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  “YOU GOT THE HOTS FOR HER?”

  “MYOB. I’VE GOT A GIRLFRIEND.”

  “MAYBE YOU WANT TWO.”

  “Smartass kid, your friend Ernie,” I said to Joanne.

  “ERNIE,” Joanne typed, “MY BROTHER THINKS YOU’RE A—”

  “Joanne, you’re asking for trouble.”

  “—SMART KID.” Joanne gave me a smile. She signed off with Ernie. “GOTTA GO NOW, PAIK, MY BROTHER’S BOTHERING ME. SEE YOU TOMORROW.”

  “So that’s what you do all the time in here,” I said.

  “No, I do a lot of stuff.”

  I sat down at the keyboard and Joanne sat next to me, eating the rest of the macaroni and showing me things she could do on the modem. There were communication boards she could hook into, a bulletin board where she could leave or pick up messages, and a storyboard where people either made up their own stories or added to someone else’s. There were ways for people to share information or support each other when in trouble, talk, get things off their chests.

  “See, George, it’s not complicated. Anyone can get the hang of it. Even you.”

  “Bless you, my child.”

  “You know what I mean. You don’t get your kicks out of computers.”

  I sat there, punching keys and trying to keep up with the rapid-fire instructions I was getting from Joanne. I caught about fifty percent of it. We were on the bulletin board when a message caught my attention.

  “HELP. SMALL PRACTICAL PROBLEM. I WANT TO KILL MY DENTIST. ANY ADVICE FOR ME? SIGN-OFF, BLOOD AND GUTS.”

  “Who’s going to answer that?” I asked Joanne.

  “I don’t know.”

  The answer appeared on the screen. “BLOOD AND GUTS, FOR GOOD HEALTH HABIT, AVOID DENTIST AT ALL COSTS.”

  “Now what happens?” I asked. “Will Blood and Guts answer?”

  “Maybe she just left the message there and she’ll come back later for an answer.”

  “She? You think Blood and Guts is a she?”

  “Who cares? Maybe it’s a he. Maybe it’s an it. Maybe it’s a Max Headroom. That’s what I like about the modem, George. You can talk to anybody, and nobody cares what you are or who you are. I could be talking to the President, and he wouldn’t know I was twelve years old and a girl and lived in Clifton Heights. All he’d know is what I said.”

  “And what would you say to the President?”

  She punched me. “Don’t give me that goofy, patronizing smile. I’d probably say something nice and soothing. He’s got a hard job. He’s got to relax sometimes. Maybe there are things he can’t say to anyone else, because he’s President and everybody thinks the Prez has to know all the answers. Probably he never gets a chance just to be silly, so I might tell him, ‘Prez, you can be as silly as you want with me. I won’t give it away.’”

  Another message appeared.

  “APPRECIATE CONCERN FOR MY HEALTH. DENTIST IS THE ONE I’D STILL LIKE TO CROWN. TEETH ARE AT THE ROOT OF THIS PROBLEM.”

  “‘Root of this problem,’” Joanne repeated. “Har-har-har.”

  “Shhh,” I whispered.

  “They can’t hear us, George.”

  “B&G: INVITE DENTIST ON A LONG CRUISE IN A LEAKY BOAT. OR GET HIM DRUNK ON TOP OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. OR, ALL ELSE FAILING, TIE HIM TO THE BACK OF A TAXI AND SEND THE DRIVER TO CALIFORNIA.”

  “These people are really getting into it,” I said to Joanne. “Do you think I could put something in?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I typed, “PUSH HIM OFF ONE OF HIS BRIDGES.” It was silly, but fun. I went on playing around with the modem, hooking into different conversations. Joanne left to make herself a milk shake.

  Chapter 6

  In the morning, before she left for work, my mother asked if Troy and I would pick up a bureau she’d left at the refinisher’s. I buttered a roll, thinking about Julie. I’d dreamed about her last night. Something about a cat meowing and screeching … someone crying. It was a relief to wake up.

  “Troy still has his truck, doesn’t he?” my mother said.

