the garage stairs with Duval behind him, and unlocked the door to its small apartment. All seemed in order: the television sat untouched in a corner, with the CD player beside it – they would have been priorities for any thief.
‘Who lives here?’ asked Duval.
‘It awaits my mother-in-law. She’s supposed to come visit this fall.’
‘Don’t want her in the house?’ asked Duval with a sly grin.
‘We haven’t really got the room,’ he said, then laughed in acknowledgement of the truth.
After measuring the broken windows, they drove to a hardware store in the nearest town. It was a small poky place, too near the industrial Indiana belt to be a country town, too poor to be charming. They bought glass panes cut to order, a tin of putty, and a putty knife. Then he bought two steaks at a grocery store. As they drove back Duval started laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Robert.
‘I ain’t seen a whiter town than that in a long time. Reminds me of downstate Illinois.’
‘You been down there? I mean . . .’
‘Yeah. I was six years downstate. Not that I actually saw the town. But I heard about it plenty from the guards. Lordy,’ he exclaimed, ‘they was a backward bunch of peoples. Illinois ’sposed to be a northern state, but you’d have thought you was in Georgia. Crackers.’
‘That bad, huh?’
‘It was okay if the guards thought you weren’t no trouble. They were more scared of us than we were of them – but they got the guns! Some of them had never known any black people ’til they come to work inside.’
Back at the coach house Robert cooked the steaks under the oven’s grill, then cut them into thick pink slices onto the buns he warmed in the oven. Taking the plates and two bottles of beer, he and Duval sat out in the small yard, since though the cloud remained it was pale and unthreatening. They ate hungrily, and he went and filled two more buns with the remainder of the steak.
‘You like to grill?’ asked Duval as he brought them back.
‘There’s something about the smoky taste.’
Duval nodded knowingly. ‘My first meal when I got out was barbecue. I made Jermaine stop the car as soon as we got to Chicago, and bought me a rack of ribs as long as my arm.’
‘What was the food like in prison?’ He felt able now to ask about life inside.
‘Some years better than others. That’s when you got a choice.’ He gave a sour snort. ‘Pig slop or beef slop. No ribs, though.’
‘Vanetta used to make ribs every week.’
‘She did at home, too. Man, she could cook. She told me once her mother taught her when she was just a little-bitty girl.’
‘Down in Mississippi?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You ever go there?’
Duval shook his head. ‘Aurelia wouldn’t take me. She didn’t like it there. She said it was too hot.’
‘I can believe that.’
Duval said harshly, ‘That wasn’t Aurelia’s real problem. She wasn’t going to like no place where you couldn’t get a nickel bag as easy as a Pepsi, and a man with a wallet as big as his dick.’
Robert stood up and collected the empty beer bottles. ‘Come on. Time to earn our lunch.’
He decided to cut the strip of grass in their little fenced-in yard while Duval tackled the windows – he didn’t feel right reading scripts inside while his friend did manual labour. When he checked an hour later, Duval was almost done, though the putty had been applied unevenly. Next time he’d get the Poindexters’ handyman to do it.
He was just handing Duval a beer in the kitchen when he heard a car on the drive. Looking out the window, he was astonished to see the Passat pull into the garage, with Anna at the wheel and Sophie next to her in the front seat.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he said. Outside, he found Sophie rushing out of the garage, and gave her a bewildered hug as Anna emerged more slowly from the car. She was carrying a soft overnight bag. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘We thought we’d see how you’re getting on with the DIY. And the Poindexters said there’ll be fireworks tonight on the beach.’ She avoided his stare.
‘Have you forgotten the Crullowitches?’
She looked at him with a studied, defiant air that had recently become commonplace. ‘Your president is indisposed. A summer bug, according to Mrs Crullowitch. She sounded quite relieved not to be entertaining us all this evening.’
‘We still have to go back,’ he