Just Like Dostoyevsky

The mason arrived late in the afternoon. He went to the jumbled pile of red bricks, snatched one up in his left hand and began tapping at the crusted mortar with an odd-looking hammer - too short to pound nail with, too narrowly-constructed and lightweight for any other, practical use. Tap. Tap. Tap. Broken cement and sand flew in every direction. Sylvia Mandelstam’s twelve year-old daughter, Becky, tanned legs askew, was sitting on an undamaged section of the wall talking non-stop. Lean and wiry with a tuft of curly, brown hair skittering out from under a shapeless brown cap, the mason never lifted his eyes. Finishing the first brick, he knelt down and retrieved another.
Sylvia watched from the upstairs bedroom window for a while then went into the den to edit term papers. An hour later when she looked, he was standing in the same position chipping away only now a small pile of clean bricks lay neatly stacked to the right of where the truck had crashed through the wall the previous month. Becky was still straddling the wall carrying on an intense monologue. “Strange!” Sylvia muttered.
An oil truck caused the damage. As the driver rounded the turn off Hope Street, the left front tire blew out; the errant truck with its full load of number ten heating oil as added ballast careened onto the property, raking the wall, right-to-left, for a distance of thirty feet. The insurance company settled within days. Sylvia got the mason’s telephone number from a small line ad in the Providence Journal:

Mason and general handyman;
no job too small;
call Danny O’Rourke at ... .

“Fixing the wall’s no problem,” the middle-aged man said in an amiable tone tinged with Irish brogue, “Late afternoons and weekends. Five hundred dollars. Everything.”
The insurance company settled for fifteen hundred. “Yes, that seems fair enough.”
Irish brogue. From an etymological standpoint, Sylvia understood the term to have several distinctly dissimilar meanings: a heavy shoe of untanned leather, formerly worn in Scotland and Ireland; a strong oxford shoe, usually with ornamental perforations and wing tips. She glanced at Danny O'Rourke's steel-toed construction boots. “When can you start?”

Tap. Tap. Tap. Chip. Chip. Chip.
By 7:30 the light was fading. In the yard, the monotonous, brittle sound of a snare drum solo gone slightly haywire drifted through the window. Sylvia pushed the heap of papers aside. Two hours he’d been at it without a break and after a full day’s work elsewhere. Becky was in the den doing homework. Sylvia went downstairs and out the front door into the muggy, July warmth. “If you’d rather purchase new brick,” she said approaching from the flagstone walkway, “I’ll be happy to kick in the extra money.”
The hand holding the hammer drop to his side, and he looked up with clear, brown eyes. “New brick won’t match weathered.” The chin was broad, Gaelic - cheeks wide, sloping toward a generous mouth. “No need to waste good brick. Another day or two, I’ll have these cleaned up like new.” He dropped the brick in his hand onto the soft ground. “I usually deal with the husbands,” he said, collecting his tools.
“How’s that?”
“When it comes to estimates and repairs.”
Sylvia smiled and teased a crimson ladybug off the sleeve of her blouse. “The husbands,” she repeated with a watery smile, as though the term held some exclusive, hidden meaning. “Even if he were still here,” she said sardonically, “my ex-husband wouldn’t understand what you’re doing anymore than I do.”
The mason did not react. His expression remained neutral, noncommittal.
Sylvia’s ex-husband, Jason, had always been an incessant talker, a shameless self-promoter. When he bailed out of the marriage, he took with him the entire Coltrane collection - 25 CD’s, including several hard-to-find, bootlegged European tapes - plus the white noise of his arrogance. After publishing several clever articles on post-modern, French literature, Jason ran off with a leggy, blonde coed. Now he held a full professorship at Rutgers where, academic rumor had it, he traded the blonde for a more supple-minded philosophy major a scant seven years older than his daughter.
Even in her prime, Sylvia could never keep track of her husband’s dalliances. Short and plump hers was a muted, understated attractiveness. The legs were still shapely, but hadn’t always been. She had to work at it.
“Your daughter, Becky, said you teach.”
“Russian literature, at Brown.”
He tossed his hammer - a double flip, end over end - and caught the handle effortlessly. An involuntary gesture, she had seen him do it a dozen times or more while he was working at the bricks. “Ever been to Russia?”
“Last year. An academic seminar in Moscow.”
“Like it?”
“Yes, very much so,” she lied effortlessly. “A thoroughly enjoyable experience.”