  I nodded. “He’ll do it, Mom, if he doesn’t have football practice.” I waited. I knew what my mother was going to say next. I can’t understand why anyone with Troy’s talent.…

  “George,” Mom said, right on cue, “I can’t understand why anyone who can play the piano like Troy would risk his fingers on a football field.”

  “Well, he likes football.”

  “But music is so much more satisfying.”

  “He likes that, too, Mom. He’s got room for both in his life.”

  “I suppose so,” my mother said doubtfully.

  My parents’ opinion of Troy as a musical genius was formed the day they came home and found him playing Beethoven at our piano. Nobody in our family knew how to play the piano like that. Given half a chance, my father would start in on how he’d always dreamed of playing the piano, and how he never had a chance to learn because he went to work in his father’s barber shop when he was ten years old.

  This speech always ended with, “If I’d had the opportunities you kids have, I would have practiced four hours a day every day of the year and considered it a rare privilege.”

  “Right, Dad.” He and my mother had more or less forced me to take lessons when I was a kid, and they were pushing Joanne now. Neither of us had any talent for music. I was even more hopeless than Joanne. I never got past Für Elise. At least Joanne could play a few things.

  So you can appreciate how my parents felt when they came home that day and saw Troy hunched over the keyboard, with those big mitts of his drawing the softest, most delicate sound out of the piano. He was totally involved in the music, his eyes closed, his hands like butterflies over the keys. Then his head snapped up, his hands rose, and he brought the sound up with big sweeping movements, a beautiful sound, more sound than we’d ever dreamed could come out of our piano.

  My mother clapped.

  “Bravo!” my father said.

  “Where did you learn to play like that?” my mother said.

  Troy stood up. “My mother’s a piano teacher.” There he was, my friend Troy the slob, shirt unbuttoned, belly showing above his pants. Ordinarily my parents would have noticed those things, clicked their tongues, wondered if this person was a good influence on their son. But Troy was forgiven all because of his rare talent.

  “Beautiful,” my father said, shaking Troy’s hand. “You’ve got a wonderful talent.”

  After that, they always talked about him in a special way. And whenever he was at our house, they’d ask him to play the piano.

  Troy came around the corner in his pickup, blasting the horn. “I hope you know I’m doing you an immense favor,” he said as soon as I got in. He sucked up the last of a soda, then tossed the can on the floor.

  “Understood. I’m humbly grateful.” I booted some of the junk out of the way. The inside of his truck was like a giant wastebasket, ankle high in greasy hamburger papers, soda cans, and plastic cups.

  We cruised over to Englewood. “George.” Troy rapped me on the knee and pointed to some girls. “Pay attention. We’re picking winners and losers here, hits and misses, stars and bombs, keepers and discards.”

  When it came to girls, there was always a certain cynical way guys talked. You didn’t want to express emotion or show that you really liked a girl, or that you could be hurt or unhappy or vulnerable. Emotion was for girls. Guys were macho, impregnable. Iron forts. Any guy was superior to any girl. On higher ground. Judging. Commenting. Ruling. Handing down the final verdict.

  We’d be in the locker room after a workout in the gym and Troy would put an arm lock on me and drag me over to his locker and show me the latest naked lady. “What do you think?” He’d lick his lips and ask as if it were a serious question, “If you had the chance, would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “If she invited you? Would you turn it down?”

  I’d try to be cool about it. “Troy, you are a primo slimeball.”
And I’d tell him to get his head out from between his legs. But there’d be heat in my cheeks and my ears, and I knew that if he was a slimeball, so was I.

  Now he pointed to a girl jogging by in sweats and a T-shirt. “Keeper or discard. I’d give her a nine, but she’s a little light in the rear end.”

  “Duck walks turn me off, but my heart goes out to girls that are pigeon-toed.”

  “Is Julie pigeon-toed?”

  “Tell her, and you’re dead, man.”

  “You two—” He always said that, you two, and he never said it without a shake of his head that he reserved for anything that was almost beyond belief. Julie and I supposedly fit into that category. We weren’t like other people, other couples. Not really normal.

