from the days of the earliest settlements, the Indian Sachem Yanno, for whom Hyannis is named, sold the area presently known as Hyannis as far as Craigville for 20 English pounds and two small pairs of pants."

"Now you know why the Mashpee hate us," her daughter added.

An elderly woman with a wrinkled face and platinum colored hair emerged from a jewelry store with several bags. She was carrying a funny looking dog that resembled a cross between a Shiatsu and a poodle. The dog had a face like an exploded cigar with dark, spiky hairs sprouting in a dozen different directions. The pooch was decked out in an almond-colored sweater and a collar studded with garish stones. The woman hurried past with a preoccupied expression, on her way to some hoity-toity tea party or socialite function. "Such a slave to fashion," Grace muttered under her breath. A Boston Brahman with a pampered pooch. Not the sort of woman who would ever have to beg the courts for chump change. But still, the weather is delightful and it's a blessing to get away.

Two doors down was a store with a blue awning. The sign over the door read Cape Cod Collectibles. Grace stepped over the threshold. Metal sculpture and small statuettes in various medium rested on tiered displays; pottery and ceramic vases were washed in a soft sheen from overhead track lighting. From a speaker in the rear, Clifford Brown's limpid jazz trumpet was navigating through the melodic chords to Joy Spring. The smoky horn leaped into the upper register, hammering out a barrage of staccato triplets before settling back into the final chorus of the tune.

A man came out from behind the counter. He was casually dressed in a V-necked sweater and hush puppies. "That sculpture you were admiring is by a local artist." The fellow had a boyish appearance despite a barren patch on the back of his skull where the hair had thinned away to a mere wisp. "It sold yesterday."

The piece, which stood four feet high, had been executed entirely in thin-gauged, brass. Using multiple strands of wire to recreate the instrument and performer, the artist had literally drawn the figure of a jazz saxophonist in silhouette. Off to the side was a trumpeter, a skier and a ballerina up on her toes. A five hundred dollar prima ballerina.

Grace budgeted everything. Without that extra twenty-five bucks from Stewart there was no margin for error. And yet, some people could blow five hundred dollars on a brass ballerina and never give the extravagance a second thought. The Kennedy compound was less than a mile down the road. The senator from Massachusetts could, on a whim, buy the jazz saxophonist or an entire sixteen-piece big band without breaking a sweat.

"Clever concept, don't you think?" The proprietor explained how the artist drew a rough sketch in charcoal in order to visualize each figure. Then, using the drawing as a template, he shaped, rolled and twisted dozens of metal strands to bring the figure to life. "They're three-dimensional," he added. "The images have depth despite the thinness of the metal."

The talkative owner knew Grace and her daughter had no intention of buying anything but didn't seem to care and Grace appreciated that. To meet someone without an agenda or ulterior motive was refreshing. "My name's Donald. Donald Carrington." He handed Grace a business card. "Feel free to stop in any time."

******

On Monday after classes, Grace went to the Brandenburg town library and searched for books by Pushkin. She found nothing. A volume by the author was available at a neighboring branch. Grace had the librarian order the book. When it arrived, she read the introduction and a half dozen short stories written in a simple but straightforward style. The prose was lean and muscular with a sharp, realistic edge. In one of the stories, a Mongol chieftain from an eastern province staged an uprising against the local ruler and was put to death. Was the tale meant to be taken literally or was there something more - a childish parable masking a deeper, hidden truth? In the biographical postscript that followed the stories, the editor wrote:

'Alexander Pushkin's highly unique style

laid the foundation for modern Russian literature.'

******

When she arrived home later in the afternoon, the light in the living room was burnt out. Grace replaced the bulb but that didn't fix the problem. "It's gotta be the switch," Angie said.

Grace removed the plastic plate and stared at a jumble of wires. "Maybe you ought to shut of the electricity at the main box," Angie cautioned, "before pulling things apart."

"Stupid me," Grace thought, easing her hands away from the bare wires. There were different voltages in different parts of the house. Two-twenty and one-ten. She wasn't sure what she was dealing with. But replacing a wall switch wasn't brain surgery. How difficult could it be to change a stupid switch? "Let's go for a ride."

At Home Depot the electrical aisle was thirty feet long with offerings on both sides. Fourteen-gauge wire in fifty-foot coils, junction boxes, wall outlets in a huge metal bin, black electrical tape, shiny metal conduit, wire strippers, needle-nose pliers and plastic splicing nuts in various color-coded sizes. With Angie bringing up the rear, Grace cornered a salesman.

"New or old installation?" The man had a walrus moustache and grumpy disposition.

"I just need a light switch."

Everyone else seemed to know perfectly well what they were doing. There were contractors loading up shopping carts with every conceivable electrical offering. An older black man was rummaging in a bin of 20-amp circuit breakers. None of the other customers needed any help. The salesman hooked a thumb on either side of the buckle of his leather belt and scowled. His gut hung precariously out over the inverted buckle. "Two-way or three-way switch?"

Grace felt her brain grow numbed. "I don't understand the question."

The salesman made a sound that was a cross between a belch and a death rattle. "You don't know the first thing about electricity, do you?" He ran a crooked forefinger over the salt and pepper moustache. "Lot of people come in here. Do-it-yourselfers. They can manage a regular switch without too much trouble, but when there's an extra hot wire thrown into the mix, that always sends them to the nuthouse."

A fellow snaked passed them pushing a steel flatbed loaded with framing lumber and sheets of particle board. The metal wheels on the bottom of the cart made an unholy ruckus. "All I asked..."

"We're not in business to teach novices complicated installations." The salesman's cell phone rang and he answered it. "Be back in a minute." He strode off down the aisle as though escaping from the plague.

"Idiot!" Angie fumed.

Grace put her hands over both eyes and bent over as though someone had sucker punched her in the gut. She wept quietly and with infinite self-loathing. She had come to Home Depot tabula rasa, intent on facing down her demons, and what did she get? The electrical salesman from hell, a misogynistic son of a bitch!

"Gees," Angie hissed, "get a grip!" Twenty feet away, the older black man sorting through circuit breakers was staring at Grace with a blank expression. The hardware department was no place for strong emotions. A young man with thick glasses was restocking a bin with yellow extension cords. Angie slithered in front of him. The man dodged to one side, but she blocked his path. "My mother needs help with a switch. Really really bad!"

"Two way or three way?" the geeky fellow asked. Angie's mouth fell open. "How many switches," he rephrased the question, "control the light that won't work?"

"Just one."

The man sauntered halfway down the aisle and removed a small switch from a bin. "There you go." Grace stood beside her daughter now, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. "Something wrong, miss?" He seemed genuinely concerned.

"Allergies.", She cleared her throat and spoke a bit more forcefully. "How do you install the damn thing?"

He turned the switch over. "There're only three wires. Two black and a bare copper ground. Just hook the blacks - that's your hot wires - to the bronze screws and the bare ground wire to the smaller green nut here at the bottom." He pointed to each place as he spoke."

"It doesn't sound that difficult," Angie said.

The young man wagged his head up and down. "Easy as snapping a circuit breaker into a junction box."

"This is all I need?"

"That's it, lady." He pushed the glasses up on the bridge of his nose. "Three-way switches are just a tad more complicated, but if you ever need to change one, come back and see me." He handed Grace one of his business cards and hurried off down the aisle.

Angie studied the layout of the switch. "Cripes, I could do this!"

In the parking lot Grace hesitated. Turning to her daughter she said, "There's one more thing I want to do before we head home. It will just take a moment."

The museum was open late due to the fall art show. The Brandenburg Gazette devoted considerable advertising to the event and several dozen visitors were still milling about the foyer with only half an hour to closing.

They found the standard fare of water color paintings—still lifes, floral arrangements and nature scenes. A potter with an unusual glazing technique had three bowls set out on a lighted display. Not all the offerings were conventional or even attractive. One offbeat artist had worked facial features into an odd-shaped gourd along with a bulbous nose and formidable set of teeth. A vegetative rodent. The work reminded Grace of the satanic creatures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

"A bit too avant-garde for my tastes," a woman sporting an Etienne handbag directly in front of them murmured to a friend.

Close by the back wall was a bust of Abraham Lincoln cast in bronze. The emancipator of the slaves looked rather melancholy. Grace could picture such a piece in a government building, but couldn't imagine a morosely depressed former president sharing her personal living space.

"Here's Carl's box." In the far corner was a diminutive box no more than four inches square. Unlike the amboyna burl masterpiece, it offered no fancy curves or daring swirls. The surfaces had been planed perfectly flat, the edges gently eased.

The sides of the box were fashioned from a light, cream-colored wood, but this was clearly just a pleasant detail and nothing more. The viewer's eye was immediately drawn to the lid which was done in three, exotic contrasting woods—a mottled, golden outside layer which exuded an irresistible glow as though it contained its own, inner light source. Nearer the middle was a band of quilted, reddish wood and, at the center, a coffee-colored burl with numerous swirls and intricate patterns.

A tall blonde woman, the museum director, came up behind them. She had a pleasant, sensible face. "You like the box?" Grace nodded. "The lemony gold wood is avodire and the red is sapelé. Both come from Africa. The medallion in the center is walnut taken near the root of the tree. The tremendous pressure the wood is under creates the unusual, paisley pattern."

"I know the artist," Grace said. "He works at our school."

The director smiled. Though it was late, she didn't seem in any great hurry to close the museum. "Perhaps you could tell me something about the man. I haven't actually met Carl personally."

"But I thought -"

"When he made his application," the director continued, "he simply filled out the form and clipped it to a brown paper bag. The box was in the bag."

"Wierrrrd!" Angie held out the 'r' for dramatic effect.

The director reached out and waved an index finger over the lid. "Everybody ogles this little box but never bothers to look inside." The director winked at Angie - a conspiratorial gesture - then motioned with a flick of her head. "Go ahead, open it." Angie placed her thumb in an indentation on the front and raised the lid to reveal a poem which had been recessed beneath the lid.

Paradise is there, behind that door,

In the next room;

But I have lost the key.

Perhaps I have only mislaid it.

Kahlil Gibran

Paradise is there, behind that door,... A poem hidden away, like a precious gem, in a box. A gift within a gift. What did it mean?

"The paper is archival, acid neutralized so it will never fade or yellow. Come back in a hundred years and it will look just as crisp and clean as it does today." The director glanced at her watch. "We'll be closing in five minutes." She lowered the lid hiding the enigmatic verse and went off to tell the other patrons. Grace grabbed a pen from her purse and, reopening the lid, jotted the poem on the back of a slip of paper.

******

Monday night they got home too late from the museum to tackle the light switch. The following evening after supper, Grace assembled what few tools Stewart left behind when he drove off in the U-haul. "So this is it." She began unscrewing the light plate."

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Angie cautioned. Her mother stared at her with a blank expression. "The power. You have to shut the electricity off at the main box."

"Silly me." They went down into the basement and tripped the circuit breaker that controlled the hall lighting.

Back upstairs, all the lights in the entryway were dead. Grace used the Phillips screwdriver to remove the two screws securing the switch to the wall. Just as the pleasant salesman with the horn-rimmed glasses had assured her, the black wires were fastened to the brass nuts; the neutral ground tucked under beneath the switch. All she had to do was remove each wire, one at a time, from the broken switch and shift it over to the new one.

And to think the obnoxious salesman with the bowling ball gut had tried to break her spirit - make her feel like the only thing women were good for was cleaning house and fornicating, not necessarily in that order. Boorish swine! He probably sat home all day Sunday watching WWF wrestling matches on his flat screen TV and smashing empty beer cans on the side of his primordial skull.

All the wires were replaced and Grace tossed the broken switch into the trash. "Moment of truth." Angie went downstairs and threw the circuit breaker. The other lights went on but the hallway was still dark. A fleeting image of the salesman with the walrus moustache floated back to her. He was wagging a finger in front of Grace's nose, his lips curled in a dismissive sneer.

This wasn't rocket science. For God's sakes, how difficult could it be? Grace peered into the metal receptacle box. "Wait a minute. I see the problem." The topmost wire had wiggled loose from the fastener, when she folded the wires repositioning them in the wall. She poked at the loose wire with the tip of her screwdriver. Big mistake! The second the metal blade made contact with the bare wire, there was a loud hissing sound and a bright arc of white light shot through the air.

"Mom!"

Grace tumbled backward, collapsing in a heap on the floor, and the room went totally dark again. Dead silence. "I think," Grace gingerly lifted herself up on her elbows, "we were suppose to shut the power down."

Angie held a flashlight over the box while her mother attached the errant wire. When they flipped the power back on, all the lights worked. "On. Off." Grace flipped the switch and watched the light alternately glow then fade to darkness. "On. Off. On. Off. This is fun."

"You're a regular card-carrying electrician." Angie stared up at the ceiling as her mother played with the new switch. Suddenly her daughter's face clouded over. "Damn!"

"What's wrong?"

Angie gestured toward the picture window. "We've got company."

Grace peered out the window, but the street was empty. It was after nine o'clock. For the past hour, a light rain had been falling in a steady drizzle. "I don't see anyone."

"Over there by the shrubs." Diagonally across the street and partially concealed behind an outgrowth of lilacs stood Dwight Goober, the Village Idiot.

Grace snuffed the lights, climbed the stairs and drifted noiselessly into the bedroom. She lifted the curtain and peered into the street.

"What's he doing now?" Angie whispered anxiously. Dwight had shifted away from the lilacs and was standing in the middle of the street. All six feet of him. At nine o'clock on a school night in the pouring rain. Even when the boy stood rooted in one place, all his limbs were in perpetual motion, elbows stabbing the moist air, hips jerking about fitfully.

"He's like a wild animal," Grace mused. "A dangerous one at that."

There had been a youth at Brandenburg Middle School several years back who reminded Grace of Dwight Goober. Same feral quality and lack of impulse control. Some of the teachers felt sorry for the troubled youth, even suggesting that he might benefit from one-on-one counseling. The well-intentioned teachers changed their tune after a kindergartener was found raped and beaten in the woods behind the elementary school.

"What are you going to do?" Angie pressed.

"I don't know." What could she do? Call the police and, as soon as Dwight saw the flashing patrol car lights turning onto Adeline Avenue, he would run off down a side street as far as the cul-de-sac and disappear into the woods. The police might take a report, but then he'd be back the next night, like a bad dream, to settle scores. Dwight Goober was vindictive. He smashed mail boxes, let the air out of neighbors' tires, set an empty lot on fire and trashed the Wilson's storage shed. Not that anything ever came of it. When something rotten happened, everybody knew Dwight was to blame but go try and prove it. He had the brainpower of a slug but always did his malicious dirty work late at night, when it was impossible to see much of anything and the neighbors already were sound asleep. Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer, The Boston Strangler, Jack the Ripper, Dwight Goober—they were all cut from the same bolt of cloth. It wasn't as simple as fixing a broken light switch.

"What am I going to do?" She repeated her daughter's question. Grace boiled herself a cup of tea and sat in the kitchen making out the grocery list. When the clock struck eleven, she went back to the bedroom and pulled back the curtain a half inch.

"Is he still there?" Angie had taken a shower and changed into a pair of flannel pajamas.

"Yes, over by the lilacs again." Dwight was lurking in the rain with no hat, swaying from side to side like a back ward schizophrenic. But he wasn't psychotic, not in the traditional sense.

"Maybe he'll catch pneumonia."

"Not likely," Grace replied. A herd of cows over at the Cumberland Dairy frequently stayed out in the rain for days. They seldom became sick. Sometimes their hooves got infected, what with the mud and muck, but, otherwise, inclement weather was just a minor inconvenience. Grace lay down on the bed but she couldn't sleep. All the excitement and exhilaration over fixing the switch ebbed away. She felt depressed. Dwight Goober was a blight on society. A malignant growth. The damage he did to the community was exponential. He had the power to turn the whole neighborhood topsy-turvy, but what could anyone do?

Shortly before midnight, Grace got up to pee. She went and looked out the window. The rain was still coming down. The street was empty now, Dwight crawled off to his smelly lair. She went back to bed and pulled the comforter up around her throat. A vision of the poem box danced in her mind's eye.

Paradise is there, behind that door,

In the next room;

But I have lost the key.

Perhaps I have only mislaid it.

A car swerved onto the street and the rain-soaked tires made a gurgling sound. Only fools would argue that an earthly paradise was easy to come by. Too many complications, missed opportunities, false starts. Tomorrow midterm grades would be printed and sent home. Brandenburg had scored poorly on the state MCAS test, and Ed Gray was on the warpath. He scheduled a faculty meeting to plan a strategy to remedy the problem. More aggravation. More grief. What year was it exactly when Grace lost her key to paradise? But then, as the Lebanese poet coyly implied, perhaps she had only mislaid it. Having almost electrocuted herself earlier in the evening, she still managed to fix the light switch. Hopefully, before she ended up toothless and senile in an old age home, she could figure how to set her private universe back on an even, harmonious course.

******

Every year the Brandenburg Knights of Columbus donated turkey dinners to needy families. Grace helped deliver meals. It was a family tradition. On Thanksgiving morning the phone rang. "We got three deliveries, all in the same area."

Grace grabbed a pen and jotted down the addresses. Around ten she and her daughter stopped by the hall and collected the meals. The first stop was an elderly man who lived with his wife and a Siamese cat. The wife suffered from Parkinson's disease and sat quietly in a recliner while her husband arranged the food in the refrigerator. Next was a Hispanic family in a three-decker tenement over by the Safeway Plaza. The father broke his leg and was out on disability. The wife thanked them profusely and offered Angie a small bundle of sugar cookies.

"Two down one to go." Grace pulled the car back out in traffic. They drove cross town past the new fire station and cruised through an older residential area of modest split level ranches built in the mid-fifties. The single family home was similar to the others except for a fresh coat of slate blue paint. Grace rang the doorbell.

When the door opened, she blinked twice and felt her jaw go slack. Carl Solomon was standing in the doorway. He wore tan Dockers with a plaid flannel shirt; the heavy work boots had given way to a pair of suede Nikes. "We're delivering Thanksgiving meals." The remark was phrased more like a question than a statement of fact.

"The Knights of Columbus called earlier," Carl replied. "Mrs. Shapiro was expecting you."

An elderly woman, petite and neatly dressed, limped into the room favoring her right leg. "Whose there, Carl?" The accent was distinctly European but with another inflection that Grace could not readily identify.

"Your holiday meal," he explained.

"Please come in. I'll just be a minute." The woman took the food and went off. The living room was quite small but neatly arranged. An old-fashioned mahogany table decorated with lace doilies stood in the center of the room. Reflecting the somber tastes of a previous age, a stuffed arm chair rested in the far corner next to a tiffany lamp and brocade ottoman. Scattered about the room were several small boxes with fancy inlays.

"I know you," Carl said softly. "The English teacher."

"We saw your box at the museum," Grace blurted out, stumbling over the words. "The one with the Gibran verse."

Angie kept looking back and forth between her mother and the man in the flannel shirt. "Wait a minute. You're the janitor who makes boxes!" Carl shrugged then his face dissolved in a self-conscious grin. "Someone loses a key but then maybe he only misplaced it and can't get into paradise or heaven or whatever ..."

"I think," Grace interrupted, "the verse is intended as an allegory."

"You understood the poem?" Carl's eyes glowed with fixed intensity.

"Perhaps,... not completely." Grace blushed and felt the words catch like a logjam in her throat.

Finally, Mrs. Shapiro returned carrying a tray of pastries. "I hope you don't have to rush away.'

"No, you're our last stop." Graced eyed the pastry. "Is that German strudel?"

"Homemade, no less."

Carl brought napkins and cups from the kitchen. Mrs. Shapiro eased gently onto a chair. "Had a stroke in April and I'm still not a hundred per cent. Old age—it's a real pain in the butt." "So you know Carl?"

"Yes, from school. "I teach at the middle school."

"When I was her age," Mrs. Shapiro waved her good hand fitfully in Angie's direction, "we were reading The Magic Mountain and Goethe's Faust. Now you're lucky if young people have enough patience to wade through the National Inquirer."

Carl grinned. "Ruth can be a bit melodramatic."

"For what it's worth, I read The Magic Mountain my freshman year in college," Grace replied. "Thomas Mann is one of my favorite writers."

Mrs. Shapiro raised an eyebrow. "You just made a friend for life." In the street a car with a blown muffler backfired as it raced past the house. The old woman muttered something angrily in a language that Grace could not readily identify. She picked up a word or two in German but then there were others in a more guttural tongue that eluded her. "That bum—he lives two blocks down," Mrs. Shapiro groused. "Almost ran a kid over last week. You might think he was competing in the Daytona 500."

Grace broke off a piece of strudel and nibbled at a powdered raisin. The papery thin layers of pastry dough were flaking in her fingers." What was that you said a moment ago?"

"Du solst wachsen wie ein tzibilah..." "It's Yiddish. Old German mixed up with Hebrew and some Slavic offerings. The European Jews spoke it as a common tongue for centuries. A modern day Esperanto."

"And the meaning??"

"Well, it's not very nice," Mrs. Shapiro didn't seem terribly contrite. "I was referring to the hooligan who just used our street for a drag strip. I said that he should grow like an onion with his head in the ground and ass in the air."