Moscow airport. Bleak and dismal with atrocious lighting and Spartan furnishings. At the far end of the arrivals gate, a trio of frumpy babushkas dressed in white smocks were washing the floor. One woman with a nose like an onion leaned on a long-handled pole, a 12-inch T tacked to the end. A second woman fished a rag from a pail of filthy water, wrung the excess back into the bucket and hurled the limp cloth onto the floor.
Splat! With no great sense of urgency, the woman with the pole began pushing the mess back and forth redistributing the muck in a broad arc. Smoking an unfiltered cigarette, the third woman, presumably the crew chief, showed no interest in either the arriving foreigners or her workmates. They took a brief rest, chatted, gazed dully at the empty Aeroflot planes resting on the rutted tarmac and scratched their shapeless rumps before proceeding to the next patch of grimy floor.
Welcome to Moscow!

“Danny’s nice,” Becky shuffled into her mother’s bedroom later that night as she was preparing for bed. A lithe version of Sylvia, Becky was often mistaken for an Israeli sabra; the olive skin and chiseled nose were patently Mediterranean. “Nice and available.”
“You want me to marry a brick layer?”
“Date a few months then decide. Where’s the harm in it?”
Sylvia brushed the fine, dark hair out of the girl’s eyes. The faint outline of a training bra was visible beneath the summer-weight, cotton blouse. Not much flesh to support. If Becky was anything like her mother, another year or two, the meager mounds - more like hillocks - would need more than a flimsy training bra to hold them in check. Her daughter’s lack of curves offered little solace; it was the potential for curves that kicked Sylvia’s maternal anguish into high gear. “What did you and Mr. O’Rourke talk about?”
“The man’s no talker. Hardly said two words. Reminds me of that character in the Carson McCullers story.”
“Which one?”
Becky took an emery board from her mother’s night table and began shaping a nail. “The deaf mute.”
Sylvia frowned. “I think you’re blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.”
Becky smirked, a conspiratorial gesture. “Danny’s never been married. I told him you were divorced.”
Sylvia felt her face flush hot. “Must I remind you, Mr. O’Rourke is here to repair the wall. And from what little you’ve learned, it’s clear we have absolutely nothing in common.”
“Daddy’s Jewish; he teaches at the university. Lot of good that did!”
“Touché,” Sylvia replied and kissed her daughter lightly on the cheek. “I can assure you I will, not now or ever, go out with Mr. Danny O’Rourke.”

The next afternoon the mason did not return. She had paid him half the money in advance as an act of good faith. Hadn’t bothered to sign a formal contract or work out the fine details - cost of labor, materials, etc. An act of good faith? More like a colossal act of stupidity! When would she stop behaving like some ditsy divorcée and more like what she really was: a single mother, head-of-household?
Another day and no sign of Mr. O’Rourke. On Friday the battered pickup with the blown muffler pulled up in front of the house. The mason went directly to the busted wall and began cleaning and stacking bricks, lingering even later into the dusky light until all the bricks - even the damaged ones - were tidied and properly stacked.
The next day he arrived before 9 a.m. and began mixing mortar in a crusted wheelbarrow.
“Gonna be a scorcher.” Sylvia came out to greet him. “Temperature’s in the nineties.”
The mason worked the gray sludge in a figure eight pattern with a garden hoe. “Threw in some lime,” he said, indicating a bag of white powder in the rear of the truck, “so the mortar wouldn’t set up too fast.” He dumped a shovelful of fine sand into the soggy mix. “I’ll rebuild the far column first, run a line and fill everything in between.”
Other tools lay on the ground, odd-looking tools she hadn’t noticed before: a long mahogany-colored level with a curved, yellow bubble, trowels, small wooden blocks, string and a strange-looking tool that resembled a twisted piece of scrap metal. “That,” he saw her gawking at the bent rod, “is used for tooling joints. Keep moisture off.” He threw the hoe aside and began working the thickening mass with a short-handled, pointed shovel. “In winter, frozen water can crack mortar. So much for your newly-repaired wall.”
Nine thirty and it was already insufferably hot. “Yes, I see,” Sylvia said and retreated to the inconspicuous safety of her front porch.

