A few weeks after arriving in St. Cloud, Eddie started to pick up jobs here and there. He randomly encountered Sandy, the waitress from the Hungry Haven, at a drugstore and she told him that an overworked construction guy who didn’t do concrete had heard about a divorcée in a Victorian outside Pierz who needed a whole pool patio and front walkway done. Pouring concrete didn’t require much finesse, and the construction guy could handle anything Eddie couldn’t. When Eddie met with him, the guy made the call while Eddie sat right there. People did favors for strangers here, Eddie noted, without exactly being friendly. Nevertheless, he felt like he had a reprieve. Bethella had mixed feelings about his decision to work. Sometimes she warned him to get a diploma, other times she openly wished for solitude, seeming to imply that he should get a steady job and get gone.
Eventually Bethella stopped tolerating Eddie’s announcements about going to find Darlene. Your mother and I—she would begin, always neglecting to finish the thought. Then she’d say, Just don’t. You have to have a bottom line.
Darlene had called the house, begging him to return, but it soon dawned on Eddie that she hadn’t quit drugs. Their conversations splintered into anger and incoherence, and while brooding over their relationship in his workspace—aka Bethella’s basement—one day, he admitted to himself that some problems—and some people—can never get fixed, even by a skilled handyman.
After that, Eddie might speak abstractly about going to rescue his mother, but he said very little to his aunt about the exploitation and injury he’d suffered at Delicious Foods. She never encouraged him to return for Darlene, and she never asked for details. The more time went by, the more ashamed he grew about taking Darlene’s side, and the more he saw the sense in Bethella’s dispassionate, rational decision to cut her off.
In the meantime, good luck at work made hedging easier for him. His one job grew other jobs, then an apprenticeship, and soon a regular business sprouted up around him. That September Eddie turned eighteen and moved from Bethella’s to an apartment just down the street, so they could still look out for each other. Sometimes Eddie would go over to her house to watch her new favorite TV show, a sentimental series featuring a black woman angel. She would rub his shoulder blade and describe her pride in him, but he could still hear the undertones of her relief that he’d left. She might come over with a piled-up plate sometimes—no sweet potato pies, but juicy greens that made the breading flop off her overcooked fried chicken; mashed potatoes in a tinfoil pouch, soaking up its metallic taste; undercooked pig feet. He ate only enough to be polite. He never complained—he knew that good intentions always trumped bad soul food, and he grew as comfortable with the surrogate motherhood she provided as she did with the way that he partially filled the space left by Fremont’s death.
In due time, Eddie learned to stick a pen in his mouth and write again, and once he gained some skill, he sketched out a device: Two short cups, each with a pair of pincers attached, a simpler model of a prosthetic hook he’d studied in a trade magazine. The carpenter to whom he’d become apprenticed helped him make a version out of wood—cheaper that way. Together they perfected it, a custom fit for the end of his right arm. They smoothed and finished it, covered it in a lightweight polymer, and when that one worked, they made another for his left, attached it to a harness with catgut strings, and looped it around his back.
Wearing the contraption felt as grand to him as putting on an expensive new suit. Eddie stretched his arms and elbows, testing out the potential for movement, for subtle inflections in each pincer, for a lifelike bend in the wrist. The prosthesis seemed to wipe out the past and stretch the future into infinity. Eddie began to hope ferociously. Perhaps he would go back south after all and get Darlene to leave Delicious whether she wanted to or not.
He spent eight months or so gaining dexterity. Mornings and late nights, he’d practice picking up grains of rice, turning doorknobs, spigots, and pages, holding utensils, raising glasses. As he grew more confident, he tried juggling two eggs, but after covering his kitchen table in goo, he switched to small rocks.
The range and subtlety of motion Eddie’s invention offered him expanded his abilities well beyond what he’d hoped. Pouring concrete and tarring roofs no longer made up his entire work schedule. After being in St. Cloud for a year and a half, he returned to doing electrical wiring and repairing appliances, as he had done at the farm, though it took longer to overhaul a radio than before. He had trouble managing the tiny screwdrivers, the intricate circuitry. But soon.