Mrs. Saint and the Defectives

Once the old woman was inside, she would surely amble into the living room to check on whether Markie had hung any artwork yet—which would lead to her tsking and och-ing and motioning for Frédéric to run back for his toolbox and for Patty and Bruce to fetch the art from the basement while Ronda rooted through the cupboards to see if there was something she could make them for dinner.

“On second thought,” Markie said, scratching arms that suddenly felt like they were covered in poison ivy, “if the job Mrs. Saint offered was for you to help over there, then I guess you need to do that. Don’t want to be asking for concessions on your first day.”

“Ooookay,” Jesse said, clearly confused by her 180-degree change but not at all interested in the cause of it. “That works, too.” He jumped up, retrieved Angel’s leash, and snapped it on. “I’ll bring her back in a bit and grab my history book,” he said. “I’ve got a quiz tomorrow. Get this: Mrs. Saint says part of my tutoring job is to do my own homework in front of Lola. I mean, I won’t get it all done, since I have so much more than she does, but I can do a bit of it, like looking over history. Cool, right? I mean, who gets paid to do their own homework?”

“It’s very generous, that’s for sure,” Markie said.

He reached the door, but instead of opening it, he turned back. “Oh, do we have any Hershey bars? Lola says she’ll do all her homework without complaining if I give her one.”

“We don’t,” she said, “but you don’t want to teach her to do homework for a reward anyway. You want to get her to do it for herself, because she wants to learn, wants to get good grades—the same reason you do all of yours. That’s why Mrs. Saint’s paying you to look at your history notes over there. She wants your work ethic to rub off on Lola.”

“Oh, yeah. That makes sense.” He smiled. “So, like, you and Mrs. Saint are totally on the same page, huh?”

He was out the door and across the patio before Markie could form the thought, not for the first time, that having him spend his afternoons with Trevor might have been the safer choice after all.





Chapter Twenty


The fact that Jesse wasn’t hyperbolic about his first week with Lola—it was “okay,” she was “not a bad kid,” their walks home were “still fine,” tutoring her was “maybe a little more annoying” than expected “but not as awful as it could be”—made his report the following Sunday, about his first afternoon with Frédéric, that much more notable.

“It was, like, amazing!” he told Markie as he collapsed on the family room floor a little before six o’clock on Sunday evening.

He was physically exhausted but mentally amped up, so while his limbs were motionless, his mouth was the opposite. He lacked the energy to push Angel away, so as he gave Markie a rapid-fire play-by-play of his afternoon, the dog licked every inch of skin she could find. Markie was shocked into muteness at the number of words voluntarily leaving her son’s mouth, and she could only sit, openmouthed, and listen.

“We replaced a fifth of the fence! A fifth! Just us! In only three hours! That means taking out the old part, carrying all the new wood over, measuring it all. Oh, by the way? Frédéric’s a total perfectionist, to an insane degree. We checked every measurement, like, a hundred times. Then we had to cut it all. Some we did with a handsaw right at the fence, and some stuff, the bigger posts, we carried into the garage, where he’s got this totally cool workshop set up where a second car would go.

“That’s a ton of work! When he pointed out the section of fence he wanted to finish, I figured it would take us twice as long as it did. Oh, and I did the handsaw! I sucked at first, Mom, like, so bad. And you should’ve seen Frédéric, trying to pretend I was doing a decent job so he wouldn’t hurt my feelings. He had to look away a few times after I butchered a few of the little rail pieces. He had extras, though, luckily.”

He dropped his voice here, although they were the only two in the room. “He told me he bought extras, and then he told me he thought it would be Bruce helping him, and then he shrugged. Which I’m guessing means he expected Bruce to mess up, and he planned ahead for it. But he wouldn’t come right out and say that. Just like he wouldn’t let on that I was messing up.

“He’d say things like ‘Perhaps on the next try you will take a little more time to get the saw at the right angle before you start to cut’ or ‘I always find that checking my work as I go is helpful, rather than speeding through and finding I have gone off the line.’ He’s like, the world’s most patient teacher.”

Markie considered this. Perhaps that was the answer to Frédéric’s almost-daily disappearance.

“Do you think he’s a professor?” she asked Jesse.

Earlier, she had formed an idea he might be a consultant of some sort. She hadn’t considered teaching—until now. There was a community college in town and also an extension campus of the state flagship university. Maybe he taught at one of those places? “Did he mention anything about teaching? Or where it is that he goes every afternoon?” Jesse looked at her quizzically, and she quickly explained Frédéric’s regular sojourn and how she couldn’t get a straight answer about it from the others.

“Nuh-uh,” Jesse said. “He didn’t say anything about it. I don’t think he’s a teacher, though.”

“Why not?”

“He just seems too . . . I don’t know, shy or something. He seems a bit . . .” Jesse looked at the ceiling for the right word and, not finding it easily, shrugged, letting the thought dissolve.

Sad, Markie wanted to finish for him. Defeated. Those were the words she often conjured when she thought of Frédéric. It was as though he had once held a far higher position than handyman and general foreman to a group of fellow Defectives, and he was constantly aware of that. Or was she imagining things? Had her own fall from professional, social, and financial grace made her see things in Frédéric that weren’t there?

“Why are you so obsessed about where he goes, anyway?” Jesse asked.

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just taking an interest in our neighbor.”

Jesse laughed. “Since when?”

“I find him to be an intriguing person, that’s all,” she said. “But never mind. Go on with your story. What else did you do over there?”

“Oh, right. Let’s see . . . oh yeah, we took one of the big posts to the garage for him to cut with the table saw, and I asked him if I could learn to use it sometime, and he was like, ‘I always think it is best to master the less complicated tools first.’ Can you believe that? Unreal, right? I mean, I don’t even know why I asked about it, but once it came out, I expected him to laugh at me and say, ‘Nice try!’

“Anyway, I got a little better with the handsaw after the second hour, and by the end he was smiling at my cuts and telling me, ‘Good job.’ And then, when I was leaving just now, he told me that maybe next Sunday he’ll try me out with the big posts on the table saw! How awesome is that?”

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