year or two, they would sell the house and move to wherever Jack found a tenure-track position. O’Neil hadn’t a clue at all about Jack’s job, which had something to do with labor, and Kay often joked that it would have rounded out his expertise nicely if he actually did some around the house. At such moments she appeared not to like her husband very much, but these glimpses were brief. O’Neil didn’t feel one way or the other about Jack, who seemed to regard him with the generic masculine warmth of a fraternity brother. “How’s the man?” he would ask O’Neil as they crossed in the hallway, or maneuvered past one another in the cramped kitchen. “What’s the word, O’Neil?” One Friday, a few weeks after his return, O’Neil had come home late from a bar and heard Kay and Jack talking in low voices in the kitchen. He paused in the dark hallway to listen. Although he couldn’t make out their words, he knew from their measured, parental tone that they were speaking about him. When would he move on? What would become of such a person as O’Neil?
Back from the hospital, Kay helped him to bed in his little room of boxes, and in the morning O’Neil awoke late to find that Kay and Jack had already left for the day. Balancing on his crutches, O’Neil made coffee and took some more codeine and then paged Joe, who called him back in the early afternoon while O’Neil was watching a soap opera on the sofa, his cast propped on a stack of pillows.
“I just drove by the house,” Joe said, and in the background O’Neil could hear the wash of traffic on the Post Road. “What the hell did you do to the roof?”
“I had an accident,” O’Neil said.
“Those people are going to be royally pissed. Just get over there.”
“Joe, I have a broken leg.”
A pause followed, as O’Neil waited to hear what Joe would next say.
“Okay,” Joe said, “I’m sorry. Tell me, how’s your leg?”
O’Neil held the phone to his leg and rapped the plaster with his knuckles. “You can sign my cast, if you want,” he said. “Also, you owe my sister fifteen hundred dollars for medical expenses.”
“Jesus, O’Neil. Don’t you have any insurance?”
On the television a couple began kissing with their eyes closed. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?” said O’Neil.
“Okay, okay. I have to tell them something. What’s the woman’s name? Patty?”
“Patrice. She drove me to the hospital.”
“I always thought she was pretty good looking,” Joe said, thinking aloud.
“Try telling her you’re going to paint her house.”
O’Neil passed the afternoon watching television and napping, and keeping off the leg, which had begun to hum with pain, like a low-bandwidth radio signal. He believed that Joe would call back eventually and try to settle the situation. He had never met anybody like Joe, who spoke about his native country with a rhapsodic patriotism that was like nothing O’Neil had experienced in his life. “People think Canada is cold,” Joe liked to say, “but it’s the warmth of the people that makes it special.” O’Neil had serious questions about Joe’s business practices—he underpaid all his workers so badly that almost no one stayed, and he seemed to be taking deposits on houses he couldn’t paint in a million years—and yet O’Neil liked to think that his loyalty, doing an awful job nobody else wanted, would count for something in the end. But Joe did not call back, and as the afternoon wore on, it occurred to O’Neil that this silence might be permanent.
After dinner, when Kay and Jack had left him to catch an early movie, O’Neil put two pills in his shirt pocket and swung on his crutches out to the patio, a concrete slab attached to the back of the house that Kay and Jack had dressed up with plastic furniture and potted marigolds. O’Neil arranged himself in a chair and washed the pills down with a can of Coors, and waited for the codeine to kick in. The day was nearly gone, and the last of the light seemed to pour into the shadows like water down a drain. His body had always been highly responsive to medication of any sort, and this was true of the codeine, which made him feel like hammered tin. At times like this, O’Neil sometimes thought of Sandra, the last girl he had loved. They had broken up just a few months after his parents’