  Staying with one girl! How could I do it? Troy lusted over women. He liked to say, “I never saw a girl I didn’t want to sleep with.” Chris was a record for him. He’d been going with her for three months.

  “Does Chris know you look this much?”

  “She looks, too. Everybody looks.”

  “Julie doesn’t.”

  Troy gave me a glance that said I was a poor, innocent jerk. “Everybody looks,” he repeated. “And some of us do more than look.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, Chris is great, but the world is full of girls. What am I supposed to do, retire at the age of seventeen?”

  When we got to Englewood, we had trouble finding the refinishing shop. “It’s called The Village Woodworker,” I said. “Someone named Lydia Joy owns it.” We finally located it on a small side street behind a row of expensive antique shops. Troy parked the truck and we got out. The door was locked. I rapped on the glass.

  A black woman in a denim apron and jeans opened the door. She had high cheekbones, wore big glasses, and had her hair down around her shoulders. She was fairly beautiful.

  “Good day,” Troy said, turning on the charm.

  “You have a bureau ready for Farina?” I asked.

  “Farina?”

  “That’s my mother. She asked me to pick it up.”

  The woman looked at me, then at Troy. “And who’s he?”

  “He’s my friend, here to help me carry it out. It’s his truck.” I indicated the pickup.

  “Mmm,” she said. “What’s your phone number?”

  I gave her the number of the shop. She left us standing outside while she phoned. She’d locked the door. When she came back, she let us in. “I’ve been robbed too many times,” she said.

  We followed Lydia Joy to the back of the shop, where tables, chairs, and bureaus were stacked one on top of another. She stopped to tighten the clamps on a chair being reglued.

  “Okay, three-drawer bureau. Here it is.” She polished the top with a chamois. “It’s a beautiful thing. Look at the grain.” It was the first time there was some warmth in her voice.

  “Oak,” Troy said.

  “No, it’s not oak. It’s chestnut,” she said flatly.

  I stooped down to look at the grain of the wood. Mom had bought the bureau at a house sale. It had been painted a dull brown and we’d all thought she’d thrown away her money.

  “It’s an unusual piece,” Lydia Joy said. “There’s very little chestnut around anymore.” Then she gave us a lecture on how the chestnut trees once covered the eastern United States and supported a huge population of squirrels and other animals. And how today there wasn’t a mature American chestnut left in the world. “Kids like you don’t even know the difference.”

  “Well, you gave us something to think about,” Troy said, with his usual sarcasm. She caught it, too.

  I ran my hand over the top of the bureau. “It’s like velvet.”

  “It should be. It’s been sanded six times.”

  I looked around. I smelled raw wood, glue, and linseed oil. I liked seeing all this old, beat-up furniture piled up waiting to be worked on. “It must be great doing this work.”

  “Great? Only if you love it. There’s no money in it, not the way I do it. See that piece over there?” She pointed to a large rolltop desk. “Some idiot painted that. It’s over one hundred years old and it was nearly ruined. I’ve been working on it for months, and I still haven’t gotten every speck of paint off. And when I do finish, you know what’s going to happen? Someone will come in here, see it, want it, and then complain like hell about the price. They don’t think anything about my labor. Okay, let’s get this bureau out of here, boys.”

  Troy and I lifted the bureau and walked it back through the store. Outside, we loaded it in the back of the truck.

  Then Lydia Joy climbed up and wrapped the chest in blankets and showed us how she wanted it tied down. “There’s not a scratch on it now, and I don’t want a scratch on it when you deliver it to your mom. Got that?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “We’ll treat it like a newborn baby,” Troy said.

  I asked Lydia Joy if she did everything herself.

  “You mean, all the work here? Yes. Why?”

  “Oh.…” I smiled. “Just thought if you needed somebody to work for you—”

  “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are your qualifications?”

  “I’m strong.”

  “You’re not very big,” she said.

  That was kind of brutal. “Looks are deceptive,” I said. “I’d really like to work here. I don’t know, something about the wood and the smell … and making old things new.” It sounded so lame, I stopped.