Pushkin. Gogol. Turgenev. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky. Solzhenitsyn. On the second day in Moscow, the insanity began. They were driving down the main thoroughfare, the Kremlin with its spiraling domes visible out the right hand window. A policeman waving a wooden nightstick pulled them over. The Russian driver got out of the car. After a short conversation, he returned and they continued on their way. “What was that all about?” Sylvia asked the interpreter, Marina.
“Today is Friday,” Marina said gruffly and withdrew into a wall of silence. She was a tall, stylish woman in her late twenties with thick lips and close-cropped hair.
They sped through Pushkin Square, past the Bolshoi Ballet, Lubyenka Prison. After a moment, Sylvia said, “I know what day of the week it is. Why did the policeman stop the car?”
As though locked in mutually exclusive conversations, Marina repeated, “Today’s Friday, last day before weekend.” They passed several government ministries and a public housing unit built with forced labor, prison conscripts, during the Stalin era. “The Russian government pays poorly. This is how the police get their vodka money. By shaking down drivers on their way home from work. A few rubles here; a few rubles there.”
“And if you refuse to pay?”
Marina only gave her a dirty look and stared out the window at the crater-like pot holes and grimy snow. “Today is Friday,” she repeated grimly.

On Monday afternoon, Danny O’Rourke began filling in the smashed-out portion. With the column trued-up, the work went much quicker now. “My father’s a big cheat,” Becky Mandelstam said. “A whoremongering asshole.”
The mason wrapped one end of the discolored masonry twine around a maple corner block then stretched the line sixty feet to the far end of the brick wall where he fastened it tautly to a second, hardwood block. With the guide line in place, he came back to where the young girl was standing. “I don’t know that your mother would much appreciate your sharing that information.”
She stared impudently at his jutting jaw. “I’m not gossiping,” she protested. “My father’s infidelity is common knowledge; it all came out in court during the divorce settlement.”
In lieu of a response, Danny slathered mortar on the underside of a brick and tamped it into place on the broken wall. Reaching down with the sharp edge of the trowel, he trimmed the excess cement bulging from the wet joint; the pasty mortar fell noiselessly to the ground. Edging closer, Becky fingered the white, linen twine. At first she thought his features coarse, common. But now, she noticed something terribly appealing, strong and forthright, about his brown eyes and Irish chin. “I study body language. Yours is very calm, earthy.”
The mason removed his cap momentarily to wipe his forehead. A film of sweat was developing on his freckled cheeks. One of the bricks was touching the string. With the butt of his trowel, he tapped it back a fraction of an inch. “Earthy,” he repeated, reaching for the 48-inch level.
“I think you and my mother could be very - ” She waved an hand theatrically in the air.
“Incompatible,” Danny offered. “A Jewish, college professor and an uneducated, Irish brick layer.” He patted her playfully on the head with a gritty hand. “There’re a half dozen words for what you’re trying to say and I wouldn’t repeat any of them in mixed company.”

When Sylvia returned home from work on Wednesday afternoon, the wall was finished. Becky wandered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk. She was wearing a halter top and cut-off jeans. “If you won’t go out with Danny O’Rourke, at least invite him over for a home-cooked meal.”
“Did he see you in that outfit?” Sylvia asked.
“It’s the middle of summer! You expect me to wear wool skirts?”
Sylvia shook her finger in her daughter’s face. “You’re not a child anymore. As a woman’s body matures, even respectable men - ”
“Oh, mother! Get a life!”

At three a.m., Becky came to her mother’s bedroom and shook her awake. “You cried out in your sleep.”
“Just a bad dream. A nightmare.”
Jason, with an entourage of fawning, half-baked coeds, had returned to the misogynous scene of the crime, parading past Sylvia as though she were the nebulous figure, the one dreamed. No justice, no belated comeuppance.
Sylvia pulled her daughter down on the mattress next to her. “I’m okay now,” she said and nuzzled the girl’s bare arm with her cheek. Becky would stay with her mother for the rest of the night and, for that small blessing, Sylvia was thankful. There would be no more hurtful, humiliating dreams with her child close at hand.
“Got A-minus on a social studies test,” Becky said, fluffing the spare pillow. “Missed the capitol of South Dakota.”
Sylvia could smell the avocado shampoo Becky favored. Reaching out, she fingered a strand of silky, black hair. “Not a name that readily springs to mind.”
A light breeze stirred the wandering Jew in a macramé hanger by the open window. She had all three varieties - tradescantia albiflora, tradescantia fluminensis and zebrina pendula - scattered throughout the upper level. In recent years, she filled the house with a profusion of house plants - feathery ferns, philodendrons, coleus and African violets so delicate and turgid with vitality that the brittle leaves snapped and fell away at the slightest hint of pressure.
Arranging her home as though it were a Zen garden, Sylvia favored a bare minimum of furniture. In the living room was a settee strategically placed near the bay window, a small bookcase and upright piano, separated by huge gobs of empty space. On each end table, exactly five - no less no more - National Geographic magazines, fanned discreetly in a semicircle. The magazines were not intended for reading. “A consultant from Perkins Institute for the Blind,” Jason observed a week before he deserted the marriage,” couldn’t have done a better job.”