Grace flinched, not expecting such language from an elderly woman, while Angie burst into a fit of hysterical laughter.

Mrs. Shapiro talked at great length about a variety of subjects. Born in Germany, she immigrated to Israel only a few years later when her parents fled the Nazis. She worked as a chicken farmer—a very smelly affair—then a journalist with Yediot Aharanot, a popular Hebrew newspaper. In the early sixties she emigrated to the United States and taught German at Boston State College, where she met her third husband. What happened to the other two she conveniently omitted or forgot to mention.

But she didn't just speak about herself. After Mr. Shapiro passed away, she rented space to make ends meet. Carl responded to an ad in the local classifieds. He had been staying by the week in a rooming house over on the east side. Not a nice place—a lot of riff raff and fershtunkener bums. Her last husband—may he rest in peace—had been a cabinetmaker. While cleaning the workbench, Carl found a book on joinery buried under a pile of pipe clamps and plywood jigs. He asked Mrs. Shapiro's permission before using any of her late husband's tools.

******

What a character!" Angie said. Mrs. Shapiro had insisted that they take what was left of the strudel and Carl had wrapped it in a paper plate. "He treats her swell, don't he?"

"Doesn't he," her mother corrected. "And, yes, he treats Mrs. Shapiro very respectfully indeed."

As they were preparing to leave, Carl helped Mrs. Shapiro to her feet, supporting her under the left elbow, which was her weak side. Whether it was clearing the table or locating a three-pronged cane so she could see the visitors off, there was nothing forced or affected in his actions.

"Carl's nice," Angie said. "A bit Neanderthal but nice." There was no response. "So..."

"So what?" Like an over-the-hill boxer telegraphing his punches, Grace could see where her daughter was heading with the conversation.

"What do you think, I mean, about Carl?"

"The world would be a splendid place if there were more people like him." Grace realized that she was doing 'the voice'. The voice was a stilted, high pitched tone she unconsciously slipped into whenever she felt uncomfortable, out of her element. She pulled up at an intersection and waited for the light to turn. Five more minutes and they would be safely home. A quick shower and off to bed. Tomorrow was another full day at school, the formal beginning of a new semester and grading period.

"Why don't you ask him out on a date?" There was no reply. "Women do it all the time. They see somebody they like. Maybe the guy's shy,... doesn't know how to approach woman... socially challenged." Grace stared at her daughter in disbelief. "You been divorced a year and it's not like any hot prospects are breaking down the door to ask you out on a date."

"You have such a succinct way of putting things."

"Which isn't an answer," Angie shot back petulantly.

"Carl may be well read and a gifted woodworker, but he's also a custodian at the school where I work." She blew out her cheeks in despair. "I'd be the laughing stock of Brandenburg Middle School."

"This is America, not India. Carl's not some grubby pariah."

A fleeting image of the yogi with the chalkboard flash in front of Grace's eyes. "No, you're right, but still..."

"What?"

"I don't know." They were home. She set the shift in park and flicked off the ignition. "I'll think about it," Grace replied weakly.

"No you won't," her daughter made no effort to conceal her disgust. "You always play it safe. You lost the key to paradise when dad cheated. You'd rather hide behind allegories and metaphors than risk something to get it back."

******

Later that night, Angie followed her mother into the bathroom and sat pensively on the toilet while she got ready for bed. "Those curvy boxes we saw over at Mrs. Shapiro's house were designed by a woman."

"Yes, that's true." Grace put the toothbrush away and reached for the dental floss. Before they left the house, Mrs. Shapiro had insisted that Carl show them a new piece he was working on. The box was similar to the one Grace had seen in the boiler room. "It's not my design," Carl admitted in an offhand manner. "There's a woodworker, Lois Keener Ventura, from Pennsylvania. She came up with the original design. These are just reproductions."

Lois Keener Ventura had an artistic vision. A vision of sumptuous boxes that would mimic the shape of fish, plants, whales, even boa constrictors. Like the ingenious, brass wire sculptures in Hyannis, Ms Ventura sketched her improbable designs out on paper first, then transformed the whimsical doodles into exotic and voluptuous forms with names like boa, surf, minnow, whaleplay and leaf.

Carl showed them a half dozen other boxes, all faithful, meticulous reproductions. One tall box Carl nicknamed the 'Koa boa'. Fashioned from a slab of greenish gold, Hawaiian koa, it curled in a sinuous series of 'S' patterns. A lethal reptile frozen in wood. "A woman," Angie spoke softly, "can do just about anything she sets her mind to."

Grace nodded in the affirmative. It didn't matter that Carl borrowed the design. The workmanship was his as was the clever idea to decorate the drawers with amboyna burl. "A woman woodworker." Grace ran the floss behind an upper molar then tossed it in the trash. "Now that's something special!"

******

Friday morning Grace met with Ed Gray at Adam's Diner. He wanted to discuss the school's poor performance in the English portion of the MCAS test over breakfast. It wasn't a formal meeting. That would come later, include everyone in the English department and tediously drag on through the remainder of the school year. Ed was mildly paranoid; he didn't trust many of the ELA teachers. They harbored dangerous ideas. This meeting was more a pep rally, an effort to brain storm and set an early agenda.

"Poached eggs with rye," Ed handed the menu back to the waitress. "Lightly toasted, not too much butter."

"And to drink?" The cloying smell of maple syrup and hash brown potatoes sifted through the restaurant.

"An Earl Grey tea with honey."

"We're fresh out of honey," the woman replied.

Ed scowled and fidgeted in his seat. "Coffee... decaf with skim milk."

Grace glanced at the menu. All the breakfast entrees were named after popular dances. There was the Charleston - two eggs, with hash browns and a slab of Canadian bacon; the Viennese Waltz - similar but with smoked sausage as the meat; the Hokey Pokey - blueberry pancakes slathered with whipped cream; and the Last Tango in Paris. Grace had used this unusual offering as her basis for the 'crazy omelet'. She ordered the Charleston with a cup of coffee.

"Now there's a work in progress," Ed interjected, gesturing with his eyes toward the entryway. A painfully thin, disheveled man had just wandered in and sat down on a stool at the counter. "That fellow comes here every day," Ed said in a hushed voice, "A burnt out drunk. He's off the sauce now - or at least that's what he says. Lives over by the YMCA in subsidized housing and gets a disability check."

"And how do you know all this?" Grace asked with an amuse expression.

Ed Gray removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "It was my great misfortune to be sitting at the counter one day when he arrived for breakfast." Sure enough, the reformed drunk latched on to the ear of the fellow sitting next to him and began haranguing the customer with a long-winded story. At one point he laughed, a deep-down, straight-from-the-gut raucous belly laugh. Grace observed that four or five teeth on the top were missing - punched out, rotted away or sacrificed in a drunken fog. "What a blowhard!" Ed seethed.

Grace smiled inwardly. She could picture Ed Gray, a captive audience, sitting next to the reformed drunk as he held court. A court of fools.

"About the test scores," Ed ran his fingers through a tuft of thinning hair, "Brandenburg is down fifteen points over last year. Nobody's happy."

All the staff was in a similar bind. A math teacher could no longer just teach basic algebra any more than a history teacher could focus on the Civil War or Great Depression. Compelled to teach to the test, they had no control over what the pundits in Boston chose from one year to the next. The end result: the brightest students received endless praise; average kids were made to feel like dopes and dunces - a motley collection of ineffectual losers; and the marginal students cursed the day they ever set foot in a public school. It was an insidious blame game. Teachers blamed the students for not trying hard enough or, worse yet, downright laziness; parents pointed an accusing finger at the school; the superintendent, taking the bureaucratic high road, conveniently reprimanded all concerned. "I saw the social studies test." Grace said.

Ed Gray made a face and cracked his knuckles one at a time. "What do I care about social studies?" He spoke impatiently, as though the remark was totally irrelevant to the conversation.

Grace leaned forward across the table. "The eighth grade textbook covers the history of western civilization from Roman times through the Middle Ages. Pope Innocent the Third, Thomas Becket, Henry the Second, Papal Indulgences and Justinian Codes ... It's a college level curriculum scaled down to middle school. Eighth graders just barely handle puberty. They can't digest that much information."

"I don't see where..."

"Does anyone really give a hoot," Grace pressed her point, "that the Visigoths invaded Spain toward the end of the Roman Empire?"

"Let's talk about English," Ed said peevishly, "and let the barbaric Huns and Visigoths sort themselves out. Or perhaps you'd rather travel back in an Orwellian time machine ten years or so when the ultra-liberal anarchists were trampling public education into the ground."

"That was a cheap shot," Grace said.

Ed Grayson was referring to a regrettable period in American education when the progressive establishment tossed traditional teaching out the window in favor of an enlightened approach. Since rote memory skills were considered old fashioned, the Dick and Jane primer was abandoned. No one needed to learn vowels or consonants, at least not in the conventional sense. First graders could sound out and spell words with an improvisational flair. It didn't matter if a sentence was technically correct. The children would grapple with proper spelling, phonetics and grammar as they progressed through the higher grades.

Rules of language. Roolz uf Langwage. Ruels off Lainkwuch. Over time, the first graders' Tower of Babel would eventually sort itself out. Young learners would blossom into educational free thinkers.

At least that was the grand design.

In reality, kindergarteners taught the 'enlightened' educational model frequently emerged in later years functionally illiterate and desperately needing remedial help to repair the damage done by 'progressive' education. The utopian dream proved more a pipe dream - make that pieyup drrreeeem - than the real deal.

Grace felt her enthusiasm draining away She had come to the meeting with an open mind, but Ed Gray lived in a world of tattered novels and bureaucratic niceties. Given the option, he'd probably prefer working with the bureaucrats in Boston than teaching the children. The waitress brought their food. Grace spread strawberry jam on a slice of toast. "Last year the English test focused mostly on vocabulary and punctuation."

"Don't forget the composition portion," Ed added. "That counted for thirty per cent of the overall score."

The reformed drunk suddenly rose from the counter and, moving unsteadily, careened off in the direction of the rest rooms. As he passed their booth the man leaned over and stared at Ed Gray "Hell, I know you," he crowed. "You got some fancy pants, high fallutin' job over at the elementary school."

Middle school," Ed corrected stiffly. "I work at the middle school."

"Ooooowee! You're girl friend's one hot tamale!" The man dropped down on his haunches beside Grace. "I never would have taken you for a lady's man, but what the hell do I know." Giggling like a recalcitrant schoolboy, he staggered to his feet again and disappeared into the men's room.

"What an asshole!" Ed lowered his voice to a faint whisper. "A totally useless waste of humanity!" He suddenly reached across the table and tapped Grace lightly on the forearm. "About that unfortunate business with the janitor's helper... "

The remark caught her off guard. Ed was smiling at her but the expression was pinched. "The man was ill informed. Writers in Pushkin's time were very mannered. There was a conventional romantic formula. They all used it."

"Yes, I'm sure." Grace didn't know what to say.

"Alexander Pushkin was a brilliant writer but no different than the rest." He pushed his glasses up on the brim of his nose. It wasn't just a casual statement. A reply was expected.

"Yes, I suppose." Grace cringed inwardly. What Ed was telling her simply wasn't true. Pushkin was different from all the rest - a literary heretic! Ed Gray was probably telling everyone at Brandenburg Middle School that Carl was a fraud, but that was just damage control. A clever PR job.

The burnt out drunk had returned to the counter and was acting real crazy now, flailing his arms and talking gibberish. One of the cooks, a burly man wearing a soiled apron tied around his thick waste and a Red Sox baseball cap emerged from the kitchen. He bent over the counter and whispered a handful of words in the man's ear and, without waiting for a reply, retreated back to the grill. The ex-drunk who lived in subsidized housing and got by on his disability check never opened his mouth through the remainder of his meal.

An epiphany! Grace suddenly realized who the unkempt loudmouth reminded her of. Sure, there was Dwight Goober ten years down the bumpy, dysfunctional road of life. He would be living off the dole at taxpayer's expense and wrecking havoc in a slightly more sedate, middle-aged fashion.

"I'll get the check," Ed waved a hand at the waitress.

******

A week after Thanksgiving temperatures plummeted. There was no more talk of Indian summer or winter reprieves with sunny days in the high fifties. A thick film of frost on the windshield greeted Grace went she went out to warm up the Volvo. The finches, chickadees and hummingbirds had long since departed for more temperate regions. Only a handful of diehard cardinals, pine siskin and blue jays presented themselves at the feeder.

At Brandenburg Middle School, vocabulary lists had been inflated to twenty-five words per week amid grumbling and groans from the students. Information overload—too much homework, too many facts to digest, not enough hours in the day. Schoolwork as drudgery! Sisyphus, king of Corinth, doomed to roll his rock up the steep mountainside on a daily basis. Worse yet, Ed's new strategy, which was no different than the old strategy, produced the opposite effect. Test scores continued to plummet. Now parents were in open revolt, and the chairman of the English department's only response was to hold firm.

Shortly before lunch, Grace found a handwritten note in her mail slot.

Mrs. Shapiro called. Please

stop by later today after work

regarding an urgent matter,

an emergency. P.R.

Pam Riley, the office secretary, took the message. If she made the connection between the old woman with the funny accent and Ruth Shapiro, Grace was in serious trouble. The administrative secretary was an insufferable news bag, a one-woman rumor mill, who would let everyone in the school know the latest dirt. Actually, Grace wasn't quite sure what exactly Pam Riley might do with the information, but it wouldn't be anything flattering.

Later that afternoon, Grace baked breaded scrod with mash potatoes. When the meal was done, she left Angie to clean up and drove out to Mrs. Shapiro's house. Carl's car was not in the driveway.

"You mentioned an urgent matter,... an emergency?"

"Emergency?" Mrs. Shapiro shrugged. "What a strange choice of words!" The woman was dressed in a white blouse and blue skirt. Grace followed her into the living room. Again she favored her left side, dragging the injured leg in a sweeping arc, an accommodation to the illness. "PTO meeting at the school tonight," Mrs. Shapiro noted absentmindedly. "Carl has to close up so he won't be home until late. Too bad. He would have enjoyed your company." The room was growing dark and she flicked on the Tiffany light. The bulb was weak and only dimly lit the area around the recliner. "Poor man! He doesn't enjoy much of a social life."

Grace let the remark die a natural death.

"Weather has been so cold lately." She settled into the recliner, wiggling her rear end until she was quite comfortable. Her withered left hand curled inward toward her chest in a limp ball. "We were spoiled by the warm weather. Now winter is here with a vengeance."

Grace took a seat by the mahogany table. Why had Mrs. Shapiro invited her here? Certainly not to discuss the weather. "You lived in Israel," Grace deflected the conversation in a new direction.

"Seventeen years. We were Zionists, nation builders back then." The old woman tucked her crippled hand in the crook of her arm and smiled wistfully. "I was twenty-five and living on a kibbutz, a communal farm, in the upper Galilee. The Golan Heights rose snow-covered to the east, the biblical cedars of Lebanon due north." A nostalgic, bittersweet reminiscence tugged the corners of her lips gently upward. "I worked in the poultry barn, but mostly we harvested apples, oranges and grapefruit for export."

Grace tried to picture Ruth Shapiro as a young girl, petite with dark hair and eyes—a fastidious little bird of a woman. A Jewish settler, brimming over with pioneer fervor in the land of milk and honey. "But you left."

"Too many hate mongers," the old woman replied, "on both sides of the ethnic fence." She fell silent. In a distant room, a grandfather clock struck eight o'clock. Only when the last chime had rung did she pick up the thread of conversation. "There was a handful among us who still remembered the tradition of haskalah."

"Which was?"

"An outmoded, 19th century notion that all people could live together in peace and brotherhood. The father of modern day Zionism, Theodore Hertzl, was a proponent of haskalah, but few people remember that utopian gibberish today." Her final words trailed away in a self–mocking tone.

Grace didn't know what to say. Snowing was falling outside, the ground peppered with a lacework pattern of fragile whiteness. The small room where they were sitting exuded an austere, monastic economy as though in her final years this well-traveled woman was slowly shedding the unwieldy trappings of the material world.

"The Magic Mountain—I don't suppose you read it in the original." Grace shook her head. "So much gets lost in translation." She pursed her lips and stared at Grace for the longest time before proceeding. "The main character, Hans Castorp, visits a friend at a TB sanatorium. He falls sick and ends up a patient himself."

"Yes, I remember," Grace replied. "The boy remains at the mountain until he is well enough to leave." She was getting used to Mrs. Shapiro's scattershot tendency to talk in free associations. One disjointed thought melded into the next with little or no forewarning. But there was a method to the madness. Conversations careened in a dozen random directions, ricocheting off her nimble mind, but, whatever it might be, the cagey woman never lost sight of the central theme.

"The book's ending is left intentionally vague. Not your typical bildungsroman, where a hundred loose ends are neatly tied up and everyone ecstatically happy."

"But you didn't call me here to discuss German literature," Grace observed.

"I see no ring on your finger. You're divorced?"

"A year now."

"Seeing anyone special?"

Outside an inch of snow blanketed the ground. "I'm not in the market for romance at this stage in my life."

"That's too bad." The old woman waited a discrete interval before continuing. "You remind me of Hans Castorp."

Grace laughed. "We're discussing a fictional character from a previous century who, coincidentally, happens to be a man not woman. It's just a beautiful story."

Mrs. Shapiro shrugged off the remark. "At the Zauberberg, The Magic Mountain, many patients were terminally ill. They got no second chance at life. Don't become one of them."

Grace rose. "It's getting late and I have to be up early."

"But you can't leave just yet," Mrs. Shapiro protested, half rising from the chair. "We haven't even discussed the reason I called you here."

******

Grace was so distracted on the ride home that she almost missed the hulking figure lurking behind the bushes at the far end of the driveway. She flicked the high beams on to get a better view and Dwight Goober, like some nocturnal predator, slid away behind the foliage.

She entered the house. "Why are all the lights off?"

Upstairs in the bedroom, Angie was huddled on a rocking chair, a blanket draped over her shoulders. She threw her arms around her mother and burst into tears. "Dwight's been out there for over an hour now. He knew you were gone because there was no car in the driveway."

Grace gently held her daughter at arm's length. "Stay here."

"Where are you going?"

"To have a little one-on-one with the Village Idiot." Grace rushed down the stairs and out the front door. Eight inches of powdery snow now covered the ground with the temperature bottoming out in the low twenties. No one in their right mind would be milling about on a night like this. No one in their right mind. Grace had no game plan, no idea what she was going to do. Dwight was standing under a streetlight on the opposite side of the street.

"Go home, Dwight." The boy just looked at her with an oily smirk and shifted back and forth on the balls of his feet, a percolating mass of primal flesh. "It's ten o'clock at night and there's school tomorrow."

"School but no curfew for minors," Dwight shot back in a gravelly voice, "and you can't do shit." Dwight's face was all blotchy, an unsavory mishmash of acne and freckles. Never a particularly attractive youth, the teenage years had been particularly unkind.

In response to increased crime, homeowners in Brandenburg wanted a curfew for teens, but the ACLU got involved and squelched the petition before it ever came to vote. Kids - good kids, that is - worked or participated in late night activities. Why punish them? The pending legislation raised too many complications. You couldn't trample on people's basic freedoms, even if the people included neighborhood bullies, drug addicts, hoodlums and thugs.

"There's school tomorrow, and the day after that, too," Dwight was enjoying the repartee. It was a sadistic game. This is what he lived for. Other kids played on the varsity football team or acted in the tri-region musical theater. They collected stamps or skated or took gymnastic lessons or joined 4-H club. Dwight Goober hid behind bushes and terrorized the Bovey street neighborhood.

"Want a smoke?" He pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and lit a cigarette with a butane lighter. Inhaling deeply, he luxuriated in the smoke, then crumbled the empty box in his fist and tossed it over his shoulder.

A light went on across the street and a neighbor's head emerged in the open doorway. Grace felt a surge of confidence, but just as quickly, the light was extinguished and - Thump! - the door slammed shut.

"Hey, look who's here!" Dwight knelt down as a small beagle sidled up to them, huffing and puffing in the frigid air. The neighbor had only let his dog out to pee. "That mean Mrs. Paulson doesn't like, Dwighty, but you sure do." The dog's tail was whipping the air in frenzied joy. Dwight scratched the dog behind the ear. "Her stupid bitch of a daughter ain't got no use for me neither so you're my only girl friend—the love of my freakin' life." Flicking his cigarette up into the air, he grabbed the dog forcefully by both ears and planted a sloppy kiss on its snout. The beagle broke away and, with its stiffened tail tucked firmly between its hind legs, ran off down the street, yelping like a banshee.

"Where are your friends, Dwight?" There were plenty of kids Dwight's age in the area, but the incorrigible oaf had no friends. Well, that wasn't really true. There was a kid off of Lancaster Boulevard that he chummed around with, but he was locked up at the juvenile training center for a string of robberies. The other teens kept a wide berth. They knew what Dwight Goober was capable of.

"I got plenty of friends." He picked at a scab on his chin. "But maybe your daughter, Angie, might want to come out here and spend some quality time with me."

