“No,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Patty said.
“No,” I said. “He’s not going. He’s staying here.”
Patty opened her mouth and closed it. A big, fuzzy, yellow-and-black bumblebee moved in a lazy circle near my head and then planed off in a big looping arch down toward the lake.
“That’s illegal,” Patty said.
I didn’t say anything.
“You can’t take a child away from its parents.”
The bee found no sustenance near the lake and buzzed back, circling around Patty Giacomin, fixing on her perfume. She shrank away from it. I batted it lightly with my open hand and it bounced in the air, staggered, stabilized, and zipped off into the trees.
“I’ll have the police come and get him.”
“We get into a court custody procedure and it will be a mess. I’ll try to prove both of you unfit,” I said. “I bet I can.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I didn’t say anything. She looked at Paul.
“Will you come?” she said.
He shook his head. She looked at me. “Don’t expect a cent of money from me,” she said. Then she turned and marched back across the uneven leaf mold, wobbling slightly on her inapt shoes, stumbling once as a heel sank into soft earth. She got into the car, started up, yanked it around, and spun the wheels on the dirt road as she drove away.
Paul said, “We only got three studs to go and the last wall is finished.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it. Then we’ll knock off for supper.”
He nodded and began to drive a tenpenny nail into a new white two-by-four. The sound of his mother’s car disappeared. Ours was the only human noise left.
When the last wall was studded we leaned it against its end of the foundation and went and got two beers and sat down on the steps of the old cabin to drink them. The clearing smelled strongly of sawdust and fresh lumber, with a quieter sense of the lake and the forest lurking behind the big smells.
Paul sipped at his beer. Some starlings hopped in the clearing near the new foundation. Two squirrels spiraled up the trunk of a tree, one chasing the other. The distance between them remained the same as if one didn’t want to get away and the other didn’t want to catch it.
“‘Ever will thou love and she be fair,’” I said.
“What?”
I shook my head. “It’s a line from Keats. Those two squirrels made me think of it.”
“What two squirrels?”
“Never mind. It’s pointless if you didn’t see the squirrels.”
I finished my beer. Paul got me another one. He didn’t get one for himself. He still sipped at his first can. The starlings found nothing but sawdust by the foundation. They flew away. Some mourning doves came and sat on the tree limb just above the speed bag. Something plopped in the lake. There was a locust hum like background music.
“What’s going to happen?” Paul said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Can they make me come back?”
“They can try.”
“Could you get in trouble?”
“I have refused to give a fifteen-year-old boy back to his mother and father. There are people who would call that kidnapping.”
“I’m almost sixteen.”
I nodded.
“I want to stay with you,” he said.
I nodded again.
“Can I?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I got up from the steps and walked down toward the lake. The wind had died as the sun settled and the lake was nearly motionless. In the middle of it the loon made his noise again.
I gestured toward him with my beer can.
“Right on, brother,” I said to the loon.
CHAPTER 23
