Markie bowed her head in defeat and sighed. She couldn’t believe what she was about to suggest, but anything was better than letting him spend more time with Trevor the spray-painting twit. Taking a breath, she gestured across the fence and said her next words as fast as she could, before she lost her nerve.
“Go talk to her. She has a list of things Frédéric could use help with. When she first told me, I didn’t think you’d be interested, but, obviously, things have changed. The list wasn’t all that long, but I bet if you tell her what you’re trying to do, she’ll add to it.”
“You want me to talk to Mrs. Saint?” he asked, incredulous. “You want me to work for her?”
Markie chastised herself for the sighing and muttering she had done about their neighbor in her son’s presence. From now on, she would keep her griping to herself.
She nodded. “It would probably be a lot less physical than the lumberyard.”
A self-conscious smile flickered over his lips. “I was starting to worry about that, to be honest. Trevor’s a lot bigger than me. But you really think she’d come up with more stuff? A thousand bucks’ worth?”
“I do.”
“That’s, like, crazy.”
Before Markie had a chance to reconsider whether perhaps Trevor might be the lesser of the two evils after all, Jesse took off across the patio, Angel running behind. She watched as they sped across the lawn, jumped the fence, and sprinted the rest of the way to Mrs. Saint’s side door. Jesse knocked, and a moment later, Frédéric answered, bowing stiffly in greeting. He exchanged a few words with Jesse, then called over his shoulder.
Mrs. Saint appeared, opening her folded piece of paper and holding it out to Jesse, who took it with one hand and held the dog’s collar with the other as she pulled to get in the door. Markie waited for Mrs. Saint to point to the screened porch or the tie-out or some other place where Jesse could secure the animal so she wouldn’t sneak into the house. But the older woman stepped back, pulling Frédéric with her to make room, and beckoned the boy and his pet inside. The door shut behind them, leaving Markie alone, gawking at her neighbor’s closed door.
Chapter Nineteen
The thud of a closing door woke Markie at 5:45 on Wednesday morning. She panicked for a moment, recalling the last time she’d been woken by a noise in the night, but a moment later she heard Angel whine from the sidewalk outside her window. Peeking out, she saw them walking down the street, Jesse holding plastic bags in one hand, the leash in the other, as the animal tugged, trying to get him to move faster. He resisted and forced her to walk beside him at his ambling pace, and Markie grinned. The boy might want a dog, but he did not want a morning jogging routine. Angel would have to get used to the fact that her owner was a video gamer, not a runner.
She was finishing her second cup of coffee when the two of them came panting in an hour later.
“I tried getting up earlier,” he said, “I really did, but I just couldn’t do it. Sorry. I know you think she needs to be out a lot longer.” He collapsed on the floor, struggling to muster the energy required to unhook the leash. “Even the hour killed me.” He closed his eyes and appeared to be settling in for a nap.
“Jesse,” she said, “it’s quarter to seven.”
“Ugh,” he groaned, lifting himself slowly. “I’ve got to get Lola in fifteen minutes.”
As Markie predicted, Mrs. Saint had been more than willing to add to Jesse’s list until it resembled a work order that would total $1,000 over several months. Some things she would come up with as she thought of them, she told him, but others she added right then as he stood in her sitting room, Angel at his feet. The new items were all Lola-related: walk her to school in the mornings on his way to high school (a block from the elementary), walk her home in the afternoons, take her along on his after-school walk with Angel, help her with homework.
“How’s that for easy money?” he said when he returned from talking with his new employer. “She’ll pay me for basically walking myself to school and walking my own dog!”
Mrs. Saint was worried the girl wasn’t getting enough exercise, she told Jesse. Plus, she sensed Patty needed more breaks from Lola, as did the others, including Mrs. Saint herself.
“And here I am,” he said, “looking to earn some cash. So it’s all, you know, a win/win or whatever. ‘Shooting the single bird with the identical bullet’ is what she said, actually.”
“I told her I didn’t think a ninth-grade boy would want to hang out with a second-grade girl,” Markie told him. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be a problem if you asked her for other jobs instead. I saw the list, and it was all Frédéric’s stuff. Maybe Bruce has some things.”
“I don’t mind,” he said, and she was shocked.
When he had first seen Lola on the other side of the fence shortly after they moved in, he begged Markie not to make him go over and introduce himself.
“I mean, I sort of mind,” he admitted. “But Mr. Levin minded what we did to his store, so who am I to mind what I have to do to pay him back?”
“I’ll feed her,” Markie said, gesturing to the dog. “You go shower.”
“For real?”
“You can’t be late on your first day of work. Not for any job, even one for a neighbor.” It sounded so much like her father that she felt compelled to add, “And I’m proud of you. For what you’re doing to make things up to Mr. Levin. So I want to help.”
“Proud,” he repeated, as though he had possibly heard her wrong. “Not ashamed that I have something to make up to him for in the first place?”
She thought back to Sunday morning and how she’d had the sense that he had extracted all the shame from the atmosphere around the house. Her father, whose spirit had now settled into the kitchen, having heard her mini-lecture on the importance of timeliness, rose inside her. Clayton could find stray pockets of shame between the particles of oxygen and nitrogen suspended around them if he had to, after which he would trot them out in the form of “I can’t believe a child of mine would stoop this low,” or “How will your mother and I show our faces at the club after this?”
Markie drowned his presence in a mouthful of scalding coffee. “Proud,” she said, pointing to the basement door. “Now, shower. Hurry.”
“You’re the best, Mom.”
One point to Markie. One to the French Canadian, for the dog and the job. Zero to Clayton the Commander.