Grace could feel the control slipping away. As soon as he mentioned her daughter, the hoodlum gained the unfair advantage. "Goodnight, Dwight. There may not be any curfew, but if you're not gone in five minute's I'm calling the police." She went back in the house.

Grace turned all the lights on in the lower level, an act of defiance. Climbing the stairs, she went into the second floor bathroom and peered out the window. Dwight hadn't moved a fraction of an inch since her ultimatum. Five minutes later she called the police. "I want to report a rather large youth loitering on my street."

"Address please." The officer sounded bored. Grace gave him the particulars. "There's a patrol car in the area. I'll send him right over."

"Thank you." Grace turned back to the window. Dwight Goober was nowhere to be seen.

******

Ruth Shapiro hadn't invited Grace over so she could play matchmaker.

The previous week, Angie stopped by the middle school after classes to see Carl. She wanted him to teach her how to make elegant boxes like Lois Keenan Ventura's. Carl said no. She was too young. Power tools were dangerous. More to the point, since everything from the four-inch belt sander to the Delta drill press belonged to Mrs. Shapiro, it wasn't his decision to make.

The next day Angie returned. "Teach me how to make boxes like that lady woodworker from Pennsylvania." Carl, who was spreading rock salt on the front walkway, told her to go home. The issue was non-negotiable. Out of the question. A no-brainer. On the third visit, Carl threw his hands up in the air and growled, "I'll ask Mrs. Shapiro. Depending on what she says, you would still need your mother's permission."

Grace cornered her daughter after supper. "I met with Mrs. Shapiro."

Angie eyed her uncertainly. "I figured as much."

Grace ran her tongue over her lips. "Okay. Go make boxes with Carl. Just don't cut your lovely fingers off."

Angie threw her arms around her mother's neck. "I was so sure you would -"

"Perhaps you could make me a nice chest with a separate compartment for my chains." She held her daughter close and nuzzled her neck. "A light wood like maple or white oak would be nice."

What Grace conveniently forgot to mention was that, before leaving Mrs. Shapiro's home on the snowy evening, she had reached her decision, and it was non-negotiable. Angie would not, under any circumstances, be spending time with Carl Solomon churning out woodchips and endless piles of sawdust. But halfway home, she had a change of heart. It wasn't anything thought through in a logical, coherent fashion. Curiously, Mrs. Shapiro remained totally neutral and hadn't tried to influence Grace one way or the other. No, it wasn't anything quite so obvious. Maybe it was the rarified air at the summit of the Magic Mountain where young people languished, their most precious dreams fading away unfulfilled. Grace decided, just this once, to put her cogitating mind on hold and let some other, ephemeral organ run the show.

******

In the morning, Grace left the house a half hour earlier and drove up Lexington Boulevard to the police station. She entered a small vestibule but there was no one to talk to. A sign on the wall next to a black phone said:

SPEAK INTO THE HANDSET TO RECEIVE ASSISTANCE.

Grace lifted the phone. "Hello? I need to speak to someone."

"Is this an emergency?"

"No, not at all. It's a personal matter."

The phone went dead and a burly patrolman with a red face and moustache opened the door a crack. "What's this in regards to?"

"A teenager on my street is causing problems."

The officer brought her into a room in the rear of the station and closed the door. She told him about Dwight Goober. "Yah, I know the kid," The officer said. "Been to his house a half dozen times or more."

"Maybe you could talk to his parents about -"

"Mother," the officer cut her short. "There's no father in the picture. Just the old lady and, in answer to your question, talking won't do a damn bit of good. The woman's a screamer. Any time there's a complaint against her beloved Dwighty, Mrs. Goober, starts hollering like a locked-ward lunatic." He shook his head and pressed his lips together in a disagreeable fashion. "There's no reasoning with that woman."

"The kid's prowling outside my house at ten o'clock at night."

"There's no curfew. He's completely within his rights." A voice came over the intercom requesting the a.m. crew report to the roster room. "Look, the snot-nosed punk's on probation," the officer said. "My advice is to go down to district court and speak with his probation officer or even the clerk of courts. They might be able to strong arm the little creep."

"The little creep is six foot tall."

"I was thinking," the officer replied drolly, "more in terms of mental capacity rather than height."

******

On Saturday morning Angie was scheduled for her first lesson, but Carl called and told her to meet him at the lumberyard in the Marieville section of town. "I'll drive you over there," Grace suggested, "and then you hitch a ride back with Carl."

At the lumberyard, Carl was waiting out front besides a Chevy pickup truck. Grace kissed her daughter and made a motion to leave. "You can join us if you like," Carl said.

Grace killed the engine and slid out of the car. They went inside. A plump man with a red beard and plaid flannel shirt reached across the counter and shook Carl's hand. "Didn't you women see the sign on the door? No females allowed unless they're swinging 30-ounce Estwing framing hammers."

"Don't mind Fred," Carl explained. "He missed his calling in life as a standup comic."

A contractor plunked a cellophane bag bulging with sheetrock nails on the counter and went off in search of something else. Fred weighed the nails on a scale and wrote the price on the outside of the bag with an felt-tipped marker. "If you're looking for cherry, you're out of luck. We got an order from an overseas, Asian firm. They bought up our entire first grade cherry for a massive, building project in Japan. Paid a small fortune for the lumber." Fred shook his head thoughtfully. "All we got left is low-grade seconds."

"Maple and walnut are fine," Carl said. "Mind if we go up into the loft?"

The contractor reappeared with several tubes of clear caulking and a Forstner, flat-bottom drill bit. Fred started ringing up the order. "Watch your step, ladies. Stairs are narrow and it's a long way down."

They headed back outside. The temperature was frigid and Grace could feel the icy air burning her lungs. Crossing the lumberyard, the threesome passed row upon row of neatly stacked lumber - two-by-fours and pressure-treated decking, thicker boards for roof trusses, floor joists and decorative lattices. A forklift puttered by with a stack of cedar fencing. At the far end of the yard was a huge shed with a steep flight of stairs leading up into a darkened loft. Grace peered up the stairwell but the landing was invisible from where they stood.

Carl led the way up the narrow stairs, which ascended twenty feet before reaching the second level where more wood was stacked on pallets up against the walls. He flipped a light switch on. "It's colder up here than it was down below," Angie said between chattering teeth.

"Here's some maple." Carl gestured toward a stack of cream colored boards. He pulled a six-foot, coffee colored plank off an adjacent pile and stood it up on end. "This hickory's beautiful but hard as nails. You'd run through a dozen sanding belts just trying to shape one box." He moved on to the next flat. "Ash is a bit softer but brittle with an open grain and hard to finish."

"And I thought wood was wood." Grace made a tent over her nose and breathed out forcefully trying to warm the flesh. Judging by the pins and needles shooting up her calves, her feet were growing increasingly numb.

"What's this?" Angie asked, indicating a reddish brown board with a smooth, textured grain.

"Honduran mahogany. A mature tree can reach 150 feet high with a trunk diameter upwards of six feet. It's still very plentiful over there," Carl explained. "Unfortunately, most of the exotic, South American timber is seldom replanted so it's becoming endangered."

"This wood," Carl ran a hand over the Honduran mahogany, "is grown on tree plantations; it's a renewable, resource." He turned to Grace. "Remember the Beetles?"

"The rock group from the sixties?"

"Ringo's drums were made from mahogany. The wood produces a very warm, resonant tone. It's also great for guitars."

"Some of the finest musical instruments - violins, pianos, basses, and cellos - were originally made from European hardwoods. Native American spruce found in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, where the trees grew taller and straighter, was also greatly prized. The straighter the grain, the richer the tone."

"That metal beast over there, " he gestured at a huge machine that took up most of the left side of the room. "is an industrial grade planer. When contractors needed lumber sized to a special thickness, they run the wood through the machine, which thins the lumber in tiny increments."

Carl finally pulled up in front of a pile of coarse boards. No one had bothered to trim the bark; the slabs were random thicknesses and lengths. Unwanted, mismatched orphans and ugly lumber ducklings.

"Gross!" Angie turned up her nose.

"Gross and just what we are looking for." Carl grabbed the roughest plank, which was a solid inch thick and handed it to Angie. "Watch out for splinters. It's still got most of the bark on the back side."

"What's so special about that one?" Grace asked. The pins and needles in her toes were beginning to crawl up her ankles and she stomped her feet on the floor to get the blood flowing.

"This homely slab of black walnut is drop dead gorgeous, but its true character is hidden away under all the bark and dirt." He flipped the board over. "Look here." Angie and Grace stepped closer and stared at a section near the top of the board where the rough, scaly bark had been trimmed away. The chocolaty grain swirled in glorious unpredictable patterns. "We can buy this board for half the price of the others, trim the bark and mill the finished wood ourselves."

Carl picked over several other rough-cut boards then sent Grace and Angie down the steep stairwell. When they reached the bottom, he brought the lumber down from the loft, one unattractive plank at a time. Paying for the lumber, he loaded the boards in the rear of his truck then went back inside. Fred was at his post behind the cash register. "Got any exotics?"

"See for yourself." Fred gestured with a flick of his head. "Just stay away from the pear and butternut. It's all wormy."

Carl led the way into a backroom cluttered with broken picture frames, sharpening stones and carbide-tipped router bits. Up against the wall was an odd collection of smallish lumber, some cut at jagged angles. Carl pointed to a dark brown board with brilliant swirls rippling through the grain. "Morado from the mountains of Chile." He grabbed Angie's hand and pressed the heel of her palm up against the wood. "Morado belongs to the rosewood family. There's so much natural oil in the wood, you don't even need to apply a finish. You can polish the surface to a high gloss with nothing more than your bare hand."

He steered Angie's hand in a figure-eight and the surface of the chocolaty wood soon began to glow with a subtle richness. "I want some of that," she whispered.

"Perhaps next time." He reached for a thin board, light as skim milk and shot through with orange highlights. "Tulipwood. Also from the rosewood family." Carl took a small penknife and peeled a paper-thin shaving from the board. A pungent, sickly sweet perfume wafted through the room. He showed them an unusual African mahogany flecked with gold and a dark wine colored board with the peculiar name bubinga. There was a small bar of bluish black wood no longer than a Louisville slugger, baseball bat - kingwood. Even with a crack down the middle, the scruffy 'bat' was worth fifty dollars. And a tiny scrap of ebony—black as coal and twice as hard. Angie lofted the absurdly heavy wood in her hand. When she put it down again, her fingers were smudge with a blackish soot.

******

Later that night, after Angie showered, Grace held the blow-dryer while her daughter combed out her thick, wheat-colored hair. "So what did you learn today?"

Angie lifted a tuft of hair in the back. Her mother waved the dryer over the wet strands, causing them to flutter and spread like a golden fan. "Woodworking resembles the Catholic Church with its endless, repetitive rituals."

"Such as?"

Angie explained how each jewelry box required a set number of pieces all cut to exact specifications. The poem boxes, which were really quite simple, contained eight individual sections, but each had its own unique dimensions. Before any of the intricate joints or decorative elements could be added, the pieces had to be properly sized. "You know that industrial planer we saw up in the loft at the lumber yard?" Angie switched from the hairbrush to a wide-toothed comb and began untangling the bangs. "Carl has a similar tool but smaller."

"How nice!" Grace was admiring the look of her daughter's skin, the way the freshly washed hair caressed the bronze neck and fleshy shoulders. "What else did you talk about?"

Angie curled her lips and tossed her mother a questioning look. "Wood,... we talk about making things from wood." Grace backed off one setting on the dryer and began working the front of her face. "To make an heirloom quality box requires humility—the humility to fail a dozen times and keep plugging away until the artisan's flawed skills overtake his inner vision."

"Carl said that?"

"He's a little bit queer in the head like Mrs. Shapiro. They both talk in riddles." Her daughter relieved Grace of the blow-dryer and directed the warm air over the side of her scalp, lifting the hair between her fingers to exposed the last few damp strands. "For an older guy he's really in great shape. Probably good in bed, too."

"Angie, for God's sake!" Grace sputtered and fidgeted with her hands.

"Anybody who's that passionate about woodworking -"

"I think your hair is sufficiently dry." Her mother kissed her daughter's cheek and hurried from the bathroom.

Back in her own room Grace couldn't get the image of Carl Solomon out of her mind - the undisguised look of reverence that seeped from his hazel eyes when he ran a hand over a plank of mottled hickory up in the frigid lumber loft. When was the last time anyone had looked at her with that much honesty?

With Stewart, everything was about possessions, social status and image. When the marriage fell apart, they tried marriage counseling. What a joke! Stewart conveniently never bothered to show up half the time, and the psychologist branded her husband a phallic character disorder. Grace thought it rather crass and unprofessional for the man to share such damning details, but the counselor wasn't telling her anything she didn't already know. Stewart only cared about himself. An incorrigible, phallic character disorder, the man driven by enlightened self-interest - what's in it for numero uno!.

******

Every Saturday and two afternoons a week Grace dropped Angie off at Mrs. Shapiro's house. If they were still busy in the basement when she returned to retrieve her daughter, Grace would sip a cup of Twinning's tea and keep her company. By now she was used to her eccentricities, the way her thoughts floated off in a dozen unrelated directions. The perpetual streams of consciousness - it all made sense after a while, because there was always that gossamer thread that held the disparate ideas together.

"Are you religious?" Mrs. Shapiro asked. Grace noticed that the old woman's hands trembled later in the day as her physical strength ebbed.

"No, not at all."

"An atheist?"

"More like an agnostic," Grace hedged her bets.

The old woman became strangely animated and wrenched her crippled body up straighter in the chair, "There's a theory that Jesus Christ was a member of a secret organization, The Kat Yam Hamelech, the Dead Sea Sect. They broke with traditional orthodoxy, believing that Jewish religion had become too rigid with all its formal laws and ritual. Because elitist rabbis held all the power, there was nothing terribly democratic about religious life for the common Jew."

"Like the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages."

"Yes, a hundred times yes!" For the moment, her hands stopped shaking and her face took on a youthful, almost radiant glow. "The Dead Sea Sect believed that the brain was grossly overrated. The nefesh – human soul or whatever you chose to call it - could lead a person closer to God in a heartbeat than all the stultifying rituals in the Talmud or Shulchan Aruch."

"You love someone and treat them kindly," Mrs. Shapiro continued, "that is all the wisdom a person needs to live in harmony with the universe."

"I thought you said you weren't religious?" Grace challenged.

"And I'm not," the woman tossed the words out defiantly. "I haven't set foot in a synagogue in thirty years."

In the basement the sawing and planning had died down altogether. Carl and Angie were sweeping sawdust and putting hand tools away. "There was a medieval rabbi who couldn't find it in his heart to believe in a traditional God." The tremors in her hand had returned and now extended through the forearm causing the delicate China cup to clatter in the saucer she was holding. "He scoffed at the notion of a Jewish deity with a flowing white beard shaking his patriarchal fist in divine wrath. Self-righteous malarkey—that's what he called it."

"A Doubting Thomas of the Jewish persuasion," Grace said.

Mrs. Shapiro collected her thoughts before replying. "Refusing to worship God in the conventional manner, the heretic rabbi proclaimed, 'the scent of a rose is proof enough for the existence of God!'"

"The scent of a rose," Grace repeated softly. "How beautiful!" She was thinking beyond the medieval rabbi, remembering how Carl sliced the paper-thin membrane of tulipwood and the bittersweet fragrance wafted like a benediction through the back room in the lumberyard.

******

After her personal life fell apart, Grace turned away from religion altogether. Father Callahan, the priest where they attended as a family, was a staunch advocate of hellfire and brimstone. If he had lived in the fifteen hundreds, Grace was convinced the good father would have burned the books of Erasmus and Thomas Moore while, in his spare time, waging holy wars against the Huguenot infidels.

According to Father Callahan, original sin was endemic, a virulent plague for which there was no cure. Each Sunday the priest demanded parishioners acknowledge their sinfulness. His piercing eyes always sparkled with righteous indignation.

Indignation or hubris, stiff-necked spiritual pride?

If Father Callahan came out of the rectory one morning and found his Jeep Grand Cherokee up on cinder blocks, would he be so magnanimous and forgiving toward a Dwight Goober? And then there was Stewart. Because of his marital indiscretions, Grace was compelled to kneel alone patiently in the pew while the 'faithful' received Holy Communion.

One Sunday during a particularly prickly homily, Grace leaned over and whisper in her daughter's ear, "Phony baloney!" It didn't seem right to attend church regularly and harbor such vile feelings toward the church, so the following Sunday morning Grace told her daughter, "Get dressed. We're going to Adam's Diner for breakfast."

"What about Mass?"

"Church is for God-fearing Christians and true believers."

"And what are we?"

Grace thought a moment. "What we are right now is hungry. Let's get something to eat. Unless, of course, you'd rather check out the Episcopalians."

Angie's face dissolved in a toothy grin. "Let's eat!"

******

The first Tuesday in December, Principal Skinner cornered Grace between classes. "Test scores are in the toilet. I'm soliciting suggestions." Earlier in the day, Grace had noticed Ed Gray sitting in the principal's office. Neither man was smiling. An ugly rumor was filtering through the school; if trends continued on their downward spiral, the state could withhold the district's education funds or, worse case scenario, put the entire program into receivership.

Many of the English faculty were afraid of Principal Skinner. A large-boned hulking figure, he swilled Maalox as though it was a soft drink and kept a roll of antacids, unashamedly in full view on the top of his executive desk. "What does Ed suggest?" Grace asked.

"He's pushing for a full revamping of the curriculum to shadow last year's MCAS."

"Teach to the test." The principal nodded politely and waited for her response.

"It won't work."

"No?"

"They're eighth graders and their hormones are out of control." She spoke impulsively without bothering to edit her remarks. "The children are already overwhelmed by the increased workload."

"You're not telling me anything I don't already know." Grace shrugged. Principal Skinner rubbed his chin and a disgruntled noise welled up in his throat. "Well, at least you didn't try to humor me."

"And you didn't shoot the proverbial messenger."

"Sordid business earlier today," he said changing the subject.

"Sordid and unsavory," she wasn't quite sure if she should smile or assume a more serious expression, "but I think you handled it well."

Around ten o'clock shortly after first period, the librarian, Miss Curson, caught Benny Finnegan thumbing through a glossy magazine, Slatternly Sluts and Brazen Bimbos. The boy with the floppy ears and goofy, Alfred E Newman smile was hunkered down at a table near the reference desk ogling the centerfold, when Miss Curson sidled up behind him. The librarian dragged Benny straight to the office where, after reviewing its content, Pam Sullivan slipped the girlie magazine in a manila envelope. "Benny Finnegan is here to see you," she said delivering the envelope to Principal Skinner.

The secretary went back to where Benny was sitting. "What exactly is a slatternly slut?" Pam asked with a menacing edge to her voice. "Enlighten me."

"I dunno," Benny whined. In a daze, he seemed unable to properly collect his thoughts. "It's just some stupid stuff. I dunno nothin' at all."

"Bimbo," Miss Curson accentuated the first letter of the word with an explosive burst of air. "Can you even spell the word?"

The boy muttered something unintelligible, crooked his head to one side and began biting distractedly at a fingernail. "Speak up!" Miss Curson shouted.

"I only memorize the words on Mrs. Paulson's vocabulary list. Bimbo ain't on the list."

The two woman eyed each other in disbelief. "No, I shouldn't think so," Pam said frigidly. Her brow furrowed and she leered at him suspiciously. "Something funny?" The boy shook his head violently. "Then why are you smiling?"

"When I'm scared," Benny spoke haltingly, "I smile a lot. It's a nervous habit."

"Well," Miss Curson noted, "judging by the look on Principal Skinner's face when he opened the envelope, your cheek muscles are going to get a real good workout today." Hearing this, the boy, who was snuffling and wiping his runny nose with the back of his hand, began to wail despondently.

He was still sobbing when Grace was summoned to join Principal Skinner for the formal inquisition. Pacing back and forth in front of Benny, Principal Skinner had the look of a man on the edge. At six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, even some male staff were intimidated by the hulking bear of a man. "This is how you reward Mrs. Paulson, a woman who dedicated her entire life to educating young minds?"

Benny Finnegan continued to make unintelligible snuffling sounds. "Where did you get this filth?" the principal demanded.

"Under my father's bed."

"Which is where it should have stayed," Grace noted dourly.

"You tell my old man I took his magazine, he'll kill me," Benny moaned and bent double with his fists balled up under his soggy eyes.

Now that the initial shock had worn off, Grace was beginning to collect her thoughts. Benny Finnegan was a C student at best. A goofy, lovable dope. But in his defense, he seldom caused trouble, and his father was as much to blame for leaving the dirty magazine lying about. In all likelihood, Mr. Finnegan would whack his son a half dozen times when he found out what happened. Then he's take a short drive to Parker Street in the city's south end where, in a back room off the shabby Convenient Mart, he would purchase the latest, December edition of Slatternly Sluts and Brazen Bimbos.

Principal Skinner continued to pace about the office for another minute or so waving the manila envelope fitfully in the air. He didn't seem particularly angry anymore but the boy was too upset to notice the difference. "Normally I'd call your parents for an indiscretion this reckless, but I'm going to give you a break. Just this once and against my better judgment."

