water, for some reason. Don’t ask me why.”
“Ms. Valera talked about that type of thing. This Roman guy, Tacitus, he wrote that in Germany they used to put the prostitutes in the bogs. Then they wedged them in there with stakes. It was supposed to be so their souls couldn’t get up and wander around.”
I chuckled. “Sounds very German, indeed.”
“Yeah, we have to write a group report based on it. Except ours has to be on Maryland, and I’m in charge of the crime and punishment section, and it’s nowhere near as interesting.”
“Maybe you should talk about our laws against interracial marriage,” I suggested, edging my tone with humor. I slowed for a red light and added, “It was still illegal here when I was a girl. I hear it obscures the ancient wisdom, or something like that.”
“That’s me,” he joked. “I like to complicate things for you white people. If it wasn’t for me, you
“My coworkers will find out, and I’ll lose my job.”
“Oh, I won’t tell on you. I’ll just use the information for blackmail.”
“Is that the worst you can find on me?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, is it?”
I smiled privately.
“Ooh,” he said. “Maybe it’s not. I’ll have to find out all the dirt on you.”
“Dig away, kiddo.”
He jabbed me in the arm again, then in the waist, again and again until I laughed out loud. And for a moment, for the first time in perhaps my entire life, the things I guarded made me feel mysterious instead of dreadful.
With Zach’s belly full of apple, cheese and various food dyes, he seemed to be in much better spirits. Hours of work stretched ahead. With a glance toward the parking lot that was empty except for my car, I told Zach I would be back later that afternoon, then crossed my fingers and hoped no injuries or fires would occur in the meantime.
“I can handle it,” he said, his voice edged with glee.
I ran my errands, stopping by Russ’s college to pick up stacks of brochures for Sylvania School’s College Fair the following week, then took myself to the dining hall and picked up a sandwich that came with a handful of brittle, inedible potato chips. On my way around the circuit I paused at the bakery counter and ordered two cookies: one chocolate chunk, one black-and-white.
The weather was lovely, crisp but not yet cold, and so I carried my foam container up the hill to the benches that surrounded the reflecting pool. As I ate I watched the skate-boarders coast up and down the concrete terracing, grinding on the giant sundial, all bold energy and stumbling grace. A few looked old enough to be college students, but most did not. They all wore close-fitting T-shirts and baggy jeans hitched even lower on their hips than Zach’s. Their bodies looked solid as stones. Nothing moved but muscle and sinew; and they seemed so careless about it, as if it were nothing to move through life in a package so neat and dense and perfect. I ate my cookie and smiled forgivingly when a skateboard ran up against my ankle, and one of them, a young man with a headful of wavy golden hair, jogged over and said, “Sorry, ma’am.”
After a while I collected my trash and left. Something in side my chest felt pinched, bunched up and tied with a tight string. I think it was the place in my heart where the joy of youth had once been: a phantom pain.
Zach met me at the entrance to the workshop. His thumbs were hooked in the pockets of his jeans, and he was smiling. Before I had even fully crossed the parking lot, he called, “It’s done.”
“You finished it?”
He grinned and nodded. “I did. Finally.”
I held out the paper sack. “And here I thought you’d need sustenance to get through the last stretch.”
“Hey, I don’t mind.” He took out the cookie and ate a quarter of it in a single bite. “Black-and-white,” he said approvingly, spitting crumbs. “You came through after all.”
“So let’s see what you’ve got.”
I followed him through the door, past the tables scattered with tools and the hulking shapes of metal saws. The air smelled of clean, fresh wood, and motes of sawdust danced in beams of light near the windows. In the very back it sat, at the very midpoint of the back wall, Lilliputian but still so large it amazed me that Zach had built it on his own. Gingerbread trim scalloped the roof’s edges and the flowerbox below the front window. All around its base was fiberglass stone, rolling so naturally that it appeared stacked by hand. The artificial tree that he had attached to its back, arching above the acorn-covered roof to shade it with leafy branches, made it look even more impressive. I flipped open the topmost Dutch door and peeked inside at the tightly joined corners, the fairy-sized wooden box attached beneath a window to hold secret treasures.
“It looks perfect, Zach,” I told him. “You did a top-notch job.”
“Thanks.”
“The school should get a lot of money for it. You ought to be proud.” I walked around the sides, admiring his work. “It’s actually worth all the grief and misery I put up with.”
He shot me a cheesy, achingly innocent grin. In a singsong voice he said, “Thank you, Mrs. McFarland.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Aren’t you going to look inside?”
I regarded the small space with amusement. “I’m a little big for it, don’t you think?”
“Naw. You’re pretty little for an adult. And it’s bigger on the inside. You’ll see.” He crouched down and crawled inside. Squatting on one side, he stuck his head out the door and said, “See, I fit. And I’m about a foot taller than