  She looked at me. “I could use someone, but I need someone reliable.… Well, let me think about it.”

  “Which means no, meathead,” Troy muttered.

  But she took my name and number, scribbled it on a piece of paper, and stuck it in her pocket.

  Later that day, I called Julie. Her mother answered. “George? I just walked into the house myself. I don’t even have my shoes off. Let me see if Julie’s here.” When she came back, she said, “Julie wants to know if you got her letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “I don’t know, George. She said she sent you a letter.”

  “What’d she send me a letter for?”

  “Wait a minute.… Julie!” She didn’t bother covering the phone. “Do you want to talk to George?… Okay … George, all I know is she says you should have the letter by now.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And she says she can’t talk to you till you read the letter.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t get it, either, George. Julie says, after you read it, then you’ll understand. Okay, George?” She hung up.

  A letter? From Julie? Why a letter? We didn’t write each other letters. We were on the phone almost every day. The last time she had written to me was two years ago, the summer she went away for a month to visit her father’s parents in Corpus Christi, Texas. The only thing I remembered from those letters was how boring and flat it was out there and how she couldn’t wait to get back and see me.

  What did she have to say that she couldn’t say face-to-face? Something bad, I thought. And I remembered that dream about the cat and Julie.

  I checked the front hall, the mail drop inside the door, and the window seat where my mother sometimes left the mail. There was an L. L. Bean catalogue and a flyer announcing a pancake breakfast. Was that today’s mail or left over from another day?

  I called my mother at work. “Mom, did you get the mail today?”

  “You mean here? At the shop? Yes.”

  “Was there a letter for me?”

  “No. Why?”

  “How about the mail at home?”

  “George. Darling. You’re home, not me.”

  “There’s no mail here.”

  “Then I guess it didn’t come.”

  “Doesn’t it come earlier than this?”

  “I thought so. Are you sure there’s no mail?”

  “Mom, that’s what I’m asking you!”

  “Shh,” she said, “not so l
oud. What’s the trouble? What’s supposed to come in the mail?”

  “Nothing! Just a letter.”

  “Well, it’ll come. Be patient. I have to go now, darling.” She hung up.

  I stood there for a moment. What is it, Julie? Why a letter? I remembered how angry she’d gotten at her mother the other night. Did it have something to do with that? That didn’t make any sense. If she was mad at her mother, then she ought to write her mother a letter.

  Suddenly I remembered a funny thing that Julie said to me a few weeks ago. “You always say ‘understood.’ I’m sick of hearing you say, ‘Understood, understood.’”

  I didn’t get it. “I always say what?”

  “George, we’re going shopping Saturday. Am I right?”

  “Understood.”

  “There you go,” Julie said. “Exhibit A.”

  I hadn’t even heard myself say it. “I’ll stop saying it if it bothers you,” I said.

  “Yes, it bothers me.”

  “Okay, fine. That’s the end of that.”

  “Good.” We didn’t talk for a while. “I want to see a movie on Saturday,” Julie said.

  “Understood.”

  “But not that war movie. You know how I feel about war movies.”

  “Understood.”

  Julie grabbed my arm. “You just did it twice in a row. It’s so obnoxious! And you know what, now I’m doing it, too. Every time someone says something to me, I catch myself saying ‘Understood’! I can’t stand it. Now we’re even talking alike.”

  Understood. Understood. I went and looked for the mailman. Understood, she said. Only I wasn’t understanding anything.

  Chapter 7

  “Joanne?” I yelled up the stairs to my sister’s room. No answer. “Joanne, where are you?”

  “Down here.” Her voice floated up from the basement.

  “Did the mail come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t take it in?”

  “No.”

  I went down to the basement room where my workout mats were stacked. Joanne and Ernie Paik were down there. Joanne was soldering some bits of wire together. Ernie watched intently. I’d never seen him look any other way. He didn’t talk much, either. In fact, that “conversation” we had on the computer was the longest one I’d ever had with him. Come to think of it, I’d hardly ever seen him eat, either. Maybe that’s why he looked dazed—undernourished—but maybe it was because he was on another plane, a higher level.