He momentarily left the room. When the man returned he was lugging a small paper shredder, which he set up in the far corner. "You will sit here," he pointed to a chair next to the shredder, "and remove all staples from the inside binding. Then you can feed your father's girly magazine into the shredder, one perverted page at a time."

"What do I tell my dad," Benny Finnegan's voice was cracking, "when he asks what happened to his favorite magazine?"

"Great question," Principal Skinner patted Benny playfully on the head, "and I'm sure between now and when you get home this afternoon, you'll figure out an equally clever answer."

Grace left the room and went back to class. Twenty minutes later, Benny Finnegan shuffled into the room wearing a haggard, beaten dog expression. The other children eyed him uncertainly but soon lost interest. Ten minutes later when the bell rang, Benny bolted for the door, but Grace pulled him up short. She waited for the other children to empty out of the classroom. "Tough morning, huh?"

Benny kept his eyes lowered waiting for permission to slip away. "You did something pretty dumb today, but that doesn't mean you're stupid." There was no response. His face frozen in a sour knot, the boy was going catatonic on her. "How's your sister?" she asked, changing the subject altogether.

Benny raised his head. "Which one?" There were four Finnegan sisters in all.

"The bow-legged girl." It was, admittedly, a peculiar moniker to hang on someone, but the Finnegan's were a queer lot. The mother, a stout woman who suffered from chronic roseola, dominated her husband, who was a hair taller than a dwarf with a receding chin. When they came to the parent-teacher conference in October, the couple reminded Grace of the culturally challenged hillbillies in the movie Deliverance.

"Nadine. She's okay now, I guess."

Grace remembered a painfully thin girl in hand-me-down clothes. Where Benny was awash in freckles, Nadine's complexion was pale and flawless. She was a stick-thin beauty with jet black hair which she seldom bothered to comb, translucent, pearly skin and buttery almond eyes. The ungainly limbs were ridiculously long for the emaciated body and her pebbly teeth, which looked like they belonged in a toddler's mouth, were separated by neat little spaces. The legs, like spring saplings, bowed perversely. Nadine Finnegan was damaged goods.

"Tell Nadine Mrs. Paulson was asking for her." Grace removed a small envelope from the desk drawer and handed it to Benny. "I wrote a short note to your parents, explaining what happened today. I told them that you were properly disciplined by Principal Skinner and terribly sorry for the foolishness." She peered at him intently. "You are sorry, aren't you?"

The boy grunted sheepishly and averted his eyes. "I suggested that your father find a more suitable place to store his adult reading material and not punish you anymore. What's done is done."

Benny Finnegan swallowed hard and his Adam's apple did a fleeting little jig bobbing up and down. "Gees, Mrs. Paulson, you're a peach." The boy mumbled something else under his breath but the words were unintelligible.

"Excuse me?"

"Mrs. Sullivan ain't half as nice as you," Benny growled. "She's just a plain old nasty bitch on a stick."

Grace smiled. Yes, Pam Sullivan, the office manager, is a sadistic, castrating bitch, who would spend the rest of the school year regaling the teaching staff with her personal account of Benny Finnegan's fall from grace.

"Bitch on a stick." Grace turned the phrase over on her tongue, savoring the colorful imagery.

******

The geeky young man at Home Depot who helped Grace with the light switch was named Reginald Worthington. Grace reached Reginald at the number on his business card. "I want to wallpaper my living room."

"No problem. Come by the store before closing and I'll get you situated. How'd you make out with the light switch?"

"After I remembered to shut the electricity off at the junction box, it was a piece of cake."

Grace spent twenty-nine dollars and thirty-five cents. She bought a wide brush for smoothing out the wet paper, a utility knife with a set of snap-off blades, a seam roller, scoring tool and five-gallon pail of wall primer. Reginald discouraged Grace from purchasing the plastic water tray. "Just roll the sheets inside out and soak them in your bathtub."

******

"Where's the repeat?" Grace held the roll of flowered wallpaper up alongside a fresh cut piece. Angie slid the two sheets back and forth until the patterns meshed.

"That looks about right." Two halves of a leaf fit snugly together. She penciled a mark on the paper and laid an aluminum square across the sheet. Her mother gave her a questioning look.

"I square up lumber with Carl. It's the same process." Angie cut the top then measured down six and a half feet and trimmed the bottom away from the roll. "Moment of truth."

They let the paper soak in the bathtub for half a minute then checked for dry spots. Grace climbed up on the step ladder, easing the damp paper up against the wall along a vertical line they had drawn earlier using a plumb bob. She ran the bristle brush straight down the middle of the first sheet then, in a sweeping motion, flattened the paper against the wall brushing from the center toward either side. Angie crimped the bottom around the baseboard and trimmed the excess away with the utility knife.

"One down, twenty-eight to go," Grace grinned and reached for the second sheet. At noontime they broke for lunch. The rear wall and half of one window was finished and, with the exception of a small patch under the window sill, they encountered no major problems.

"What the heck!" Angie gestured ominously toward the kitchen window. Dwight Goober was sitting on the rusty, backyard swing staring through the window at them eating their lunch.

Grace felt violated. She pulled on her coat and, grabbing the utility knife, wedged it in the pocket. "For God's sakes, don't do anything crazy!" Angie tried to restrain her mother, but Grace was already out the door.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Dwight just stared at her through bleary eyes. The bluish-red welts from his acne stood out in bold relief in the midday sun. "I ain't bothering you."

"You're on my property, you idiot."

Dwight rose and glowered at her, a cold-blooded, vindictive expression. She'd never seen such a look. The burnt out alcoholic at Adam's Diner was physically repulsive; he had a foul mouth and violent disposition, but there was a critical difference between the two: the older man had a soul. Dwight's eyes were dead - like looking into the soul of a monster, utterly satanic.

His feet remained firmly planted on the frozen earth while his upper torso twitched and twirled in a spastic dance. Grace felt her mind unraveling. She reached for the knife, placed her thumb on the plastic nub and, while still concealed in her coat pocket, extended the blade full length. "Get off my property."

"Okay, bitch." He rose from the swing and, in no great hurry, shambled off in the direction of the main street. "Wait a day or two. We'll see who's the idiot."

Grace went back indoors. "What happened?" Angie pressed.

"Nothing. He just went away."

"So why are you shaking?"

Her whole body was shimmering like jello. "I'm just cold, that's all," Grace said petulantly. "It's getting late. Lets hang the rest of the paper before we lose the light."

******

In the morning Grace called in sick to work and went over to the courthouse. A line in front of the red brick building stretched down the granite stairs halfway to the Dunkin' Donuts. "What's the problem?"

A boy with a stud in his nose and chipped tooth glowered at her. "Everyone's got to pass through security." Fifteen minutes later Grace made it to the front door.

The security guard ran her purse through a scanning device. "I need to speak to someone in probation."

"Juvey or adult?" the guard asked.

"He's a minor."

"Second floor, turn right at the elevator."

Grace took a seat on a wooden bench next to the Magistrate's Office and waited for the window to open. Built in the late forties, the courthouse was quite elegant in its day; now the building was just a creaky old dinosaur with a cracked marble façade and faded wainscot. A good thirty people were already milling about, all inner city types. Teenage boys with garish tattoos on their necks and body piercings sprawled on benches next to a motley collection haggard, middle-aged women. No adult men accompanied any of the youths. No fathers. None at all.

A girl in her late teens took a drink from the water cooler. A silver hoop dangled from her nostril and her punk hairdo was dyed orange. The chesty girl wore stiletto heels and a tank top. Where her nipples mashed up against the thin, stretch fabric, a matching pair of nibs protruded.

"A tank top in early December," Grace mused. "Very apropos!"

"Great news!" A balding man in a dark blue suit rushed up to the girl. "Judge tacked another year onto your current probation. Finito!"

"No jail time?" the girl pressed.

"Zippo!"

The girl's mother leaned closer. "We ain't paying no goddamn restitution!" Her brown hair was streaked with grey, the horsy teeth caked with a grungy yellow film. Despite a sallow complexion, she wore no makeup.

"No financial restitution. No jail time." The lawyer waved a hand dismissively in the air. "Let's go sign papers." They marched off triumphantly toward a paneled door and disappeared into the judge's chamber. The steel grate on the magistrate's window rose with a metallic clatter. Grace approached the window. "I need to speak to someone in probation."

"The youth's name?" The man was in his sixties with blond hair and a pleasant smile.

"Dwight Goober."

"Tall kid, ... awful complexion."

Grace nodded.

"Your son?" Grace looked horrified. "You're out of luck."

What?"

"Dwight Goober turned seventeen a little over a month ago. He's no longer technically a minor so he's off probation." Grace groaned and put her head in her hands. She told the officer what had happened. "You could get a restraining order," the magistrate counseled, "but then it's nothing more than a civil process. The bum gets a slap on the wrist and you're back to square one."

"I have a teenage daughter." Grace was emotionally worn out, tired to death. Nothing made any sense. "This kid is terrorizing my family, running amok, and nobody cares."

The older man stared at his hands with a sober expression. "Next time Dwight screws up, he's off to the big house."

"Next time?" Grace laughed convulsively, making a snorting sound through her nose. "It's the next time that worries me."

The man stared at her blankly. "He's a nasty creep, but it's out of my jurisdiction."

Grace went out onto the courthouse steps. As she exited through the metal detector at the front of the building, the grey-haired mother and her daughter with the protruding nipples came skipping down the courthouse steps. They looked absolutely triumphant, delirious with joy. No jail time. No restitution. Grace was curious to know what crime the sluttish little felon committed but didn't think either one would readily volunteer the information. The feisty, in-your-face defiance of both women was vintage Dwight Goober. The glacial eyes and brazen sneer that played at the corners of the lips branded them kindred spirits. At the bottom of the stairs the mother paused to light an unfiltered cigarette. She breathed in deeply blowing the white smoke out her nose in a thick plume. The woman offered her daughter a cigarette from the pack and lit it from the burning ash of her own butt.

Grace felt defiled, physically unclean. She would have to soak her weary bones in a shower of scalding water for at least a week to wash away all the fetid crud from a morning at the Brandenburg District Court.

******

As the winter progressed, Mrs. Shapiro obsessed with feeding the few remaining diehard birds. She sent Carl regularly to the feed and grain store to purchase supplies - a mixture of black sunflower seeds, cracked corn and millet for the jays and cardinals, thistle for the finches plus blocks of greasy suet for the woodpeckers and other, insect feeders. She occasionally asked Grace to help her restock the feeders. "Hard to believe," the old woman said, letting a feathery-light thistle sift through her fingers, "there's nourishment in such tiny seeds." Mrs. Shapiro tended to stuff the feeders to overflowing.

"Except for the most common varieties, people don't know their birds," Grace said. "Recognizing the differences among species - the downy woodpecker, let's say, from its close relative, the ladder-back or a goldfinch from a pine siskin - that's a bit harder. But still, what's the pleasure of bird watching if you don't know what to look for? It's like giving a house party and not bothering to remember your guests' names."

"I think," Mrs. Shapiro protested warily, "your analogy's a bit thin." She pointed out the window in the direction of a tall pine tree in the back yard. "A pair of cardinals were here earlier. A male and his brown mate. They only stayed a short time. I think the hungry jays scared them off."

Grace placed blocks of peanut butter suet in a rectangular, wire cage then wiped the greasy mess from her fingers. "Did you know that in winter, a black-capped chickadee can raise its body temperature to 107º Fahrenheit?" Grace was constantly collecting fragments of incidental trivia from various birding magazines and newsletters she subscribed to. "Their bodies become feathery furnaces, internal combustion systems to ward off the extreme cold.." She took a sip of tea and put the cup aside. "At night while they're resting, their temperature can drop as much as 30º, a survival mechanism to preserve energy for daytime foraging."

A loud din floated up from the basement. "I think the planer blades are getting a bit dull," Mrs. Shapiro said. "Your daughter already knows how to set the thickness gauge, so Carl tells me."

"She's a quick study," Grace replied.

An aluminum walker was positioned next to the recliner. The elderly woman had fallen several times over the summer, and Carl purchased the device from a durable medical company. "The foreign film, Dersu Uzala, is coming to the Avon."

"Never heard of it."

"A true classic. It makes the rounds every so often." Mrs. Shapiro's head bobbed up and down, an affirmation of some distant memory. "The Russian film is forty years old, but every time they bring it back, the theater sells out."

"You've seen it?"

"Three times. Once with each husband." She played with the rail of the walker. A pair of yellow tennis balls had been cut and pressed onto the rear legs so that the device wouldn't mar the floor. "Forgive my impertinence; I thought you and Carl might like to go. The Avon's just over the state line in Providence, if you were feeling self-conscious about anyone from school seeing you together."

The basement door opened and Angie, covered with sawdust, approached. "I'll think about it."

"Think about what?"

"Nothing," Grace shifted gears. "How's it going downstairs?"

"Come and see for yourself."

The workshop was surprisingly small, but Carl had arranged the machines in an ingenious fashion. All the large power tools—the drill press, band and miter saws, router table and jointer were pushed up against the walls so that the space in the center of the room remained empty. Whenever Carl needed to use a particular tool, he lugged it into the middle of the room, made his cuts and pushed it back against the far wall. Though it seemed like drudgery, as Carl explained, he eventually got use to positioning the tools and could set up the cuts rather quickly. When everything was situated at arm's length, there was little wasted effort.

"You're finished for the day?"

"Just sweeping up," He grabbed a push broom and began coaxing the sawdust that spread a gossamer film like dry snow the length of the workspace into a pile. "Feel free to look around."

Angie was stacking small wooden parts on a bench. The shelves above the bench held a collection of projects in various stages of completion. "Are these poem boxes?" Carl nodded and reached for a dust pan.

Grace opened a box. A dainty haiku by the Japanese master, Kotimichi, was rimmed by a scaly, emerald-colored wood. "Sassafras," Carl said. He took the box from her hand, rubbed the green wood with a piece of 220-grit sandpaper and raised it under her nose. A sweet, perfumed fragrance flooded her brain. The next box contained a pithy verse, translated from the German, by Rilke. There were two love poems— a sublime verse by Pablo Neruda and another from the Persian mystic, Rumi. Offerings from the French feminist, Anais Nin and e e cummings lay side by side.

"This is precious," Grace murmured. Carl put the broom aside and glanced over her shoulder. The author insisted that people lived their existence dogged by a whimsical fate. Avoiding danger was no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Security was a superstition that did not really exist in nature. The final stanza implied that life was either a daring adventure or nothing.

A daring adventure or nothing.

"Helen Keller," Grace spoke so softly the words were almost inaudible. "Who'd have ever though ..."

She felt the corners of her eyes burn and swallowed hard. Suddenly she was lightheaded, mildly disoriented. Grace turned to her daughter. "Go upstairs and say goodbye to Mrs. Shapiro," she said. "I'll join you in a minute." When Angie was gone she turned to Carl, "There's a foreign movie playing at the Avon in Providence. I was wondering if you'd like to go."

"That would be nice." Carl picked a block plane off the table. Turning the thumbscrew clockwise, he retracted the blade below the bottom edge and laid the tool on its side. "Its not a problem for you?" The lanky man was talking in an oblique code.

"A problem for other people, perhaps, not for me," Grace replied.

On the way home Grace told Angie about the foreign movie. "A date?"

"According to Mrs. Shapiro," Grace parried the question, "Akira Kurosawa is one of the finest Japanese film directors."

"Carl asked you out on a date?"

"No," her mother corrected. "I asked him." Angie slid down on the seat with an idiotic smile plastered across her face, her knees rammed up against the dashboard. She didn't stopped smiling the rest of the way home.

******

Carl picked Grace up in his battered, Chevy F-10, pickup truck. They drove across town, located the interstate just outside of Seekonk and reached the Rhode Island line in ten minutes.

He pulled off the highway in Pawtucket, an old mill town that had seen the cloth trade gobbled up by overseas markets. At the far end of Hope Street they passed Brown University. Many of the residential tenements, which were protected by the Providence Historical Society, sported decorative trim and gingerbread molding. Homeowners couldn't even change the color of their property without permission, insuring that the choice was in keeping with local preservation ordinances.

The film, Dersu Uzala, was over thirty years old yet, just as Mrs. Shapiro had predicted the line at the ticket window wound down the street and around the corner to where a dark-skinned street vender was selling falafel wraps and humus from an open air kiosk. The crowd was mostly Brown University students, dressed in raggedy, torn jeans and funky tops - kids whose parents earned salaries in the comfortable six figures. "Les miserable," Carl chuckled. "We should be so lucky." There was no malice in his tone. The ticket countered opened and the line surged forward.

The previous summer, Grace went to the movies on a blind date. The science teacher fixed her up with her cousin, also recently divorced. The guy seemed perfectly nice when she talked to him on the phone and on the ride to the theater acted perfectly normal. He sat quietly through the coming attractions then began pawing her five minutes into the main feature. On the pretext of using the restroom, Grace escaped to the lobby where she experienced a massive anxiety attack. A taxi brought her home. The boorish oaf never even bothered to find out why Grace had gone AWOL on a blind date.

The movie, which described the friendship between Dersu, the hunter, and Arsenyev, the explorer, was in subtitles. Midway through the film, the two men were stranded on a barren plain, when the weather turned bad with a violent wind storm and snow. They built a makeshift shelter from twigs, leaves, fallen branches and anything else they could find in the frozen Siberian landscape. Grace glanced at Carl. He was sitting with his lips slightly parted, lost in the pathos of the scene.

Afterwards they strolled over to the East Side Pancake House for dessert. The waitress took their orders and returned shortly with coffee and pastry. "Angie mentioned a neighborhood kid who's been causing you grief."

Grace added a teaspoon of sugar and stirred her coffee. "How much did she tell you?"

"Enough to know this troublemaker isn't going join the Peace Corps or become a model citizen any time soon." Carl sliced a wedge of apple pie and leaned forward. "There's a bar a couple miles down the road on Federal Hill called The Ironhorse Tap. If you have a problem with a worthless punk, you go see one of the patrons,... preferably a middle-aged man who wears several pounds of gold chains around his 20-inch neck and rings on either pinky finger." Carl's tone was flippant. "You bare your soul, tell the man how much you're willing to spend to make the problem go away. And then you drive home and forget all about The Ironhorse Tap"

Grace had an intimation of what Carl was talking about. Federal Hill in Providence was synonymous with the Mafia. People like the mob king, Raymond Patriaca and his near-do-well son, Ray Junior, ran the underworld. Tough guys with names like Buckles Mancini and Frankie the Moron Mirabelli - they ran prostitution, drugs, numbers and protection rackets. During the Feast of Saint Anthony, they strong-armed local merchants and extorted money from the street venders. God help the enterprising fool with the pepper and sausage cart who didn't plan to cough up the dough!

And if some troublesome dimwit like Dwight Goober was raining on your parade, you arranged a meeting with one of the regulars, some gentleman in good standing at the Ironhorse Tap social club, and they made the problem go away. No questions asked. It was curbstone justice at its finest.

"What's in it for me?" Carl finished his pie then extended his cup while the waitress freshened the coffee. "That's all these hoodlums understand. Freud's pleasure-pain principle."

"And whacking somebody on the kneecaps with a lead pipe," Grace interjected, "falls into the latter category." Carl cleared his throat as though he was going to say something but thought better of it.

The door opened and more college students crowded into the restaurant. Grace brushed a strand of hair away from her face. "Since Tuesday, we have been studying Gray's Elegy. A masterpiece, for sure, but the kids can't relate." She broke into an impromptu recitation:

'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;

Now drooping, woeful wan,

like one forlorn, Or crazed with care,

or cross'd in hopeless love.

Carl shook his head in disbelief. "The poem's three hundred years old," Grace groaned. "These kids are into MP3 players, Britney Spears and gangster rap. Old English isn't exactly their cup of tea. "

A college girl at the next table pulled a new sweater from a bag and showed it to her friends. The sweater was knitted from a bulky, moss-colored yarn. Grace had seen similar designs in the upscale boutiques on Newbury Street in Boston. Imported from Ireland, you couldn't touch them for under two hundred dollars. "I'm copying a verse from Gray's Elegy on the blackboard. When I turn around, a girl in the front row is picking her nose. I'm explaining the subtleties of Gray's Elegy and this ditsy girl with braces and a training bra is balancing a moist bugger on the tip of her finger."

"So I got this whacky idea," Grace rushed on, "what if I pilfered some verses from your poem boxes - the haiku by Kotimichi , that amazing Helen Keller quote, some Kahlil Gibran - and taught that instead."

"Well, I suppose-"

"There was a romantic poem by Pablo Neruda," she cut him short, "something about boundaries merging."

Carl lowered his eyes and thought hard. "I love you," he repeated from memory, "because I know no other way than this. Where I does not exist nor you."

"So close," Grace picked up the next line, "that your hand on my chest is my hand."

"So close that your eyes close," Carl delivered the final verse, "as I fall asleep."

