but her hair, piled in a frizzy swirl atop her head like a dark halo. Later, when Moody saw the finished photos, he thought at first that Pearl looked like a delicate fossil, something caught for millennia in the skeleton belly of a prehistoric beast. Then he thought she looked like an angel resting with her wings spread out behind her. And then, after a moment, she looked simply like a girl asleep in a lush green bed, waiting for her lover to lie down beside her.
“All right,” Mia called down. “Got it.” She slid back inside, and Pearl sat up and looked across the street, directly at Moody, and his heart jumped.
“You want to help?” she said. “Or just stand there?”
Moody would never remember crossing the street, or propping his bike in the front walkway, or introducing himself. So it would feel to him that he had always known her name, and that she had always known his, that somehow, he and Pearl had known each other always.
Together they ferried the pieces of the bed frame up the narrow stairway. The living room was empty except for a stack of boxes in one corner and a large red cushion in the center of the floor.
“This way.” Pearl tugged her armful of bed slats higher and led Moody into the larger bedroom, which held nothing except a faded but clean twin mattress leaning against one wall.
“Here,” said Mia, depositing a steel toolbox at Pearl’s feet. “You’ll want these.” She gave Moody a smile, as if he were an old friend. “Call me if you need another set of hands.” Then she stepped back into the hallway, and in a moment they heard the snick of a box being slit open.
Pearl wielded the tools with expert hands, levering the side panels into place against the headboard, propping them up on one ankle while she bolted them into place. Moody sat beside the open toolbox and watched her with unfolding awe. In his house, if something broke, his mother called a repairman to fix it—the stove, the washer, the disposal—or, for almost anything else, it was discarded and replaced. Every three or four years, or when the springs began to sag, his mother picked a new living room set, the old set moved into the basement rec room, and the old-old set from the rec room was given away to the juvenile boys’ home on the West Side, or to the women’s shelter downtown. His father did not tinker with the car in the garage; when it rattled or squealed he brought it to the Lusty Wrench, where Luther had tended to every car the Richardsons had owned for the past twenty years. The only time he himself had handled any tools, Moody realized, was in eighth-grade shop: they’d been put in groups, one team measuring and one sawing and one sanding, and at the end of the term everyone dutifully screwed their pieces together to make a little box-shaped candy dispenser that gave you three Skittles every time you pulled the handle. Trip had made an identical one in shop the year before and Lexie had made an identical one the year before that and Izzy made yet another the following year, and despite the whole term of shop, despite the four identical candy dispensers stashed somewhere in their house, Moody was not sure that anyone in the Richardson household could do more than work a Phillips screwdriver.
“How’d you learn to do all that?” he asked, handing Pearl another bed slat.
Pearl shrugged. “From my mom,” she said, pinning the slat in place with one hand and plucking a screw from the pile on the carpet.
The bed, when assembled, proved to be an old-fashioned twin with bed knobs, the kind Goldilocks might have slept in.
“Where’d you get it?” Moody set the mattress in place and gave it an experimental bounce.
Pearl replaced the screwdriver in the toolbox and latched it shut. “We found it.”
She sat down on the bed, back propped against the footboard, legs stretched along the bed’s length, gazing up at the ceiling, as if testing it out. Moody sat down at the head of the bed, near her feet. Wisps of grass stuck to her toes and her calves and the hem of her skirt. She smelled like fresh air and mint shampoo.
“This is my room,” Pearl said suddenly, and Moody sprang up again. “Sorry,” he said, a hot flush rising to his cheeks.