The capitol of South Dakota. Had she forgotten; had she ever bothered to learn the capitol of South Dakota? Or was this the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease? Multi-infarct dementia?
“What’s it feel like to make love?” Becky asked.
Sylvia was drifting back to sleep. The loose tether of her daughter’s precious voice drew her back. “First time it hurts; afterwards it’s nice.”
“Oh, I see.”
At twelve, she didn’t see anything. And what was the capitol of South Dakota? Sioux Falls? Pierre? Boise? Helena? Cheyenne? Rapid City?
“Danny O’Rourke never damaged a single brick,” Becky said.
Again, Sylvia felt the tug on the gossamer string of her fading consciousness and opened her drooping eyelids. “What are we talking about now?”
“The mason. He cleaned and stacked two hundred and thirty-five bricks and never chipped a single one! I know because, after he left, I counted them.”
“How do you figure it?” Sylvia’s brain was on automatic pilot. She wasn’t quite sure what she was saying anymore. Nor did she care. It was enough to have Becky in the warm bed next to her.
“It’s all in the wrist, the angle the blade strikes stone.”
Boise. Helena. Bismark. Cheyenne. Fargo. Broken hymens. Labia majora. Vulva. Bartholin glands. Chip, chip, chip. Tap, tap, tap. Tradescantia albiflora, tradescantia fluminensis, zebrina pendula. Unctuous, annoying ex-husbands.
And the capitol of South Dakota is ...

Sylvia called Danny O’Rourke at home the following evening. “You did a nice job.”
“Been at it for the better part of twenty years,” he said in his dull, lumpy voice. “Ought to be good at something by now.”
“About your money ...”
“Catch you one night after work.” There was no great urgency in his voice. With a queer sense of well-being, Sylvia hung up the phone.
On Thursday around six, Danny O’Rourke showed up. Sylvia brought him into the kitchen and gave him the remainder of the money. He folded the bills without bothering to count and stuffed them into his pocket. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. O’Rourke.”
“You have to ask an Irishman if he’d like a cup of tea?” He smiled at his own joke and promptly sat down at the table. Becky padded quietly into the room and leaned up against the dishwasher.
“Where’re you from?” Sylvia asked.
“Glendalough. In the Wicklow Mountains of eastern Ireland. Beautiful country. Not much steady work, though, for someone like myself. Saint Kevin founded a monastery in Glendalough in the 6th century.”
“I’m not familiar with Saint Kevin,” she said with a faint smile.
“Ah!” He caught the subtle humor. “No, I should be surprised if you were.”
She brought him his tea which he sweetened with sugar. “Never married?” The question was gratuitous. She already knew the answer.
“Never had the misfortune.” He continued to drink his tea in silence, the face dusted with grayish film - cement or sand - the curly brown hair drifting out from under the shaggy cap. “Not being much of a talker,... it’s a bit of an affliction with me,” he said. “Don’t know what to say when I’m around people such as yourself.” He sipped at the tea, draining the last of it from the mug. “All I can do is mend walls.”
“If people could mend walls as easily as they make mindless chatter, there’d be no need for people such as you.”
“Never thought of it that way,” he said rising to his feet. His legs were thin and slightly bowed.
“One question before you go,” Sylvia said. “The section of wall you repaired looks fine, just as it did before the accident. But now the undamaged portion somehow looks different.”
“While I rebuilt the wall, your daughter tooled the joints,” he replied, “from one end to the other. That’s why it looks spanking new.” He was at the door now. “Like I said, I ain’t much good with people, but I do a passable job with mortar and stone.”
When he was gone, Becky added, “He showed me how to use the pointing tool.” Sylvia remembered the useless-looking, piece of scrap metal. “Scrape the broken mortar and stone dust from the old bricks. How to wet down the crumbling cement and reform the joints.” There was more than a hint of reproach in her voice. “He’s not some stupid, working-class clod, if that’s what you think.”
“I never, for one minute suggested - ”
“And he never snuck a peek at my boobs or bare legs. Not once!”