Now that the noisy table of college students had paid their bill and left, the waitress began clearing the plates. "Well, I don't know," he added thoughtfully. "Neruda might be a little too intense for eighth graders with training bras."

He shook his head and began to chuckle as though at some private joke. "You're asking me, a janitor, for advice. I'm sure Ed Gray would get a kick out of that."

"Ed Gray is a horses ass!" Grace impulsively leaned across the table and kissed him on the lips, a generous, unhurried gesture. "It's the Neruda poem," she said by way of explanation. Her chest was heaving with emotion. "I seem to be having a real problem with personal boundaries. Yours and mine."

It took Carl a good minute to catch his breath. "I'd kiss you back," he said softly, "if it wasn't for the audience." Several customers, including a busboy and the waitress who was clearing the nearby table, were staring curiously at the couple.

Whatever else Grace had in mind to say about Gray's Elegy evaporated with the kiss, flew out the window of the East Side Pancake House on gilded wings. They spoke little during the ride home. Grace could feel her body glowing. When they were a mile from home Carl finally turned to look at her. "Remember when I refinished your classroom floor?" His expression was sober.

"That was over a year ago."

"It still looks good, don't you think?"

"Yes, I suppose."

"Acrylic doesn't hold up as well as polyurethane but it's still a nice product." He spoke in a flat, distracted monotone. "You were sorting papers and I was moving chairs around washing one portion of the floor at a time."

He leaned over and brushed her cheek with a feathery kiss. "That was when I first realized I was in love with you." Carl said nothing more for the remainder of the ride home.

******

Angie had already gone to bed and was fast asleep when Grace got home. The mail was in the kitchen piled neatly on the counter. A couple of sales flyers from the mall, the telephone bill and a notice for jury duty. On top of the pile was a crumbled potato chip bag. Lays Onion and Sour Cream. Grace found the plastic bad crammed into the mailbox earlier in the day. The word "BICH!' was scrawled across the front in ink. A gift from the illiterate Dwight Goober. The youth had begun throwing empty Marlboro cigarette wrappers on the front lawn along with soda cans and, most weekends, beer bottles. Not that anyone ever saw him. The debris was manageable. Problem was, Grace couldn't see where his petty hatefulness was going.

Grace had a theory. She called it the 'Theory of Misplaced Altruism'. Watching the Labor Day Telethon with Jerry Louis every September, her heart broke for the poor unfortunates, the children with muscular dystrophy twitching spastically in their high-backed wheelchairs. The courageous parents who devoted their lives to sick children were modern day saints. Grace called in her pledge and said a fervent prayer to the same inscrutable God she ignored through the rest of the year.

She had no similar sympathy for that motley collection of freaks and losers in the juvenile section of Brandenburg District Court. The Dwight Goobers of the world, the sluttish girl in the revealing tank top and her mother with the horsy teeth - they threatened to rip her world to pieces with their chaos and depravity. They used the system to beat the system just like the loudmouthed drunk who held court every morning at Adam's Diner. The implicit message: live a thoroughly despicable life, wreck your health then go on the dole.

Grace was reminded of a TV segment on 60-Minutes earlier in the week. A bully was terrorizing a small-town, Southern community - a redneck Dwight Goober beating up neighbors, vandalizing their property, making obscene and salacious remarks to their womenfolk. The town fathers held an impromptu meeting and decided to get rid of the bully. They shot him in the head five times and left him to bleed to death in a drainage ditch. Then they went home to their evening dinners, bowling leagues, Sunday morning church and choir practice. The crime was never solved even though everybody knew who did it. Things quieted down after that. Got back to normal. No more bully.

No more Dwight Goober.

After the 60-Minutes segment, Grace fantasized about buying a gun. Something high caliber, where the soft lead slugs would heat upon impact with flesh and expand as they tore through the body. She would hide in the back yard until her nocturnal nemesis arrived. No need to berate the bastard. No outbursts of self-righteous indignation. Grace, the mild-mannered English teacher, would morph into dispassionate executioner, a cross between The Terminator and Dirty Harry. Call it a cold-blooded act of revenge. No, not revenge. Retribution. Most people thought of retribution as punishment, but, properly understood, retribution was a commodity given or demanded in repayment. A dozen years from now, Grace rationalized, Dwight Goober would have amassed a small fortune in uncollected debts. Why wait?

******

"Mom?" Grace drifted into her daughter's bedroom. Angie was sitting up in bed now. "So, how was your date?"

Grace smoothed the comforter up around her daughter's throat. "I guess we'll have to learn to share."

It took a while for her mother's remark to register. "Figured as much."

"How so?"

"By the radiant look on your face." Angie smirked. "I haven't seen you this happy since last summer." Grace was trying to recall what spectacular event her daughter was referring to. "Our wilderness trip," Angie clarified. "The Appalachian Trail."

******

The summer following her divorce, Grace Paulson and her daughter hiked the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuously marked footpath in the world. Not the two thousand miles stretching from Maine's Mount Katahdin down through Springer Mountain in Georgia. No, nothing so daring. Rather they would start at the beginning (or the end, depending on your place of departure) and spend a week exploring various spots along the way.

"Well, I guess it's just us girls," Grace said. She was loading provisions in a backpack, the lightweight frame propped up against the refrigerator. There wouldn't be refrigerators where they were going. No stoves, central heating, flush toilets or other basic amenities. "We'll park twenty miles below the base of Mount Katahdin and hike north. Climb to the summit and retrace our steps."

Angie handed her mother a stack of wooden matches sealed in a watertight metal tube. "How high?"

"Five thousand two hundred and sixty-eight feet."

"Twelve feet less than a mile."

"A linear mile." Mrs. Grace smiled laconically. "Only if you zoom straight up, vertically, like a helicopter." She took the matches and stashed them in a side pocket next to the spare flashlight batteries. The tent was tiny, just large enough for two. In the morning, they drove north on route 95, crossing the New Hampshire state line around ten a.m.. They reached north central Maine by early afternoon and parked the car in a small lot just off the trail. The weather was warm and muggy. "Get your pack up high on your shoulders," Mrs. Grace cautioned, "so the weight's evenly distributed."

A clutch of hikers, some lugging huge quantities of gear and others traveling light, passed leisurely in either direction. No one seemed in any particular hurry. Grace knelt down and fingered a smallish leaf, red fading to yellow.

"It's just a maple leaf," Angie flexed her shoulders. The pack felt comfortable, not too heavy.

"Aspen," her mother corrected, indicating the serrated points arranged symmetrically across the leaf. "From the genus, populus. Throughout high school she had dreamed about becoming a botanists or, perhaps, an ornithologist. Plants and birds. Somewhere she got sidetracked.

"The flattened leafstalks," She held it up for her daughter to see, "make the leaves tremble at the slightest breeze. A very noisy plant." She let the leaf slip from her fingers. With the sun drooping over their left shoulders, they looked north toward the summit of Mount Katahdin in the far distance. "Let's go!" They struck off down the trail at a loping gait with Angie bringing up the rear. A half-mile down the rough trail they came to a pond, edged by thick stands of beech with a smattering of hemlock and white pine.

Except for a few gray squirrels, they saw no animals. Passing through an open field at the far end of the pond, Grace pointed out the variety of wildflowers. An endless succession of lady's slipper with their pouchy lips, black-eyed Susan and meadow lily. "That a jack-in-the-pulpit." She pointed to a leafy plant. "Also known as Indian turnip. The local natives ate the roots as a main part of their diet. Some old-timers probably still do."

Around six, though the sun was still high, they stopped for supper. Using water from a nearby stream, Grace boiled a pan of whole grain, basmati rice over an open fire. As it cooked, the rice released aromatic, nutty odor. In a separate pan she sautéed onions and green peppers. Other hikers passed on the trail. A young boy waved and his father tipped his hat. Everyone seemed intent on getting to his or her destination before the light bled out of the sky. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, but it was still warm. "We'll camp here for the night," Grace announced. "I'll put some coffee on before we unpack."

Angie took the blackened pan down to the stream, rinsed the last few grains of rice away and filled a canteen with fresh water. When she returned to the campsite an elderly man with a white beard and rickety legs was sitting on a stump. "Mr. Anderson," Angie's mother announced, "will be joining us for coffee."

The old man smiled displaying an expanse of pink gums and not very much in the way of teeth. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew an ivory flower surrounded by red berries. "For the girl."

"Dogwood?" Grace said. "They seldom flourish this far east."

The old man nodded. "Some people call them bunchberry, but it's just a different name for the same plant." Mr. Anderson wore a tan-colored hearing aide and his left hand trembled when he rested it in his lap, but it was unclear if he suffered from a chronic illness or was just tired. Despite the warm weather, he wore a long sleeve flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists. Grace fixed the coffee and passed around sugar cookies.

The old man's wife had passed away the previous spring. The year before she died, they hiked the Appalachian Trail as far down as Hump Mountain along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, crossing through rugged hill country where several inches of snow had fallen the previous day. "Toes got frostbitten, but it still turned out okay." Mr. Anderson took a sip of coffee and sloshed the dark liquid in the warm, tin cup. "Met some real decent folk, along the trail."

He threw the last of his coffee into the fire sending up a fitful tongue of orange sparks. The more he lingered the more melancholy the old man seemed. Angie no longer noticed the huge gaps between the teeth that were and the teeth that might have been, as they rested by the campfire. The songbirds had bedded down for the night, their incessant trilling upstaged by the rhythmic clatter of crickets and bullfrogs. "Tell you a funny story before I go," Mr. Anderson said. He rested his good hand over the other and the trembling momentarily subsided.

"A boy wakes up one morning to find his faithful dog missing. He fashions a sign on a piece of cardboard. The sign reads: Lost Dog. Walks with limp - got run over, sideswiped by tractor-trailer last spring; gimpy hind leg; cataracts both eyes, left ear chewed off in mishap with homicidal pit bull." The old man paused for dramatic effect. " Answers to the name Lucky."

Answers to the name Lucky.

The two women waved as the old man disappeared down the trail into the darkness. Grace understood perfectly well that most people, regardless of outward appearances, were chewed up and run over by the vagaries of life. You could have a hearty laugh while sitting at a campfire; the trick was to maintain one's composure after leaving the solitude of the Maine woods and rejoining the money-grubbing rat race. "That's our destination tomorrow," Grace pointed at a bright star above a ridge of spruce. "Polaris, the North Star. It hangs like a jewel on the end of the Little Dipper and points the way to Mount Katahdin."

"I'm going to bed," Grace said. She wondered if Mr. Anderson's left hand had stopped trembling. And did he yearn for his soul mate when he lay in his sleeping bag? Did he dream of their wintry exploits on Hump Mountain? He wouldn't have to worry about frostbite tonight. Around midnight, Angie heard her mother stir. She rolled out of the sleeping bag and went outside. "What's the matter?" Angie asked when she returned.

"Had to pee." Grace crawled back into the sleeping bag and lay still.

"I hope Mr. Anderson's all right," Angie whispered. "I mean, what if something happened to him?"

Her mother reached out and brushed the girl's cheek with her fingertips. The gesture felt like a benediction. "Angie, you are a precious child. And I'm proud to call you my daughter."

A few minutes later, Grace could hear her daughter's steady breathing. Somewhere deep in the woods an owl let looses with a prolonged, resonant hoot deep as a foghorn. The crickets and frogs were unimpressed. Mr. Anderson was probably also fast asleep, dreaming about his lost youth and all the wonderful adventures that still awaited him on the A.T..

In the morning Angie woke to find her mother's sleeping bag empty. Grace returned before her daughter had wrestled her hiking boots on. "Come with me!" She dragged Angie down the trail past the stream, then down a narrower footpath. At the bottom of the gravelly trail, the trees fell away to reveal a sandy pond rimmed with hawthorn and Canadian yew. "A blizzard of rainbow trout! Look for yourself."

Angie stood with her boots nipping the water and watched as a steady procession of speckled fish cruised in and out of the shallows. "There's enough food to feed an army."

"Or a hungry Indian tribe," her mother interjected. Grace began pulling her clothes off, flinging her blouse, bra and shorts in a pile.

Angie' face flamed brighter than a sugar maple in late October. "Are you nuts!"

"It's seven o'clock in the morning. No one's probably been by this pond in weeks. Most of the hikers won't be back on the trail for another hour or two." Her mother waded into the water up to her knees and, bending low, began slapping water on her arms and breasts. Grace's body was still strong and athletic, prettier than most women's her age; not that she ever used her attractiveness to gain an unfair advantage.

If anyone had suggested a mere five minutes ago that Angie would find herself skinny-dipping with her mother in the boondocks of Maine, she would have rolled her eyes and deemed them certifiably insane. The young girl pulled her T-shirt up over her head in one smooth motion. "How's the water?"

"Warm as a bathtub." Her mother was floating on her back toward the middle of the pond. Angie could feel a scaly body brush up against her calf as she waded into the shallows.

They reached the base of Mount Katahdin in the early afternoon, but the weather had turned gray and heavy rain pummeled the trail into a muddy mess. "This certainly isn't fun," Angie grumbled. A group of hikers returning from the summit looked beleaguered, worn out and miserable. Her mother spoke with one of the climbers. "It's tough going. There's a raw wind and, without sun, a good twenty degrees colder."

They went and huddled under a lean-to with a dozen other campers. Half an hour later the rain was still pelting the ground with relentless force. "We'll climb tomorrow," her mother announced. "I'll go pitch the tent and we'll make do until this awful weather breaks."

"Everything soaked. There's no a decent place to pitch a tent."

"We're all in the same boat." Grace gestured at the rest of the hikers. "You'll just have to make do." She left Angie crouched under the lean-to and went off to see about the tent.

Angie began to cry but nobody noticed. They didn't notice because all the hikers were soaked to the bone and her tears just looked like so much extra precipitation. Here we are in the middle of nowhere. We can't even go to a motel because our stupid car is twenty stupid miles away. We're gonna have to make do with salami and cheese and sugar cookies. How appetizing! A regular gourmet spread!

A half-hour later, Grace returned. She managed to pitch the tent beneath a large fir. The ground was covered with a bed of pine needles, which held up reasonably well under the rain. Angie crawled into the tent and unwrapped her sleeping bag. Then she slithered in, zipped it up around her neck and, with the rain mercilessly slashing the canvas at a forty-five degree angle, went to sleep.

No matter that it was two in the afternoon and that she hadn't bothered to change out of her damp clothes or eaten anything since breakfast. Angie dozed and when she woke, she slept again. She snoozed through eleven straight hours of rain and when she woke, the sun was shining, she felt refreshed and sublimely happy. Her mother was already cooking up a pan of fried salami. She handed Angie a cup of coffee. They ate quickly without much conversation, and were back on the trail within an hour.

"Tuckahoe," Grace indicated a plant growing in the cleft of a lichen-stained rock. "Also known as Indian bread. The roots are quite tasty or at least some Native Americans think so."

They reached the summit of Mount Katahdin by early afternoon and lingered for an hour with a dozen other hikers. On the way down they recognized Mr. Anderson. The grizzled veteran gave them a toothless, thin-lipped smile as he plodded past. He wore a knapsack without a frame and a knobby walking stick. "Traveling light in his old age," Grace observed.

"How old do you think he is?"

"Hard to say. Eighty give or take a decade." Angie couldn't be sure if her mother was pulling her leg. What would make an old man in poor health want to be out in the wilderness alone and unprotected? The same torrential downpour that trapped them for most of the previous day had menaced him, too. But the adaptable and resilient old man had made it through with his sunny disposition intact.

Grace suggested that they head south until the setting sun got caught up on the treetops before pitching camp. They had been moving slowly down a rutted path when Angie grabbed her mother's arm and brought her up short. A hundred feet away in a secluded pond stood a full-grown moose. The large, palmate antlers showed that it was a male. He dipped his head beneath the water and, when the broad muzzle reappeared, it was full of soggy plants ripped from the muddy water. They stood and watched the animal forage its way downstream before moving off down the trail.

Later that night after they had eaten their whole grain rice and vegetables followed by scalding coffee and sugar cookies, Grace said, "I would tell how much I love you, darling daughter, but something essential always gets lost in the unwieldy fabric of language,... the wordiness." She took Angie's face in her callused hands and planted a moist kiss on either cheek. "Better that we should muck about with the likes of Mr. Anderson or watch a bull moose at dinner."

"Or skinny-dip with rainbow trout."

Grace's sly smile was wasted on the darkness. "Yes, that too."

Part II

"We're going to try something a bit different today," Grace announced. Already off to a bad start, she had inadvertently slipped into 'the voice', that stilted, high-pitched inflection that drove her daughter crazy.

Okay. Take a deep breath and start again.

"I want everybody to come and sit here on the floor in a circle. Right now. Let's move, move, move!"

That got their attention. The class rose from their seats and sashayed toward the front of the room. "Take a look at this box." Grace held up one of Carl's latest creations, a poem box done in contrasting light and dark woods. "Samantha," she turned to a tall black girl with cornrow beaded hair, "Lift the lid and tell us what you find inside."

The girl propped the box on her lap and opened it.

"We are each of us angels with only one wing

And we can only fly by embracing one another.

Luci,... Luci..."

"Luciano de Crescenzo," Grace refused to get bogged down in incidentals. She waved a fist in the air. "What's the lady with the exotic name trying to tell us? She scanned the room. "Samantha, what does the poem mean to you?"

"I dunno."

A commotion erupted in the hallway. Grace could hear Principal Skinner reprimanding a student late for class. What if he burst into her English class and found the class scattered on the floor? "We are each of us angels with only one wing." Grace stomped back and forth like a wild woman. "What good is a deformed angel?"

There are no takers. I'm losing them. This is worse than Gray's Elegy. A blade of terror shot through Grace's viscera. She had the momentary urge to cut and run, bolt for the classroom door and never look back. "Come here!" She grabbed the black girl by the arm and yanked her to her feet. "Raise your left arm straight out. You're damaged goods,... a wounded bird"

"Rebecca." She gestured toward a freckle-faced girl with braces. "Stand here." She positioned her to the right of the dark-skinned girl. "Did you feel that?"

"Feel what?" the freckle-faced girl looked muddled.

"A hunter just mistook an angel for a mallard and blasted your left arm,... wing with buckshot. You're in worse shape than Samantha."

"Teacher's loosing it," somebody whispered amid nervous giggles. Resurrected from the dead, the class was actually paying attention.

"Now put your broken wings around each other's waste, and let's see if we can't fly from here to the coat rack." Grace started waving her own arms up and down pantomiming an injured bird in labored flight, as she moved off in the direction of the coat rack at the rear of the classroom. The twosome followed, tripping over their feet, fluttering their free arms and laughing like fools.

"Pair up! Pair up!" Grace commanded, insisting that the class choose partners. "Picture yourselves as the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk."

"Wright Sisters," Samantha cried and shot off in another direction with her lopsided partner in tow.

Five minutes later when the hysteria died down, Grace sent them back to their seats. "Alright, so we had a little fun, but what did you learn about the human condition?" Grace pointed at a boy in the front row wearing an Adidas sweatshirt. "We are each of us angels. What's the underlying message?"

The boy crooked his head to one side and tapped a pencil listlessly on the desk. "Angels are special. Everyone, not just rich people or movie stars, is unique."

Grace raised her right arm and fluttered it back and forth. "In the poem everyone is missing a wing. What's going on here?"

"People,... all of us," a girl with her blond hair tied back in a French braid, responded, "are imperfect, ...mortal."

"Mortal. I like that word. Nobody's perfect. We all have failings and shortcomings, but if we band together, embrace each other, we can do amazing things." Grace drifted over to the blackboard and in cursive script wrote: SYNERGY.

"Synergy - the interaction of two or more agents so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of the individual parts." Several students were copying the definition off the blackboard. The poem had finally hit them where they lived, blossomed and come alive.

"Since we're on the subject of angels", Grace glanced up at the clock. In ten minutes the bell would send them scurrying to their next class. "The Talmud is a book of Jewish wisdom, clever sayings, advice and teaching. It's written in the Talmud that every blade of grass has an angel that hovers over it and whispers, Grow! Grow!"

The children were staring at her with rapt expressions. This wasn't school. It was pure magic. Educational sorcery with no Kenny 'the comedian' Kirkland to ruin the moment. "I need a blade of grass," Grace bellowed. "Grass? Grass?" A tentative hand lifted chest high. The boy, Lester Boswell, was small in stature and rather scrawny. Because of a pronounced stammer, he was seeing both the speech therapist and school psychologist, Dr. Rosen. "Lester, come sit here in the front of the room."

"Okay, class, forget about your former classmate. Lester Boswell doesn't exist anymore." A barrage of laughter rumbled through the room and several boys hooted. "What we have now," Grace ignored their foolishness, "is a single, solitary blade of grass. According to the Talmud every single blade of grass has its own angel to nurture and protect, and I, coincidentally, just so happen to be a grass angel. "Grow!" she chanted. "Grow! Grow! Grow!"

The children picked up the incantation which, quickly swelled into a thunderous wave of unsolicited affection. Midway through the chorus, Grace raised Lester Boswell to his knees, full height and, finally, up on his toes in a symbolic gesture. Everybody cheered. Bedlam ensued. The bell rang. In the far corner of the room, abandoned and shoved up against a slightly bedraggled coat rack on the refurbished, wheat-colored floor lay Carl Solomon's box.

