Chapter 6
She drove out to Dorchester on Wednesday, on her one half-day, with Leo at her sister’s in Quincy and the truck parked and the radio off.
It was forty minutes and she had never made the drive. Eighteen months, and she had never once made the drive, because she had promised herself she would not be the woman who went looking for it, and she had kept that promise, and it had cost her more than she expected and less than she feared.
The site was a parking lot now. A chain-link fence. A construction trailer with a different company’s name on it, and beyond that a low building gone up over the last year, finished, occupied, somebody else’s.
She parked and sat with her hands on the wheel for a while.
Then she got out.
There was a man in the trailer — fifties, gray beard, smoking in the doorway — and she recognized him before she finished crossing the lot. Dennis. Patrick had worked with him on and off for six years. He had come to the funeral, stood at the back, and left before the food.
He looked at her the way you look at someone you have spent eighteen months avoiding.
“Alice.”
“Hi, Dennis.”
Neither of them said anything for a while.
“I need to ask you something and I need you to answer it straight,” she said. “The scaffolding. That morning.”
He took a long drag. He looked at the building.
“Who was up here?” she said. “Not the owner. The general.”
“Hartwell.” He said it to the ground. “Hartwell had the contract. They subbed the framing out to Platt and Sons, on paper.”
“And Platt and Sons was a shelf with two guys and a phone.”
“Yeah.”
“Whose job was it, Dennis?”
He was quiet a long time. Then he told her. And once he started, he told her the rest of it too — the way you tell a thing you have carried for eighteen months to the only person who has as much right to it as you do.
The scaffold had been flagged. That was the first thing. He had flagged it himself, on the Tuesday, in writing, on the yellow form, because the base plates were sitting on mud and the mud had been there since the rain.
Nothing was done. It rained again Monday. Patrick went up Wednesday morning.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“To who?”
She stood in the gravel and did not have an answer, because there wasn’t one. There never had been. You could know a thing completely and have nowhere on earth to put it, and that was what it meant to be nobody, and she had been nobody her whole adult life.
“Who’d you file the form with?”
“The site super. Gerry Nolan.” He crushed the cigarette. “He took a copy and thanked me and told me he’d get somebody on it, and I watched him walk to the trailer, and I watched him stand outside the trailer for about a minute doing nothing at all, and then he went inside.”
“Where’s the form now?”
Dennis looked at her.
“There’s a copy in the Hartwell file room,” he said. “I know because I had to sign a duplicate for their safety man in June. And I don’t have one, and neither does anybody else who doesn’t work there.”
Alice nodded slowly.
“Whose job was it, Dennis.”
“Hartwell’s,” he said. “And Hartwell —” He stopped. “You know how these things work. Nobody’s named Hartwell. There’s a structure behind it.”
“Which structure.”
He said the name.
She had heard it before, in a different shape, on a Monday morning at her own window, in the form of a different surname tied to the same organization.
She stood there a moment longer, feeling the world tilt very slightly, and then come back.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Alice—”
“Thank you.” She walked back to her car.
She went to him that afternoon.
She did not call first, because there was no number to call, and because she had spent two hours deciding and had concluded that a phone call would let him set the terms. She drove to Ralston Street, asked the man at the gate where the office was, and the man at the gate took one look at her face and told her.
The office was four blocks away, third floor of a brick building with a coffee shop underneath. His assistant was a woman named Rosa who took one look at her and did not stop her.
Victor was standing at the window with his back to the door. He turned. He did not look surprised.
“Sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
“All right.”
She had rehearsed a dozen openings in the car and discarded all of them. What came out was this:
“My husband fell off a scaffold on a Hathaway Street job in Dorchester on the twenty-fourth of April last year. The base plates were sitting on mud. A man named Dennis Keane flagged it in writing six days before, and the site super took the copy and went inside the trailer and did nothing, and the report after he died was one paragraph and a half long.” Her voice was level and her hands were still. “And the money he owed when he died was owed through a chain of buyers that ends in a fund with your family’s name on it. So I’m going to ask you one question, and I want a short answer. Which part did you know, and when.”
Victor did not look away.
“None of it,” he said. “Until Sunday before last.”
“Sunday before last.”
“There was a report on my kitchen table. Your husband’s name, the date, the account, the amount.” He said it flatly, without softening it, which she understood later was the closest thing to respect he knew how to offer. “Before that I knew a woman sold soup outside my fence.”
“And the job in Dorchester.”
“Hartwell is mine. It has been mine for eleven years. I have been on a Hartwell site twice, both times on the water. I have never been in the trailer on Hathaway Street and I have never heard the name Patrick Hayes until eight days ago.”
“Seven thousand dollars.”
“Seven thousand.”
“It was in a book you never opened.”
“It was in a book I never opened.” He paused. “That is not an excuse. It is an answer to the question you asked.”
Alice stood in the middle of a third-floor office in South Boston feeling something that was not anger exactly, and not grief, and was not going to be either of those things for a while yet.
“And the envelope,” she said. “The man at my window yesterday. Mr. Rudo sends his regards.”
Victor’s face did not change. But his hands, at his sides, came together in front of him.
“His name is Tommy Rudo. He held your husband’s account. He went to your truck in September and told you that debts don’t disappear when people die, and I found out about it in your line on a Monday morning, and I sat him down on Hanover Street two weeks ago and closed the account and told him you were not to be contacted.” A pause. “The envelope should not have happened. That is a failure and it is mine.”
“You closed the account.”
“Yes.”
“You paid eleven thousand dollars of my husband’s debt and you did not tell me.”
“No.”
Alice laughed once, short, and not a warm sound.
“And that is the whole of it,” she said. “That is the entire shape of my life. Everybody decides things about me and hands me the result and expects me to be grateful it didn’t hurt worse.”
She took a step toward the desk.
“I signed that second note. February, at the kitchen table, because the union check was late and he said it was eight weeks and I believed him. My name is on it. That’s why I never argued with anybody, because I’d have lost, and I knew it.” Her voice did not rise. “So you didn’t clear a debt, you cleared mine. And you did it without one word to me. Not a call. Not a note. Two weeks of me standing in a window handing you coffee while you knew something about my life that I didn’t.”
“I didn’t tell you,” Victor said, “because I did not want you to owe me.”
“Then you shouldn’t have paid it. You should have let me pay it, or let it sit, or let me decide. Anything but finding out from a stranger with an envelope.”
Victor stood behind his desk with his hands in front of him and had no answer for that.
“Where’s Leo?” she said.
“At my sister’s, in Quincy.”
“Good.” She picked up her bag. “Then this is what happens. If it’s closed, I want it in writing. On paper, with a name on it, notarized, so it exists. I have spent eighteen months being told things by men who never wrote anything down.”
She stopped at the door.
“And I want it from the man who held it. His signature. Not yours. I want Tommy Rudo’s name on the piece of paper that says my husband’s debt is gone.”
Victor looked at her for a long moment.
“That will be difficult,” he said.
“I know,” said Alice Hayes, and left.
She picked Leo up at five forty. They got home at twenty past six. Leo ran ahead up the sidewalk toward the door of the laundromat building while she got the bag out of the back.
She heard him say something to somebody, and she looked up.
A gray Ford Transit was idling at the curb with its passenger door open.
Two men were getting out of it. One of them had a hand on Leo’s shoulder, and Leo was walking with them, because he was eight, and because they had told him his mother had asked them to come.
May you like
Alice Hayes screamed her son’s name into a South Boston evening from forty feet away and started running, and the door closed, and the van pulled off the curb and went up the street.
She stood in the middle of the road with her keys in her hand.