Sylvia opted to stay at her interpreter’s flat outside Moscow rather than a Western-style hotel. Tuesday the electricity was off and she was forced to carry her grocery bags up four flights of darkened stairs to the cramped apartment where they lit candles and waited for the lights to be restored. No one seemed to care. Since ‘perestroika’, municipal services and living conditions had deteriorated.
“Much divorce in Russia. I’ve been married three times, my present husband twice,” Marina said. “One can’t be happy when life is so hard.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and held the glowing weed in front of Sylvia’s face. “In Russia we understand what tar and nicotine does to your throat and lungs; we know vodka pickles your brain, rots the liver.” She sucked on the tobacco and blew a thick column of smoke out her nose. “We are not stupid, only weary of life.”
Later that night, neighbors in the upstairs apartment began to fight. The husband was drunk; the wife hysterical. The muffled sounds of young children crying filtered through the thin walls. The screaming and recriminations rose to a crescendo and just as abruptly subsided in an eerie stillness. “When these things happen,” Marina muttered, sitting in the darkness waiting for the electricity to be restored, “we have an expression. We say ‘Just like Dostoyevsky!’. Do you understand?”
“Yes I understand,” Sylvia said.
In the morning, she was lecturing at Moscow University. She would covered the first hundred pages of Crime and Punishment, focusing on the murder of the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna; Raskolinikov’s chance meeting in the tavern with the drunken buffoon, Marmeladov; the letter from his mother describing Mr. Svidrgailov’s botched attempt to seduce the younger sister, Dounia; and the dream sequence predating the murders. With Dostoyevsky as a starting point, subsequent, guest speakers would proceed to the other, pre-modern, Slavic writers.
Sylvia wanted to review her notes. But without adequate light or heat - the furnace had shut down when the electricity was lost - nothing could be accomplished. “Spakonay nochee (good night).” She went into the other room, put on her nightgown and lay down on the cold, sagging mattress.

In late August, Sylvia arrived home one day to find the kitchen floor under an inch of water, an ominous, hiss coming from the cabinet under the sink. Kneeling down, she opened the cabinet and was struck full force by a blast of cold water. The blow knocked her almost to the middle of the room where she lay dazed in the cool wetness. Water was pouring from the joint where the shut-off valve ran up into the sink. She edged closer and tried to turn the valve but the spray was too intense and drove her back. Her right eye was throbbing, the vision fractured into multiple images.
Sylvia struggled to her feet but promptly fell down again whacking her head on a chair. Retreating to the den, she dialed the plumber and reached an answering machine.
Mason and general handyman. No job too small..
“Do handymen fix leaky pipes?” she mused. Placing the heel of her hand over the right eye, Sylvia dialed the number on the torn scrap of paper. The phone rang a half dozen times before she heard the familiar Irish accent. “It’s Sylvia Mandelstam.” She was crying now, making no effort to hide her distress. “A pipe broke. The kitchen’s flooded. My eye hurts. Can you help me?”
“Where’s the leak?”
“Under the sink.”
“Go down in the basement. Shut the main water supply.”
“I can’t do it,” she sobbed. “The water hit me full force in the eye. I may need a doctor.”
“If you could dial my telephone number, you can shut the water. Right is tight. Left is loose.”
“Right is tight. Left is -”
“Counterclockwise. Just turn the water off then go check the pipe. I’ll stay on the line.”
Crying, gagging, stumbling and tripping over her soggy nylons, she groped her way into the basement and fumbled with the shut off valve. “Right is tight, right is tight, right is ...” The last quarter turn was when she heard the flow choke and gradually shut down. Total silence. The water was off.
In the kitchen, a lake mirrored the fixtures on the ceiling but the deluge was over. “I shut the water,” Sylvia spoke more evenly now. “Except for the lake in my kitchen, everything’s under control.”
“What’s the matter with your eye?” More than a hint of concern crept into his voice.
Sylvia blinked several times and gazed about the room. “My eye’s okay.”
“I’m leaving now,” Danny said and hung up the phone.
While she was changing into dry clothes, Becky came home. “What happened?”
“Pipe broke. Danny O’Rourke’s coming over.”
“How are we going to get all that water up?”
“Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Twenty minutes later, Danny O’Rourke arrived with plumbing tools and a 10-gallon wet-vac. He vacuumed up the water, then checked under the sink. “Nothing wrong with the shut-off valve,” he said, lugging the wet-vac back out to the truck. “Copper fitting gave way, that’s all.”
She followed him into the street. “I knew enough to shut the main water supply,” Sylvia blustered. “When the water hit me in the face, I got momentarily, disoriented.” She suddenly grabbed his wrist with both her hands. “That much I did know.”
“Yes, these things happen.” Danny located a propane tank. “Have Becky open the outside faucets to drain the line.”
Why drain the line? Wasn’t it sufficient to have the water shut down and pipes dry? It was easier to learn the Cyrillic alphabet than deal with these domestic calamities. “Yes, of course,” she said and immediately felt silly.
Back in the soggy kitchen, Danny lit the gas torch and fanned the flame over the pipe. When it glowed bright orange, he clamped a vise grip on the upper stem and pulled the joint apart. Running a sausage-shaped, metal brush back and forth inside the coupling, he cleaned the copper tubing with cloth-backed, emery paper.
“What’s that for?” Sylvia asked. He was brushing a clear paste inside the joint and on the polished outer surface of the pipe.
“Flux,” he replied without bothering to look up. The metal glistened with the wet paste. “It keeps the metal from oxidizing and draws the solder into the joint for a water-tight seal.” He relit the torch, adjusted the flame to a compact, blue wedge and placed it against the metal. A minute passed. Touching a strand of solder to the metal, the silver wire dissolved in a moist blur disappearing into the faucet coupling. When the excess bubbled up over the edge, Danny pulled the strand away, flicking the torch off. “All done. Good as new.”