******

In the morning when Grace went out to retrieve the Sunday paper the house was covered with egg. The slimy yolk and brittle shells reached as high as the second level with an ugly yellow streak smeared across the picture window. She went back in the house and called the police. A patrol car drove up ten minutes later. The officer was the same man she had spoken to at the station.

"What a mess!" The officer tilted his neck so far back his mouth hung open. "Any idea who might have done this?"

"Does the name Dwight Goober ring a bell?" Grace was staring at the officer's leather gun holster. It hugged a small caliber revolver with a leather strap over the firing pin. A pair of silver handcuffs was seated in a leather pouch close by the lacquered nightstick.

"Did you see him actually throw the eggs?"

Did I see the Village Idiot egg my house? As a matter of fact, I was coming home from a date, my first romantic soiree since my moronic ex-husband gave me the boot, and there was Dwight Goober, standing in the middle of the street with an egg in each hand. They were locally grown, native brown eggs not the white-shelled variety normally sold in the supermarket. I saw what he did and I'm willing to swear to it on the King James Bible, Koran, Old Testament, I Ching and anything else readily available. I'll even take a freaking lie detector test if necessary to put the creep behind bars where he belongs.

"I know it's that pimply-faced bastard, but I didn't see him throw the eggs."

The officer shook his head. "You're gonna need an extension ladder to clear that mess."

"What about Dwight?"

"It's your word against his." The officer scratched an fleshy earlobe. He had taken out a small pad and pen but put them away without writing anything down. "You know, there's this guy who installed surveillance equipment for the school district. He also does residential. Fenton,... Yah, Hubert Fenton. He might be able to help you out."

Grace was beginning to understand why mild-mannered Walter Mitty types suddenly went postal. The guy who never owned a BB gun much less a hunting rifle buys an AK47 and turns his workplace into a carnival shooting gallery. "You're telling me to put a surveillance camera on my house."

"Cameras," the officer qualified. "You'll probably need more than one." The thickset man heaved his belt higher up on his hips. The gun and the nightstick rocked back and forth, a small container of mace, which Grace had overlooked, nestled firmly in a rear compartment. "You got an extension ladder?" The officer asked.

Grace once owned a shiny 30-foot extension ladder stored under the crawlspace. It had a deluxe, heavy-duty nylon rope for height adjustments and extra-wide rungs. Stewart took the ladder when he packed his belongings. "Yes," Grace lied, "I have a ladder."

******

Saturday morning a pelting, wind-driven snow punished the city. The plows, which had been out since before dawn, were still struggling to keep up with the treacherous black ice. By ten o'clock temperatures eased up a few degrees and the snow shifted over to freezing sleet with a thick scum of slush clogging gutters and sewer drains. "Why aren't you dressed?" Grace asked.

Angie was curled up in bed with the blanket over her head. "Carl cancelled. Said he had to go somewhere."

A half hour later a familiar pickup truck pulled up in front of the driveway, an extension ladder lashed to the bed with bungee cords. "Heard about your late night visitor." He released the tension on the cords and lifted the ladder from the truck. Raising the outer track until the top rested against the gutter, he secured the guideline. "Quite a mess."

A plow turned onto the street driving the icy sludge ahead of it. "Should you be climbing in the snow?"

Carl walked back as far as the curb to assess the damage. "If this rain freezes, you'll never get the crud off before spring." The ladder was tilted at a cockeyed angle. A thin flagstone borrowed from the walkway remedied the problem.

"No, that's not an option." The thought of her house looking like a pigsty through the remainder of the winter took all the fight out of her. Angie fully dressed came out and stood next to her mother. "You knew?"

The girl smiled weakly and averted her eyes. "I told him what happened. Didn't know he'd take it so personal."

Carl was already halfway up the ladder and rubbing a rag, which he had soaked in some mysterious solvent, against the siding. The yellow goo hardly budged. He climbed back down and went to the truck. Rummaging in a toolbox, he returned carrying a small chisel. "If this tool can trim rock maple, egg yolk should be a breeze." He climbed back up the ladder and ran the blade gently against the siding and a section of egg yolk curled away in one long strip. Carl grabbed the tail end of the egg between a thumb and index finger then released his gripped and watched the gossamer fluff float down to the ground. "Progress!"

Three quarters of an hour later he lowered the ladder and secured it in the bed of the truck. "The jerk who did this to you, does he have a name?"

"What difference does it make?"

"Just curious."

"Dwight Goober," Angie blurted.

The wind was blowing fitfully lashing the sleet at a cruel angle. "Does Mr. Goober live close by?"

Grace grabbed him by the forearm and steered Carl toward the front door. "Why don't you come in and dry off. I'll put the coffee on."

******

"Did Carl mention the craft fair?" Angie asked. They were seated at the kitchen table. Carl's coat and baseball cap was spinning in the dryer.

Grace looked up. "What's this?"

"After someone builds half a hundred or so boxes," Carl replied, "they have to sell them. There's a craft fair over to Mansfield next month and I rented a booth. If it's alright, I thought Angie could come and get savvy on the business end."

Grace inched a box of oatmeal cookies across the table. "Only if her mother can chaperone." She was still thinking about the egg. Carl's high-powered cleaner proved useless, but with the tiny chisel he managed to scrape away every strand of yolk and egg white. The house was restored back to its original state. The yellow mess was gone and her universe restored to a modicum of harmony.

"You've done this before?"

"Mansfield's my fifth show. Didn't do so hot the first couple."

"Poor sales?"

Carl grinned sheepishly. "Poor salesmanship. I just sat in the back of my booth wearing a grumpy expression and playing the tortured artist. Probably scared half the customers away."

"Weirrrd!" Angie was peeling off her ice-covered socks for a dry pair.

"The guy next to me had a line of handmade leather belts. Nice stuff but nothing to write home about. He was up on his feet, schmoozing with the customers, cracking jokes and selling belts like crazy. I put two and two together. Decided I needed a major 'poisonality' overhaul."

"I can't picture it," Grace said in a mocking tone.

"No really," he protested. "I pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. Went from antisocial recluse to salesman-of-the-year. Well, it wasn't quite so dramatic, but I did figure out how to warm up to the customers."

"Tell you a funny story." Carl reached for an oatmeal cookie. "There was this potter at the last fair. Her parents owned a gift store in rural Tennessee. This local Indian, a Chickasaw woman, sashays into the store one day. She weaves baskets with tribal designs." "The owner asks, 'How much do you want for the baskets?' and she says 'I don't know. Maybe five or ten bucks depending on size.' So she starts selling her handmade baskets in the gift store."

Carl bit into a cookie and washed it down with swig of coffee. "Here's where it gets interesting. A couple years go by. A tourist from Boston visits the store one day and buys a basket. Six months later the Chickasaw basket business goes hog wild. Baskets are selling like crazy. The Indian woman can't weave them fast enough, and the inventory is literally flying off the shelves."

"Come to find out, the tourist was a curator at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, where he placed the basket on exhibit as Native American folk art. Now the Indian woman is no longer just a basket weaver; she's an artisan – no, make that a Native American artiste, whose medium is reeds and natural dyes. The price mushrooms through the roof. People are paying two hundred, five hundred, a thousand dollars for a single basket!"

"And then what?"

"And then the Indian woman, who was in her seventies, drops dead. Rumor has it that many of the townsfolk, local yokels with no great appreciation for art, have squirreled Chickasaw Indian baskets away in their attics or put them up for sale for a dollar or two at garage sales and flea markets. With every new twist the story gets nuttier."

Grace swept up some cookie crumbs in the palm of her hand and threw them in the trash. "And they originally cost a couple of bucks." The plow, which had struggled up to the cul-de-sac, was making its return run with the slushy mess gurgling and frothing ahead of the blade. "Let's see about your coat," Grace rose from the table and led the way down stairs. The dryer was still spinning, but when she pulled the coat and hat out they were toasty warm and dry."

Grace folded herself against the man's chest and his arms came up behind her. He kissed her on the lips. "Carl, what's happening?"

"Hard to say." There was long pause before he finally spoke again. "Ed Gray is head of the English Department."

"That's right."

"So technically, he's your boss." Carl kissed her neck. "The other day we passed in the hallway and he sneered at me. Apparently, your boss still harbors a grudge."

Grace had little trouble picturing Ed Gray sneering at Carl Solomon. Five minutes into the burnt-out drunk's tirade at the diner, Ed's nose had begun to twitch, an uncontrollable nervous tic, while his upper lip curled half way to his eyebrows. Grace didn't bother to tell Carl about the PR campaign to reclaim his damaged credibility. "Ed Gray lives in a world of musty books he can't even begin to appreciate."

"But he could make your life miserable." Carl released his grip and stepped back, putting his dry jacket back on.

Grace was trying to remember the Helen Keller quote, but her brain fogged over - something about living with uncertainty, danger being the natural state of animals in the wild. "Yes, the neurotic turd can make my life a living hell," Grace smiled, a defiant challenge, "but I'm counting on you setting everything right again." Before he could respond, she lifted up on her toes, planting a kiss on a bristly cheek. "And I'm coming to the Mansfield show whether you like it or not."

******

Tuesday before class Dr. Rosen, the school psychologist, stopped by the classroom. The psychologist wore a dozen different hats at Brandenburg. He tested special needs kids to determine grade levels and where their educational weakness lay. He also counseled kids with emotional problems and ran a play therapy group at the elementary school. "Lester Boswell's mother says you're a saint," Dr. Rosen threw the remark out in an off-hand manner. "She told me about what you did in the poetry class,... getting Lester actively involved."

"The class got a kick out of it."

Lester Boswell hadn't started the year in Grace's class. He transferred from Charlotte Anderson's home room in early October. Charlotte was menopausal and taking it out on the class. When her hormones were crashing, teachers could hear the hysterical outbursts from three doors down. Lester, the quiet little gnome with wire-rimmed glasses and a speech impediment, frequently bore the brunt of her feminine angst. After an angry call from the Boswells, Principal Skinner pulled the curtains shut and hunkered down in his office with Dr. Rosen. A week later, Lester was quietly transferred to Grace's eighth grade class. Charlotte Anderson promptly chose another child, Roberta Tolbert, to replace Lester as black sheep and worthless runt-of-the-litter. Fortunately, Roberta was more resilient than Lester; the teacher's snide tirades rolled off her thick shoulders like so much briny water off a seagull's back.

"Whatever you did," Dr. Rosen continued, "made Lester feel special."

"He is special," she murmured as an afterthought. "That was the underlying theme of the two poems we read."

"When she comes to grips with her midlife crisis," the psychologist said dryly, "be sure to share that bit of wisdom with Charlotte." Glancing at his watch, Dr. Rosen rose to leave.

"That was me a year and a half ago," Grace blurted out just before the psychologist reached the door.

"Excuse me?"

"Charlotte Anderson. It's her season to crash and burn. A year ago last December I wasn't much better, what with my marriage in shambles."

"But you're doing better now," the psychologist remarked.

"Yes, Lester Boswell and I are having a reasonably decent year."

******

The week before Christmas Mrs. Shapiro caught the flu. Carl drove her over to the emergency room at Bayberry Hospital. A nurse took her blood pressure and pulse then clipped a device that looked like a high tech clothespin onto the tip of her index finger "Blood oxygen's a bit low."

The doctor wanted to admit her but the cantankerous woman wouldn't cooperate so they negotiated a compromise. The hospital pumped two bags of electrolytes into a knobby vein in her arm and sent her home with a prescription for cough syrup with codeine and a week's worth of antibiotics to manage the sinus infection. Grace cooked up a pot of homemade chicken soup with escarole, celery, carrots and basmati rice and, while Carl and Angie were downstairs building jewelry chests, she kept the invalid company.

"I don't know what all the fuss is about." Mrs. Shapiro's frail body was racked with a broadside of uncontrollable coughing. Propped up in bed with a pillow under her head, her dark hair was matted against her forehead in pasty ringlets." Why are you looking at me like that?"

Grace placed the bowl of soup on the bedside table and waited for the convulsive fit to subside." Like what?"

"Like if you turned your back for five minutes, you'd find me keeled over stiff as a board."

"That's not likely."

"Why not?"

Grace fluffed an extra pillow and positioned it behind the woman's scrawny shoulder blades. "Rigor mortis doesn't set in for at least two hours after a person passes away. And that's a medical fact."

"I'll remember that the next time I'm planning to drop dead." She wiped her mouth and the tissue was smeared with putrid looking greenish phlegm.

"You look a mess," Grace replied calmly. "And you probably belong in the hospital."

"So now I'm inconveniencing you?" She groused pugnaciously. "A poor old woman wants nothing more than to die with dignity in the comfort of her own home, but you can't be bothered."

"Eat the soup," Grace counseled, handing her a spoon, "and cheat death."

"Cheat the devil's more like it." She sipped listlessly at the broth and pushed the bowl away. "So, I heard this improbable rumor. Utterly ridiculous nonsense."

"Which was?"

"No, no! Nothing even worth mentioning." Grace raised a skeptical eye and the old lady continued, "That some mentally unbalanced English teacher was dating the school janitor."

"That sounds about right."

"Anyone else know?"

"Not yet. We're dating and it's no secret. Sooner or later someone from the school will see us out in public. Then we'll deal with it."

"A month after he came to board with me," the old woman abruptly shifted gears, "Carl asked for something to read. I said, 'Why don't we take a look in the den. '"

In the rear of the house, Mrs. Shapiro's third husband, Oscar, had converted the den into a private library. Putting his carpentry skills to good use, the man designed custom, floor-to-ceiling, mahogany bookcases. The shelves were stocked with literature in various languages, philosophy and poetry. "Something to read," Mrs. Shapiro sighed. "What would you offer Rousseau's noble savage or one of the captives in Plato's hypothetical cave?" There was nothing condescending or sardonic in her tone. "I suggested Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Carl plowed through Steinbeck in a week. I offered him Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illyich. He devoured the novella the same day. A collection of Chekhov's short stories went down like an hors d'oeuvre."

"Last month Carl discovered Wittgenstein, the linguistic philosopher. An English translation of the Tractatus was squirreled away on an upper shelf in the den. He insisted that I explain the epistemological limitations of spoken language." The old woman had to breathe through her mouth now, her sinuses swollen shut. "A person kisses the picture of an absent loved one. How do we understand the gesture? Is the kiss symbolic or can it be understood at a deeper level? Such actions may simply be the spontaneous expression of an inner need - or no need at all."

Grace felt her usually nimble her brain balk at the odd concept. "Where kissing is concerned, lately I prefer Neruda over the linguistic philosophers."

Mrs. Shapiro either missed the oblique humor or chose to ignored it. She shook her head and blew out her cheeks in exasperation. "Even for a seasoned academic, Wittgenstein's theories are daunting." The room grew silent. The old woman seemed momentarily lost in thought staring at the flowered pattern on her bed sheet. Finally she glanced up with a blank expression and said, "Perhaps you would like to check on your daughter."

"Yes, I think I'll go downstairs."

In the basement Carl was cutting a thick slab of wood on the band saw. The block seemed to be moving through the quarter-inch, vertical blade in slow motion following the markings on a paper outline masking-taped to the top. Grace waited until he shut the machine down and stepped away from the tool before entering the work area. Angie was off in a corner spreading glue on small sections of wood.

"What are you making?"

"Ring boxes," her daughter replied, smearing yellow glue with the tip of a finger over a mitered joint. The box contained six sides. She stood them up on edge, nudging the joints together in a lopsided hexagon. "Hand me that rubber band," Angie said. The young girl stretched a band around the perimeter of the box. The sides bowed and twisted, but when the band was firmly in place, the wood settled into a perfectly symmetrical hexagon.

Grace handed her daughter another band which she secured over the bottom of the box. "Very clever." Carl flipped the band saw back on again, which was Grace's cue to head back upstairs.

Mrs. Shapiro was lying in bed with a pensive expression. "Are there many stupid teachers at the school?"

Grace was momentarily, flustered by the odd remark, but the sick woman rushed ahead without waiting for a reply. "Oh, such a rude thing to say! Forgive my impertinence." Despite her protests, she didn't seem the least bit contrite. In fact, she was smiling wickedly now, staring off into space through squinty eyes. "There's an old spinster who lives three doors down from here, a retired teacher. She was planning a trip to visit the Grand Canyon over the summer. The woman took the MBTA red line train into Boston so she could apply for a visa. Someone had to explain to Elsie that Colorado was halfway across the country but still located within the continental United States."

Elsie Davenport. Grace had worked with her at another school several years back. Even then, the woman's foolishness was legendary. Worse than legendary, common knowledge. The superintendent tried to fire her for gross incompetence, but the teacher's union dug in solidly behind Elsie. In the end it would have cost five times her annual pay to litigate the case in court so the school committee allowed dopey Elsie to muddle through to retirement.

"Imagine," Mrs. Shapiro suddenly reached out and, grabbing Grace by the wrist, pulled her close, "that you are working at a menial job and no one values what you do. You are smarter and more sensitive than three-quarters of the dummkopfs who pass you in the hall without so much as a backward glance."

"Carl is in love with you," Mrs. Shapiro said abruptly. "What are your intentions?" For the second time that afternoon, Grace was caught off guard.

"He told you?"

"No, not in so many words. But then words aren't a terribly trustworthy commodity."

"My intentions," Grace picked up the thread of Ruth's previous remark, "are no different than anyone else's." She placed her free hand on top of Mrs. Shapiro's gnarled knuckles gently massaging the mottled skin. "To find a key to paradise."

"I ask a straight question and you answer in riddles," Mrs. Shapiro replied. "So you want a key to unlock the gates to paradise? Right now I'd settle for another cup of tea." Grace got up and reached for the bowl. "Leave the soup. I still haven't decided yet if I want to live or die."

In the kitchen Grace found the Earl Grey black tea, the selection with natural oil of bergamot that the old woman favored. She waited for the water to boil, added a spoonful of honey and glanced out the window. In the yard, the jays and a handful of crows were laying waste to the sunflower seeds, scattering the torn shells all over the ground.

So, I heard this improbable rumor. At school, Grace and Carl avoided each other. He stopped eating in the faculty lounge altogether. They passed in the corridors without so much as a nod or casually greeting. That would come later. Once word got out that a mentally unbalanced school teacher was dating the janitor, vitriolic tongues would wag. Ruth Shapiro was no fool. She was simply playing the devil's advocate, baiting Grace with what was sure to come. She'd been through three husbands on several continents. She understood Grace's dilemma. A public middle school was a hothouse, a steamy incubator for outrageous gossip and innuendo.

Back in the bedroom, the soup bowl was empty and all that remained of a piece of sourdough bread was the unbuttered crust. "Carl never speaks about his past."

The old woman stirred the tea and placed the spoon on the saucer. "Carl's mother died when he was still a baby. The father couldn't cope. He ran off somewhere so the state placed the child in foster homes."

"I figured something of the sort."

In the basement, the electrical motor that powered the jointer turned over with a smooth hum. Mrs. Shapiro began to sneeze fitfully. Grace handed her a Kleenex. She dabbed at her swollen nose and her eyelids drooped. The old woman grew quiet. Grace could smell the honey and oil of bergamot in the few remaining drops of sweetened tea. Mrs. Shapiro's breath turned smooth and regular as she slept and, for a fleeting instant, Grace caught a glimpse of a young girl barely out of her teens, a beautiful wisp of a Semite with black hair and a book of poems jutting out of a back pocket. She was raking piles of rancid chicken shit into smelly piles, there on the kibbutz in the rugged hill country of the Upper Galilee.

******

The Mansfield Craft fair was in its tenth season. A hundred and twenty exhibitors were assigned spaces in the main ballroom of the Mansfield Sheraton Hotel. With dozens of minor details to sort out, Carl had packed everything up the previous night after working all day at the school.

Grace and Angie arrived around eight-thirty. "There he is," Angie ran ahead to greet Carl, who was spreading an emerald green cloth over a long table. He hadn't put any jewelry boxes out on display yet.

Grace scanned the room. In a finely choreographed bedlam, crafters were bustling about arranging tables and positioning displays full of jewelry, ceramics, paintings and blown glass. "Somebody's not happy," she whispered and pointed several tables down in the large function hall, where a blond woman in her late thirties was going toe to toe with an older man.

"The masking tape on the floor,... that what you paid for." The man struggled to keep his emotions under control, but every time he objected to something, the feisty blond fought back, raising her voice by a half dozen decibels.

"I paid good money for this spot and you can't tell me -"

"Lady, look at the tape," the man fumed. "You're grabbing twice the space of anyone else." He jabbed his finger at a clipboard. "We got you down for a ten-by-ten. That's all you paid for. You can't make up the rules to suit your convenience."

The blond woman got up in his face and hissed. "Any of these fine people complaining, huh? Is my setup taking business away from them? I'm perfectly within my rights to set up my displays as I see fit!" The older man stared at her with a constipated expression and was about to launch another frontal assault, but a woman wearing an ID badge grabbed him by the arm and hauled him away on some other business.

