level of hospitality he hadn’t seen her bestow on anyone else. Then they’d laughingly accused him of moving in on Artie’s girl. Since then, he’d become just a guy eating breakfast, and he found he liked the anonymity.
This morning the door coughed up Dennis Jonathon. The man stopped just inside and scanned until he saw CJ, then made his way to the empty stool next to him. Almost before he was situated, a steaming cup of coffee materialized in front of him. Dennis slid a dollar across the counter.
“Morning, Dennis,” CJ said, and the other man nodded.
It never occurred to CJ that he would run into Dennis Jonathon again. He hadn’t thought about him in years, and that was something he’d regretted when the full-blooded Mohawk came into Ronny’s the night of Sal’s funeral. CJ had spent a fair amount of time with Dennis’s family at their home on the reservation. Then Dennis’s parents moved him to a private school, and the lack of proximity doomed the friendship a full two years before CJ ever left for college.
When CJ saw Dennis at Ronny’s, the man had slipped into the seat next to CJ, offered a single “Hey” that CJ barely heard, and CJ had found a friendship resumed that he hadn’t known he’d missed.
“I g-got a j-job for you if you’re interested,” Dennis said, leaning down over the counter so that he could blow across the top of his coffee without picking it up.
“I already have a job,” CJ said just as Maggie set a plate of eggs in front of him.
“This one p-pays better,” Dennis said.
Dennis was a man of few words, which was a trait he’d carried with him from childhood. It was something CJ had always appreciated about him, even if he made his own living stringing words together. What made Dennis verbally stingy, though, owed less to a limited vocabulary than it did to the fact that he stuttered. Since reconnecting, CJ had noticed an improvement in the malady, perhaps because there was far less stress associated with the life of an adult wage earner than for a typical high school student.
“The last time you talked about a job that paid better was in high school, and we both wound up in trouble.”
“But th-this one’s legal,” Dennis said with no hint of humor. He tried some coffee, grimaced, and added a few sugar packets. “A house. Owner’s ripped everything out d-down to the studs. It needs new floors, sheetrock, s-some wiring. It’s all interior work.”
“Sounds like a big job,” CJ said.
“If we’re l-lucky, we can st-stretch it through winter.”
CJ nodded. He could certainly use the money. Janet, who had been calling him every day—usually to recite the litany of things that were responsible for the dissolution of their marriage— stopped doing so yesterday. What that portended he didn’t know, except to suspect that it meant the increased involvement of lawyers and judges and more money than he was making as an author, and now at Kaddy’s. He’d opened a new bank account in which Matt had direct-deposited his last royalty check, but it would take him a long time to build up any kind of respectable balance. So on that consideration alone, Dennis’s offer was tempting. Too, there was the assault case hanging over his head. His lawyer had kept him up to speed on the civil suit. For all CJ knew, he might end up owing more to the critic than he would his wife.
Even so, he found it difficult to manufacture excitement for Dennis’s project, and it wasn’t until he’d eaten half the food on his plate that he understood why. A project like this was, as Dennis intimated, a long one—designed to keep two men busy for at least a full season. Accepting it meant giving serious thought to how long he would stay in Adelia, and that was a question he’d relegated to the same part of his brain studiously avoiding the start of a new novel.
As he ate, considering both of these questions, Dennis didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at him. The man had a natural Zen quality—evident even as a boy, and short-circuited only by the stuttering—that allowed him to make the offer and not fret the response. CJ suspected he could choose to pretend the invitation had never been extended and Dennis wouldn’t say another word about it.
Rather than allow him to do that, though, CJ decided to do the opposite of what the little voices in