“My husband works for a printing firm,” Marina, the interpreter, said. They were walking in the garden of the Monastery of Saint Peter the Great. “The other day a man came into the office and requested a quote on 50,000 copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” She took a draft from an unfiltered cigarette and blew the air out forcefully through her mouth. “My husband says, ‘I don’t print anti-Semitic shit!’, and the man holds up a thick wad of rubles and says, ‘I pay cash for the job.’”
Sylvia pulled her collar up tight around her throat. April in Moscow felt more like March back home. “And?”
Marina grimaced. “My husband says, ‘Go to hell!’. The man closes his brief case and says, ‘Better yet, I’ll go down the street to your competitor.’”

Becky reentered the kitchen and squatted on her haunches next to the sink. She was dressed in a tank top, leather sandals and cut-off jeans. “After what just happened, “ Sylvia mused, “I wouldn’t care if she were naked from the waist up.” She went down into the basement and turned the main water supply back on. The joint held. Danny collected his tools and took them out to the truck.
“Ask him out.” Becky put her nose in her mother’s face. “If you don’t I will.”
“Danny O’Rourke’s a perfectly nice man - a saint, maybe - but he will never be your step-father.”
“Intellectual snob! Hypocrite!”
Sylvia kissed her daughter on the tip of the nose, deftly stepped around her and went out to the curb. “How much do I owe you?”
“Thirty should do it.”
“A plumber would charge twice as much.”
He was leaning into the cab of the truck, one hand on the steering column. “I’m a mason, not a licensed plumber.” He swung up onto the seat and began rummaging in the glove compartment. Dropping back down to the ground, he handed Sylvia a wrinkled picture postcard. “Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains.”
Sylvia glanced at the card. The ruins of several churches with crumbling steeples lay nestled in a flowery, tree-shrouded valley; a wide lake loomed in the background. “There aren’t any homes visible in the picture.”
“They’re scattered throughout the countryside. There’s no central village to speak of.” He pushed the shaggy cap back on his head. “When you look at this, perhaps you’ll understand why I’m not so clever with words.”
Sylvia handed him back the card and stared at the parched, late-summer lawn. “Cleverness with words isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” An anonymous woodpecker in one of the Scotch pines that bordered the property was hammering away at the porous wood. The rhythmic clatter petered out then, after a short lull, the woodpecker resumed his frenetic labor. “My trip to Russia last year was a nightmare.”
“But I thought -”
“I know what I said. It was crap.”

Fifteen minutes later, Becky glanced out the bay window. Her mother had moved away from the pickup truck and was standing near the mended wall, yakking away nonstop. Danny was leaning against a slim hazel tree, his hands plunged in his pockets, eyes bent to earth.
Becky went upstairs, took a shower and washed her hair. An hour later she went to the window. Her mother had edged a few steps closer to the mason who had removed his hat and was inspecting the brim. “Strange!” Becky muttered.
When the mason finally drove off, Sylvia wandered back indoors. “Mr. O'Rourke will be joining us for supper Friday night.” Her voice sounded strangely high-pitched, affected.
“A date!” Becky grinned idiotically.
“Not a date, per se,” Sylvia hedged. “Just an invite to dinner. Don’t you dare read anything more into it than that!”
“No, of course not,” Becky said in a voice equally counterfeit.