"So what was that all about?" Grace asked.

"I've seen Blondie at other shows. She's a fraud." Carl began spreading merchandise out on the table, large boxes on pedestals, smaller pieces positioned to the front. "She doesn't make any of her own jewelry. It's all BS."

"Bull shit!" Angie grabbed a necklace box and placed it strategically on a riser near the center of the table.

"That too," Carl chuckled without any malice toward the blonde woman. "But in the crafting trade, BS stands for buy/sell."

Grace's face clouded over. "I don't follow you."

"The rings and pendants are manufactured in third world countries - China, the Philippines and Taiwan. It's all cheap imports... junk. Nothing handmade. But she passes it off as the real deal and gullible customers don't know the difference." "Once they open the doors," he added, "pay close attention to Blondie. She might be a con artist but she's got a smooth delivery." Carl flashed a sly grin but didn't bother to elaborate.

At quarter to ten, Grace wandered down the length of the hall to size up the competition. No other woodworkers were booked. A woman near the far wall was hawking twenty varieties of homemade, organic salsa. She had laid out free samples in Styrofoam bowls along with several trays of tortilla chips. Scooping a healthy portion of dip from each bowl, a heavyset man was enjoying an early lunch at the salsa lady's expense.

"So what's the connection between munchies and fine art?" Grace turned to see a pallid, willowy thin woman sitting on a folding chair next to a collection of water colors.

"Funny, I was asking myself the same question," Grace replied.

"This stinks," the woman said in a humorless tone. "Customers will stuff their faces with freebies and ignore our crafts."

"Your paintings are very nice," Grace said. She didn't think the woman's artwork was particularly remarkable, but didn't want to hurt her feelings, especially since the artist was already upset about the salsa lady's unfair advantage. Truth be told, her water colors were rather commonplace and the scenes pleasant enough though not terribly original.

"It's my first show," the woman confided. "I quit my day job to pursue a career in the arts." She smiled a slightly wilted, ambivalent expression. Drifting the entire length of the table, the heavyset man finished sampling the last container of salsa and promptly bought three jars of dip. The salsa lady stuffed the money in a granny pack strapped to her waist. The fair hadn't even technically opened and she'd already rung up her first sale!

The water color artist blew out her cheeks. "Salsa belongs in a whole food store," she hissed, "not an art fair."

"Well, good luck." Grace wandered off.

So what was the lady with twenty varieties of homemade salsa doing at a craft fair? It made no coherent sense to Grace. But then further down, sandwiched between a potter and vendor with blown glass flowers was a woman hawking Mary Kay cosmetics. As soon as the droopy-faced painter sight of the perfumes, emollients and ultra gloss lipsticks, Grace mused, the woman probably would have something scandalous to say about commercial cosmetics.

Grace went back to where her daughter and Carl were waiting patiently. Five minutes later, the doors burst opened and a hoard of customers flooded into the hotel ballroom. The first wave of shoppers drifted past, some eyeing the boxes and stopping to chat with Carl. A middle-aged woman who was looking for a present for a nephew promised to return after she toured the hall. "Blondie's killing the competition," Carl said tongue in cheek. "That despicable BS artist is putting us all to shame."

Sure enough a crowd three-deep had gathered around the jewelry booth where silver bracelets, pendants and rings were flying off the table. "Yah, that's a one-of-a-kind... No I don't personally make a thing. My Uncle Sid from New Jersey is the creative genius. He designs every piece. A regular Picasso with precious metal!... Yes, everything's on sale. I can let those go two for $25. A steal at that price!"

"What did I tell you," Carl chuckled. Smaller clusters of shoppers were gathered around various booths. The salsa lady was alternately refilling empty tortilla chip bowls and ringing up sales. Everybody was grabbing the free samples. A handful of customers floated past Carl's boxes but didn't stop or show much interest.

Finally an older married couple strolled by. "Hey, Ralphy, look at these splendiferous boxes." The pudgy woman wore thick, glasses and a slap-happy grin. She stood with her hands on her generous hips studying the merchandise. "Ralphy, get a load of this neat stuff!" Her husband, scowled and moved away to examine a collection of handmade soaps and body lotions. "You make these boxes?"

The woman clearly had no intention of buying anything but that didn't seem to bother Carl. "Me and my mother." He smiled and cocked his head to one side. "You know my mother,... Mother Nature. She does the hard part. I just throw it all together."

The woman reached out and stroked the surface of a ring box. "Gorgeous stuff you make. I can't hardly believe my freakin' eyes!" She turned impatiently and shout at her husband. "Ralphy, for crying out loud! Come over here and get a load of this guy's fancy shmancy jewelry boxes." The husband, who was stout and balding in the rear, rushed off even further down the hall. The woman bent far over the table, "My husband makes boxes, too, but he only uses cheap pine and a quickie coat of varnish. Nothing like yours." She wandered off in search of the man who had disappeared in the crowd.

At ten-thirty, Carl made his first sale, a poem box done in cherry and quarter sawn oak. A half hour later another woman bought a large band sawn box and a man's valet with a sliding tray. He put the money in a small cash box and turned to Grace. "I'm going to bathroom. You're in charge."

"What about customers?"

"Take their money and give them a box." He walked off in the direction of the lobby. Grace looked at her daughter. "Do you know what you're doing?"

"No, not really. But how difficult could it be?"

Five minutes later a gaunt man in his early thirties ambled up to the table and stared at one particular box with a queer intensity. He bent over at the waist so that his ferret like eyes were no more than an inch from the wood and continued to gawk at the keepsake box. Then, without straightening up or even bothering to look at either one of them he growled, "Take it off the table."

"Excuse me?" Grace stammered.

"Take ...the box...off the table," he repeated in a furtive, clipped tone, "and put it out of sight." Only now did he straighten up and look directly at Grace. "It's a present for my daughter. She's over there with her mother." He indicated a teenage girl with dark hair a few tables away.

Angie eased the small box off the table and secreted it into a gift bag. The thin man all but threw the money down on the green cloth and rushed off spastically as though fleeing the scene of a crime.

"So what was that all about?" Angie looked at the crumpled bills in her fist. Three twenties. The fellow never even waited for his change.

"I haven't a clue," Grace said. Her first sale! She tried to gauge her feelings but nothing registered. She felt mildly disoriented, like when she got lost one time in Boston driving back and forth over the Charles River, unable to find her way home. Carl returned and they showed him the money.

"Every sale's different, I guess," he replied philosophically and handed the money back to Angie. You keep it. Gives you a hankering for corporate greed."

Angie stuffed the money in her jeans then pasted Carl with a wet, sloppy kiss on the cheek. "Hey," he cautioned, "don't mix pleasure with business!"

In the late afternoon, Grace went off to check on the competition. The flow of customers had dropped off considerably, but the blond whose fictitious Uncle Sid from New Jersey supposedly hand-crafted every bracelet, pendant and ring was still doing a brisk business. The spunky street fighter gibber jabbered with every customer, cracking an endless stream of corny jokes and frolicking her way through the final few hours. The homemade soaps were still selling well; the twenty varieties of homemade, organic salsa display looked like it had taken a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. Empty Styrofoam bowls and broken tortilla chips littered the floor. But the salsa lady was still chatting it up with a few stragglers. Diagonally across from the salsa lady the water color artist was sitting on the folding chair with her hands folded limply in her lap. All of her artwork was neatly arranged against the wall. All of it.

"I didn't sell a damn thing." She looked like one of her flowers after a prolonged drought. "If I earned a tenth of what that woman did with her crappy salsa, the show would have been a modest success."

Crappy salsa. Grace wasn't sure if the painter's assessment was based on an actual taste test or an indictment of the process. Self loathing and despair oozed from every pore in her body. "Well, for what it's worth, I like your paintings."

The woman glanced at her suspiciously. "Yah, but that's what everyone says, and I'm going home broke."

Grace edged away. Maybe she should have told the woman that her droopy, tortured artist demeanor was a liability. While the tortured, water color artist sat morosely waiting to be discovered, Blondie was whooping it up, engaging everyone from frumpy housewives to an elderly woman with nasal oxygen and a portable tank strapped to her waist. Grace remembered the Chickasaw Indian woman with her woven baskets. Humility, talent plus a smattering of self-deprecating humor - not necessarily in that order - was what the flower lady lacked.

At a booth on the far side of the hall, Grace bought some tea from an effeminate man who ordered leaves through an Asian wholesaler and mixed his own unique blends. "Bags? God forbid!" the man, who spoke with a pronounced lisp, seemed mildly horrified. Teabags were bleached. Bags were blasphemy! They adulterated—that was the word he used—the true taste of the delicate leaf. The ambrosia was perverted, desecrated, defiled. Would you take a bath in lye? All his selections had to be steeped in metal strainers. Before she left, the fellow loaded Grace up with free catalogues and samples. She would bring the teas to Mrs. Shapiro and, while they indulged their taste buds, recount the story of the overly sensitive tea salesman.

"What a surprise!" Pam Sullivan, the office manager, was fingering a selection of alpaca wool sox imported from Mexico. "What brings you here?"

"A good bargain," Grace shot back, momentarily regaining her composure.

"I just bought these crazy socks," Pam boasted. "The dye is all natural. Natives soak the wool in a vat of crushed beetles and boiling water. Isn't that a hoot!"

"Yes, I know." Grace had spent some time talking with the vender earlier in the day. The red die was extracted from the pulverized bodies of the female cochineal beetle. The insects were soaked in hot water to remove a waxy residue then dried in the Southwest desert sun. Seventy thousand female beetles were sacrificed to produce a single pound of cochineal powder. Because the organic dye was absolutely non-toxic, it was widely used in cosmetics, food coloring and soft drinks.

Grace studied Pam's selection. The socks were ugly. The young couple manning the alpaca sock booth had fair skin and hair. They didn't look like they'd jetted in overnight on a redeye flight from New Mexico. More buy/sell.

"Did you see who's here?" Pam said leaning closer. "Carl Solomon's got a table over by the main entrance."

"Yes, I know."

"How utterly absurd!" Pam tittered. "He's hawking a bunch of tacky boxes that you couldn't unload at a flea market."

Grace cringed. "That bad?"

"The guy should stick to taking out the trash and general maintenance." Pam rolled her eyes and made a motion to leave.

"I don't suppose you actually got a look at any of Carl's boxes?"

Pam's features clouded over but she left the question hanging. "A woman's holding scented candles for me three tables down. I gotta run." Pam wandered off.

When Grace returned, Carl was beginning to pack up some of the smaller items. She grabbed one of the prettier boxes off the tiered display. In response to Carl's quizzical look she barked, "Don't ask!"

******

"Marquetry. It's an ancient skill dating back to the 14th century Italian Renaissance." Grace was standing next to Pam Sullivan. The secretary was writing out a check while the candle maker wrapped her merchandise. Grace thrust the slender bracelet box under the secretary's nose. "Each piece is hand-fitted to create an intricate pattern, a mosaic in rare woods."

"Well, I don't see where -"

"And these aren't just hinges.' Grace flipped the box over. "No, no, no! They're precision, fine-tuned Brusso hinges that hold the lid open at exactly 95 degrees. You'd have to visit the posh galleries and boutiques on Newbury Street to find such lavish, high-end quality." Grace slid the box out from under Pam's nose. "Or a shrewd shopper could buy direct from Carl Solomon."

When Grace returned to the booth, Carl and her daughter were breaking down the table. "How'd we do?"

"Four hundred and eight-five dollars." Her daughter pulled out a wad of bills. "Carl let me keep what I sold."

"What was that all about?" Carl asked.

Grace told Carl about Pam Sullivan. Then she put her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth.

"Mom!" Angie shook her head in disbelief.

Grace kissed him a second and then a third time. "One last question. If all the products at a craft fair are suppose to be handmade by the local artisans, how can they peddle alpaca socks imported from Mexico or Mary Kay cosmetics?"

"The Mansfield fair wasn't juried," he replied. "Pretty much anyone who filled out the registration form was accepted. No questions asked." Carl explained that Blondie with the fake silver jewelry probably wouldn't know a soldering iron from a blow torch. All her inferior goods were purchased on the cheap from overseas markets. There was nothing original about her product line just as Uncle Sid from New Jersey was nothing more than a figment of her cunning imagination.

The same for the Gringo sock merchants. While their products were made in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile or God-knows-where and colored with beetle juice, the vendors had no part whatsoever in the design or manufacture. Even the Salsa lady was suspect. "So she cooks up a five-gallon vat of salsa on her kitchen range," Carl argued, "She's a glorified cook not an artisan. Why should she be hawking dip at a craft fair and taking business away from serious crafters?"

Grace thought of the droopy water color artist, sitting with her hands folded in abject resignation. Would this first craft fair ultimately be her last? Perhaps she would try one more only to be sandwiched between the phony baloney blonde sales dynamo and the Caucasian couple pushing south-of-the-border footwear. The water color artist's worse nightmare!

"The next fair will be different." Carl said. "It's juried, which means they only accept serious crafters. No buy/sell. No imports. No Avon or Mary Kay cosmetics. If somebody sneaks in under false pretenses, the management will refund their money and throw them out."

"What about the Salsa lady?"

"She can come to buy my original artwork," Carl was laughing now, "but she can't sell her funky salsa."

******

In the morning when Angie went out to retrieve the newspaper, the mail box was smashed. Obliterated. The metal pole was bent double, the box flattened like a pancake and unceremoniously hurled into the bushes. When Angie tried to straighten the pole, it snapped off in her hand.

"The Village Idiot." Grace put a pot of coffee on and called the police. The same officer who took the report when the house was egged pulled up in a blue cruiser.

"Did you see who did it." "No. I didn't see a thing."

The officer pawed at the dirt with the toe of his shoe. "Too bad you didn't have a surveillance camera. Could of nailed the little bastard."

"Tall, ungainly bastard," Grace corrected, "with a bad complexion." The officer threw his hands up in a gesture of exasperation and left.

Hubert Fenster. Fernwall, Feinstein. Fenton, that was it! The name of the electronic whiz who set up the surveillance equipment at the high school. Grace found him in the yellow pages under the security heading. She called and left a message on his answering machine.

Dwight Goober was a one man wrecking crew, a destructive, insolent, psychopath, and nobody could touch him. He spent his days locked away in a 'special-ed' classroom at the regional collaborative and, like a prisoner on work release, scurried back to the community in the late afternoons. He needed to be taught a lesson, Grace thought. No, the wording was too antiseptic. He needs to be hurt really bad—pulverized like the mailbox, fractured and splintered like the ruined metal pole. Everybody knew about the goons on Federal Hill. The lugs who would rearrange somebody's anatomy or tap dance on a spinal column for a few thousand dollars, no questions asked. A simple business agreement without a binding contract.

It was curbstone justice at its best. The way things got done before the era of criminal rights, ACLU and all that libertarian hogwash. What frightened Grace more than the smashed mailbox was the revelation that she had entertained the notion of stopping by the sporting goods store at the Brookville Mall to checking out the offerings. What gauge weapon would you recommend for hunting wild game. Something, say, in the two hundred pound range. A dull witted, feral beast with chronic acne and a compulsive inability to leave decent, law biding citizens alone?

Hubert Fenton, a middle-aged man with bushy eyebrows, stopped by the next night after supper. Grace told him about the mailbox and the eggs. "Latchkey brats," Hubert said gruffly, "they're taking over the universe."

"I thought maybe a camera in the front of the house might work."

Mr. Fenton shook his head. "Soon as he sees the solitary camera up on the front, he'll just target the sides or rear. These kids aren't stupid."

"Actually he is quite stupid."

Hubert Fenton ignored the remark. "I wouldn't go with anything less than four cameras. One on each corner of the house." He pulled out a blank form and began scratching some figures. "You'd need a router to send the video signals from the various perimeter locations directly to your computer hard drive. You'll also require a set up with night vision capabilities."

Grace bit her lip. "Sounds expensive."

Hubert looked up. "We're looking at four thousand depending on how much trouble we have running cables. Some of these older houses can be tricky."

Grace's brain shorted out. She didn't have that kind of money to throw away on Dwight Goober. Four thousand dollars would replace the mailbox a hundred times over. How many Dirty Harry-type, long-barrel magnums could you buy for that kind of money? Hubert Fenton left a detailed proposal on the kitchen table. The paperwork described all the scintillating bells and whistles, the electronic gadgetry with the stipulation that additional installation fees would ultimately effect the final cost.

When Hubert Fenton was gone, Grace called Carl and launched into a maniacal rant cursing Dwight Goober and threatening the thug with all sorts of outlandish abuse. Grace was just venting, blowing off steam. She could no more stop Dwight Goober from vandalizing her property than the police or ineffectual courts could. At the end of her tantrum Carl only mentioned that Mrs. Shapiro was feeling much better since the bronchial infection and, in his low-keyed unhurried manner, added, "Replacing the post and mailbox is no big deal. I'll come by over the weekend."

Neighbors on Bovey Street cursed Dwight Goober through the previous summer. Every time he trashed their lives and property, they shook an impotent fist in the air, hollered and cursed until they were blue in the face, nearly apoplectic. But they never did squat. No one ever sued the family or confronted the insolent fishwife of a mother. They never even called the police or confronted the youth face to face. No, it was all empty posturing and hot air. They were afraid of retribution pure and simple. They waxed philosophical. Oh, he'll just grow up and move away from Bovey Street or get sent to the ACI for some major offense. Better to be longsuffering and wait it out.

What the neighbors never counted on was the possibility that their diabolic nemesis might hunker down on Bovey Street for the next twenty years, finding new and ingenious ways to torment them well into their doddering old age.

Carl was a loner. Unlike the frightened neighbors, he studied a problem, whether a delicate bridle joint or a pimply-faced punk, and didn't worry about extraneous details. That worried Grace.

******

Mentally Unbalanced English Teacher

Romantically Involved with School Janitor!!

Pam Sullivan might as well have broadcasted the late breaking news over Brandenburg Middle School's public address system. Ed Gray stopped by her classroom at the end of fifth period. "I heard a rumor,... totally absurd, but I thought I owed you at least the courtesy of -"

"Courtesy," Grace cut him short, "Interesting choice of words. And, yes, the rumor is true."

"You're dating the school janitor?"

"This has nothing to do with Carl's position here. You're in a snit because he caught you with your academic pants down."

"You," Ed Gray shook a finger menacingly in her general direction, "are totally out of line." His eyes glazed over with rage. "Insubordinate!"

"What I do with my personal life is none of your business."

He made a motion to leave but turned back almost immediately. "You're not the least bit embarrassed? It doesn't bother you that the other staff at Brandenburg understand what's going on?"

Grace was sorting a pile of test that she would grade at home over the weekend. "Those teachers who care about me will wish me well and perhaps take a genuine interest in Carl. The rest can go to hell."

******

Sunday Carl replaced the mailbox. He dug out the old pole down below the frost line and wedged a four-inch, pressure-treated post in the hole. Emptying a bag of Quickrete into the pit, he flooded the gray powder with water. Satisfied with the way the cement was curing, he spread a thick layer of straw over the ground covering the hole.

"What's that for?"

"Keeps the cold out so the cement can cure properly." He leveled the post making minor adjustments. "It's just a precaution. Don't want the mix to freeze overnight."

Short of attacking it with a chain saw, no one, not even the demented Dwight Goober, was going to destroy the four-inch post. "Put your tools away and come in for a while." Grace put a pot of coffee on while Carl washed up. "Our little secret isn't so private anymore."

"Figured as much." Carl picked a strand of loose straw off his flannel shirt. "Teachers who never knew I existed, are all goggle-eyed." He chuckled in a deep bass. "You're blue-collar boyfriend's assumed celebrity status."

Grace straddled him on the chair. "Dr. Rosen stopped by my classroom Friday." The psychologist looked in shortly after Ed Gray stormed off. "He talked in circles, smiled a lot and went away." Grace could feel Carl's arms come up under her sides. "Moral support, I figure."

"Where's your daughter?" Carl was kissing her neck.

"Spending the weekend with her father." Pushing him away momentarily, Grace reached into her pocket and laid a small gift-wrapped package no bigger than a pencil on the table.

Carl picked it up and turned it over in his hand. "For me?" She nodded and settled back comfortably in his arms. He pulled the paper off carefully. The toothbrush featured soft nylon bristles and a rubber flossing pick.

******

With the cement curing under a six-inch bed of straw, they went upstairs and took their clothes off. They made love quickly and quietly then, for good measure, did it again. In the morning the couple rose early and ate a leisurely breakfast. "When is your next craft fair?" Grace pushed a plate of buttered raisin toast across the table.

"Two weeks on a Saturday. That's the juried show."

Carl was sitting at the kitchen table in his underwear, his strong lean body hunched over the food. Nothing could have seemed more natural. Grace stared at him intently. "Are you nervous?"

"There will be artists who display regularly in expensive galleries." He fidgeted in the chair. "Maybe I'm just kidding myself."

She came up behind him and draped her arms over his chest. "Or maybe like the unassuming Chickasaw basket weaver, you'll knock them all dead."

******

A week past and life at Brandenburg Middle School drifted back to normal. Teachers who had treated Grace like her bra was on backwards, greeted her pleasantly enough now and even made small talk between classes. Ed Gray was in a habitually foul mood and held impromptu daily meetings with Principal Skinner in the hallways or the administrative office. Pam Sullivan seemed contrite, almost apologetic - not that such a woman would ever give Carl Solomon the right time of day much less credit for having a reasonably endowed brain lodged between his ears.

When Grace arrived at school on Thursday morning, Pam muttered, "Principal Skinner wants to speak with you ASAP. I sent an aide over to cover you class through first period." She glared at Grace haughtily before turning her back.

So this was it. Out of shear spitefulness, Pam Sullivan had spilled the beans to the principal about her office romance. Or maybe Ed Gray had given him an earful describing behavior unbecoming a professional educator. Insubordination, rash and reckless—

"Grace, would you come in please and close the door." Principal Skinner was waving at her from behind his desk. The cap on the Maalox bottle was lying on its side, a moist, pink ring circling the inner edge. He rose and, with his back to her, stared morosely out the window. "WJAR Channel Ten weather team is calling for snow tomorrow. Two to four inches on the ground by daybreak." He pivoted on his heels and picked up a football that was perched on a shelf. "Less than half a foot of snow by dawn. Do we close the school and tack another day on at the end of the year? Decisions. Decisions." Without warning he lobbed the ball to Grace. "Nice catch!"

"This bad weather, it's not a storm, per se," he rambled on. "Nothing like the nor'easter we had last December. What would you do?"

Grace rubbed the raised surface of the ball with her finger tips. Football mementos plus several rows of varsity championship trophies littered the office. "Close the school. It's not worth the risk. But you didn't call me here to discuss the weather."

On the far wall hung a picture of a trim and robust Principal Skinner in full varsity gear with his college squad. A mop of shaggy brown hair fell down over the handsome, young man's ears. Principal Skinner gestured at the football in her hands. "Did you notice the inscription?"

Grace glanced at the writing on the side of the ball. "Sorry, but I don't recognize the name."

"Roosevelt 'Rosie' Greer. Played for the Penn State Nittany Lions. All pro with the New York Giants then went to first string right tackle with the LA Rams."

"The bruiser weighed over 300 pounds," the principal took the ball from her hands and returned the pigskin to its place of honor on the far shelf, "but always went out of his way to avoid injuring another player. Rosie had a unique hobby. Needlepoint. Use to stitch on the sidelines toward the end of his career while he was still an NFL, first string player."

"Well, that's very nice—"

"I visited the art museum last month when they featured the local artisans. Carl Solomon's box was on display. Meticulous handiwork." He cleared his throat. "Ed Gray gave notice yesterday. He's leaving the Brandenburg school system by the end of the month. Two weeks to be exact. You're my first choice for Chairman of the English Department."

Grace's head was spinning. She couldn't connect the dots; nothing the man was saying made any sense. She stared at the principal like he had been speaking in tongues. "Ed took another job?"

Principal Skinner reached for the pink liquid and filled the plastic cup to the brim. "The turncoat deserted to the enemy camp." He put the cup to his lips and tilted his head back. Principal Skinner wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. "Took a position in Boston working with MCAS."

******

"Let's take a ride," Carl said.

Angie just arrived and hadn't even removed her jacket. "Where to?"

"Providence," he replied without elaborating.

"My mother's upstairs with Mrs. Shapiro. Can she come?"

Carl grabbed his coat and headed up the basement stairs. "Sure thing."

They drove down Cottage Street and hooked up with the highway heading south. There was no place to park downtown so he found space on a side street off College Hill and plunked four quarters in the meter. They backtracked to North Main Street. Carl pulled up in front of the Rhode Island School of Design Store. A girl standing in the doorway was wearing a blue military coat with epaulets and brass buttons. Her boyfriend sported a spiked Mohawk and his tongue was pierced. Each time he spoke, a silver ball danced up and down in his mouth. Angie tugged at her mother's blouse. "Why is everybody dressed weird?"

"It's RISD. The school attracts a lot of artsy types." She turned to Carl. "I didn't know they sold woodworking supplies here."

"They don't," he confirmed. Sauntering into the store, he cornered a salesgirl. "Handmade papers?"

"Over there by the bookbinding supplies."

On a six-foot high rack, row after row of handmade papers with different themes and textures were neatly hung. "I need a new look for the Boston show. Something totally original that will knock the gallery owners' socks off."

"You got the amboyna burl veneer," Grace countered.

Carl smiled faintly. "And that's all I've got. Except for the bird's-eye maple, none of the other woods look half as nice."

Angie fingered a paper that was tissue thin and covered with dried leaves and stems. One of the gossamer leaves, which extended above the surface of the paper, broke off in her hand. Carl immediately grabbed a similar sheet off the rack and placed it to one side. "You can't replace wood with paper."

"Why not?" Carl shot back. "Artists experiment with new techniques all the time. Some mixed media work. Some don't. Until you actually take the leap of faith, you'll never know."

"But," Grace said hesitantly, "that paper's much too thin. I can see right through it."

Carl seemed momentarily stymied. A pad of writing paper was sitting abandoned on a shelf. He grabbed the pad and held it underneath the decorative, handmade offering. "You're going to use plain white paper for a background?" Angie said incredulously.

"Substrate not background," Carl countered with a defiant smirk. "It's sounds more professional."

"You know," Grace observed, "against the pale, eggshell white, it's really quite attractive. But how do you protect it from stains?"

Carl was pulling other sheets off the rack. "Don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead." He bought five sheets of paper plus an assortment of acrylic paints and sable brushes. When asked about the paint supplies, he shrugged and changed the subject.

The following Tuesday afternoon when Angie arrived, Carl had already glued up a half dozen pieces of scrap wood with an assortment handmade papers. "You do the honors." He handed her a block of wood with the transparent tissue glued to a white background. Angie loaded a carbide round-over bit into the chuck and tightened the collar on the router with a wrench. Turning the motor on, she eased the bearing snugly up against the wood. A blur of wood chips flew up in the air. The engine grew louder as she navigated the cutter freehand around the perimeter. Finishing a second pass, Angie pulled the router away from the wood and killed the motor. "Nice," she murmured, surveying her work. "Except over here on the far side where the blade was cutting across the grain."

Carl glanced over her shoulder. The cut was clean and silky smooth. "Where the cutter pulled the paper up a little, we can tack it down with glue."

After the success of the leafy tissue, the next offering was a bust. The paper was far too thick and pulpy. The whirling blade threw puffs of cottony fiber all over the room. To strengthen the sheet, Carl sprayed the surface with lacquer, but the chemicals bled through to the front creating a series of ugly blotches and stains.

Angie wagged her head from side to side. "Think wonders, shit blunders. It's hopeless." She flung the soggy mess into the trash.

The next sheet boasted delicate magenta flower petals along with flecks of dark green leaf stems peppering the deckled, ivory surface. The blade bit into the wood trimming away the topmost edge but the spongy paper tore at a jagged angle as she negotiated the final corner moving against the grain. A patch the size of a grain of rice had ripped away. "What a shame!" Angie set the router aside.

Carl stared at the damaged surface for the longest time then foraged about in a drawer and removed several tubes of paint he had bought at the RISD store. "Can you paint?"

Angie scrunched up her face. "Had a paint-by-numbers kit when I was in fifth grade."

"Which is all the skills you'll need." He handed her a magnifying headset. "Here, put this on."

Angie placed the device over her forehead and tightened the band. Carl squirted a glob of reddish paint onto a scrap of wood. "It's too bright," Angie protested. "The colors don't match."

Handing her a fine sable brush, Carl placed a dab of gray paint next to the red. "If you look closely, the flower petals are two, separate colors. Mix a little of the gray in with the red, but let both colors show."

Angie lifted a gooey drop of gray paint and deposited it in the center of the red. Both colors melded together in a streaked, purplish glaze. "Don't mix the paints. That's the look you want." Carl reached up, grabbed the visor and lowered the magnifying lens over her eyes. "Now paint a tiny petal over the torn paper and hide the defect."

Angie pulled away from the table. "What if I screw up and ruin everything."

"For cripes sakes! It's not the Mona Lisa; it's just a piece of scrap wood." Carl nudged her forward. "Don't agonize. Put your brain on automatic pilot. Just do it."

Angie took a deep breath and blew all the air out of her lungs. Propping her left arm on the table for added support, she lowered the feathery bristles. The girl ran the brush over the paper. Three quick strokes. The ersatz, magenta petal was indistinguishable from the rest. Perfection. Angie removed the magnifier, and dabbed the salty moistness from her eyes with a paper towel.

"Was it something I said?"

"Shut up!" She muttered gruffly, the tone more benediction than reprimand.

******

Grace hadn't noticed the police sirens blaring in the distance. Even when the first cruiser pulled onto Bovey Street the noise made no impression on her.

"Something's wrong." The urgency in her daughter's voice finally hit home. An ambulance careened onto the street trailed by two more police cars, their red lights and sirens turning the quiet evening upside down. Grace threw on her coat and ran outside. A shrill caterwauling arose from the far end of the street. Like the death throes of a mortally injured animal, the sound rippled through the cold night air, died away to nothing before repeating with renewed intensity. Grace could see the ambulance, doors ajar, abandoned in the middle of the street at an odd angle. Now another sound, a woman's shrill voice joined the first in a chorus of bedlam.

Grace edged down the darkened street. A policeman was methodically scouring the shrubs on a neighbor's front lawn with a flashlight" What happened?"

"Local kid got beaten up. Real bad."

The medics suddenly emerged from a wooded area in back of the property with a body on a stretcher. "My baby! My darling baby boy!" Dwight Goober's mother fought her way through the crowd of onlookers and threw herself on the stretcher, smothering the boy's blotchy face with kisses. An officer had to physically restrain the woman while the medics loaded Dwight into the rear of the ambulance. The distraught mother collapsed on the ground, moaning loudly. "Who could do such a thing to my darling baby boy!"

The swirling strobe lights on the roof of the cruisers illuminated the street with an eerie glow. Another officer approached from the woods balancing a soggy bag of potato chips between a thumb and index finger. It was the same policeman who had responded when Grace's house was egged. "Dwight Goober's last solid meal," he said with an inscrutable poker face.

"What's that?"

"In addition to other injuries, he's got a broken jaw," the officer stomped his shoes, which were caked with mud, on the ground. "Did you call Hubert Fenton?"

"Yes I did. He stopped by on Wednesday to give me an estimate."

The officer crumpled the bag - Lays Sour Cream and Onion - in his fist before stuffing it in a pocket. "Hope you didn't sign a contract."

"No, not yet."

"Good. Keep the money you were going to give Hubert in the bank and let it collect interest. Judging by the extent of injuries, Mr. Goober is going to be out of circulation for a very long time." He scraped the heel of his shoe against the curb.

"What's that awful smell?" Grace felt nauseous, sick to her stomach.

"We had to haul his waterlogged carcass out of that filthy swamp back in the woods. My shoes and sock are covered with muck." The wooded area the officer was referring to lay at the end of the cul-de-sac. The builder who owned the land originally wanted to put up new housing units, but the environmental protection agency objected. They claimed the fifty acre plot was wetlands and vital habitat for migrating birds and other indigenous animal. The EPA insisted that the swampy wooded area be left in its pristine, natural state.

"Any idea who did this," Grace asked.

"No, not a clue." the officer didn't seem overly concerned at the prospect of an unsolved crime. He pointed to a spot in the snow where several plain clothes detectives were huddled together making notes. "Someone jumped Dwight over there and knocked him to the ground. The assailant dragged him through the snow down to the wetlands."

"Maybe it was a gang."

The officer shook his head vehemently and rubbed more crud off the sides off his shoe. Acrid clay was mixed in with the dirt. "There's only the trail of Dwight's body being hauled, feet first, down to the swamp. The attacker left no prints, because the body obliterated his own tracks. Only one set of footprints emerges from the woods. Just one." The officer blew into his clenched fist to warm the frozen fingers. "The assailant threw him in the middle of the swamp, face down in a foot of freezing water. It's a miracle the creep survived."

Dwight Goober just got beaten within an inch of his life and I feel... pleasantly surprised. Exhilarated. Relieved!

And Grace didn't feel even a smidgeon of sympathy for the slobbering shrew of a mother. Retribution provided a sense of completeness. It balanced every offense with an appropriate punishment. Dwight Goober had vandalized and terrorized the community for years. Now some community-minded bounty hunter had broken his jaw and left the youth for dead in a pool of frigid water. That seemed fair enough. It balanced the ledger books. Maybe Father Callahan or the enlightened yogi with the silly chalkboard wouldn't agree, but rich people and God-crazed holy men didn't generally have to contend with the likes of Dwight Goober. Case closed.

Grace rushed home and found Angie cuddled on the sofa. The lights were off. A chill slithered through Grace's belly, the same numbing fear that she felt when confronting Dwight on the backyard swing. "I told Carl," Angie confessed in a faltering voice.

"Told him what?"

"The Village Idiot followed me home from school Tuesday. He said, 'You and your scumbag mother better grow eyes in the back of your heads. '"

"He threatened you?"

Angie pulled her legs up under her chin and began to whimper softly. "I was scared. I told Carl what Dwight said." Her chest heaved spasmodically. "We were working on one of those large black walnut chests with the beveled sides and paneled lid. We drilled pilot holes for the hinge pins." The commotion in the street had died away as the last cruiser pulled onto the main highway. Everyone, even Dwight Goober's hysterical mother, had gone home. "The lid was too tight so we brought it over to the belt sander and trimmed a sixteenth of an inch off the right side. Then Carl muttered something so soft I hardly couldn't make it out."

"What did he say?"

Angie slid down and dropped her cheek into her mother's lap. "Eyes in the back of his head."

Five minutes later her daughter was sleeping peacefully. Grace placed a blanket over Angie's shoulders and raised the thermostat. Then she went to the phone and dialed a number. "Hello, Mrs. Shapiro, this is Grace. Is Carl there?"

"He hasn't come home yet."

"Perhaps he's working late."

"Not that I know of."

Grace hung up the phone. Dwight Goober had a dislocated shoulder, smashed jaw and a broken leg. The cartilage in his nose had been reconfigured and several teeth chipped. She had learned this from one of the neighbors. The woman was walking her dog and heard someone hollering for help. Dwight told the medics that he was half a block from home, minding his own business and woke up in frigid water three hours later.

The doorbell rang. Grace peered through the peephole. Carl was standing on the front stoop. "Where's Angie?"

"Sleeping."

"Give this to her." He handed her a black walnut jewelry chest with beveled sides. The pearly textured lid medallion was cut from ice curl maple. "Tell her I used the micropolymer wax instead of tung oil so the maple wouldn't take on an amber tint."

"Did you want to come in?"

"No, not tonight." He turned and started to walked leisurely toward his truck but turned back. "How was your night?"

Grace turned the question over in her mind for the better part of half a minute. "Uneventful."

******

Grace and Angie arrived at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston around eleven o'clock in the morning. They drove in on the Southeast Expressway, took the Mass Ave exit and, with Symphony Hall directly ahead, veered left onto Huntington. The juried craft fair was open to the public from late morning, but Carl opted to set up his booth the night before and stay over at a nearby hotel.

Grace made a quick tour of the show." Quite a difference!" The Salsa lady with her twenty varieties of homemade dip was nowhere to be found. No Mary Kay cosmetics; the fair-skinned couple with the cochineal-dyed socks was a no-show.

Traffic was thin but buyers appeared upscale, cosmopolitan. A portly fellow wearing a badge and a blue uniform with gold trim approached. "Fire Marshall. I'll need a cloth sample." Carl rummaged in a cardboard box and produced a piece of material the same color and texture as his booth display. While an assistant stood by with a fire extinguisher, the marshal struck a match and held it under the cloth. The fabric scorched, then turned black but never burst into flames. "All set." He handed the blackened piece back to Carl and proceeded on to the next booth.

"Got to wash up." His hands were covered with soot from the charred cloth. "Be back in a second. Don't talk to anyone while I'm gone." He rushed off down the hallway in search of a bathroom.

Diagonally across from their display was a young oriental couple. Earlier, Carl wandered over to introduce himself and trade business cards. The husband spun bowls and urn-shaped vessels on a wood lathe, while the wife embellished the hardwoods with intricate, oriental motifs. Several of the larger pieces were spun from green, fresh-cut lumber. As the moist wood cured, it bowed, twisted, cupped and curled into fanciful shapes enhancing the overall effect. The larger bowls, some decorated with sumptuous, filigree patterns, were cleverly arranged on separate display pedestals and bathed in a soft sheen from banks of overhead track lighting.

Grace tapped her daughter on the shoulder. "I know that fellow." An elegant looking man in a pinstriped suit was standing on the opposite side of the aisle, staring at Carl's booth. He was medium height with thinning hair. "But where do I know him from?"

Yes," Angie agreed, "he does look awfully familiar."

"Nice craftsmanship." The man, who had closed the distance, was standing in front of them. "I've never seen free-form marquetry patterns on jewelry boxes. Meticulous workmanship!" The man extended a well-manicured hand toward a box but didn't touch the surface. "The finish,... is that catalyzed lacquer?"

Don't talk to anyone while I'm gone.

"Well, yes. Lacquer over tung oil. When the finish cures, a protective coat of beeswax is applied with a buffing wheel." That was safe. Grace hadn't done anything wrong. Carl always preferred a natural finish. He boasted how oil resins always showed wood tones to best advantage.

Rubbing his chin, the man looked slightly confused. "My mistake," he apologized, "Lacquer finishes are generally sprayed over bare wood. I should have known better."

Grace felt her legs go wobbly.

"Can I help you?" Drying his hands with a paper towel, Carl came up the aisle.

"I had a question about your merchandise, but your assistant was quite helpful." The man smiled genteelly and meandered over to the next booth.

"I think," Grace grabbed her daughter by the arm, "we'll do some window shopping at the Prudential Center and stop back later in the afternoon."

******

The lobby of the Hynes Auditorium had been turned over exclusively to painters and a handful of sculptures with oversized piece that wouldn't show well in the main ballroom. Where the Mansfield show felt like a raucous, three-ring circus, the juried fair was low-keyed and dignified. Well-dressed people strolled about, lingering to talk in courteous monotones with artisans before moving on.

Earlier in the week, Grace asked Carl how the organizers of the Boston event weeded out cheap imports. "At high-end shows, the judges frequently requested digital photos of projects in various stages of completion. Let's say Blondie tries to pass off a pair of bogus, imported earrings as handmade." "New earrings are always hung on smooth, straight wire before it's bent to the pendant's final shape. An earring that's been tampered with - taken apart to create the illusion of a work-in-progress - would be easy to spot, even for a novice jewelry maker. It's a no brainer!"

Grace stopped in front of a portrait done in metallic tones. The artist, a black woman dressed in a fashionable dashiki smiled pleasantly. All of the woman's paintings had the same limited tonal range but the effect was mesmerizing. Angie tugged on her mother's sleeve. "Cape Cod,... Hyannis." The girl had a crazed, slightly hysterical look plastered across her face. Grace peered at her daughter trying to decipher what she was saying. "Wire sculptures, Kennedy Compound, catalyzed lacquer."

"Oh God!" Grace moaned and bent double placing a hand over her eyes. The man in the pin striped suit was the owner of the Cape Cod Collectibles Art Gallery. She hadn't recognized him earlier because he had dressed casually in the store. She spun around, heading back to the main ballroom.

"You'll only make things worse!" Angie yelled, but Grace had already barreled through the double doors and was gone from sight. She scanned the entire room only to discover that Donald Carrington had returned to Carl's booth.

"I've a confession," Grace stumbled over her words, her voice breaking.

"Catalyzed lacquer," Mr. Carrington interrupted, anticipating her thoughts, "is the Rolls Royce of finishes, but it's harmful to the environment and terribly wasteful. Natural oils and resins are a far more practical choice, don't you agree?"

"Well, I don't really know," Grace blustered. "Truth is, I don't understand the first thing about woodworking."

"No harm done." Mr. Carrington shook hands with both of them and nodded amicably. "I'll be in touch, Carl." Folding a slip of paper in thirds, he slipped it into a pocket and wandered off.

"Do you know who that was?"

"Donald Carrington," Carl replied. "An art dealer with galleries in Hyannis, Martha's Vineyard and Newport, Rhode Island." He scratched an ear leisurely and grinned. "Mr. Carrington just placed an order for five thousand dollars."

******

Carl stopped by later that night. He sold a little over two thousand dollars to retail customers. They weren't looking for gifts. They bought larger pieces as collectibles - personal investments, not unlike stocks or mutual funds that would appreciate in value over time. Carl also took a second, substantial gallery order. "There's enough work to keep me busy nonstop for the next six months."

"How can you meet deadlines while working at the school?"

"I'll cut back my hours or quit altogether and find part-time custodial work."

"Between the woodworking and a new job, I'll hardly see you anymore."

"Not necessarily.." Carl reached into his pocket and removed a diminutive box. Not the sort of box he was in the habit of making. No, this was clothbound with polished chrome edging. Very small. Not terribly practical. Just the right size.
