3

"How's about you haul boxes around today, and I'll spend time bonding with my niece," Darren suggested to Lillian the next morning.

"Nice try."

"C'mon, it's only fair. You had your turn at the fun job." "Overruled."

As I set a bag of trash outside the front door, I thought—as I had many times before, and never without envy—about how Lillian and Darren spoke the same language. The jargon of the law, of American culture, the countless shared nuances of native English: they bantered and bickered and jousted and joked with nothing lost in translation. Whereas Stas and I—

"Hey, how's it going?" It was Jack, raising a hand from the next yard.

"Oh, hey," I said. "Well, there's always something, I guess." I mentioned the leak.

"I can probably help you out with that too," he said. "I've fixed a lot of ceiling leaks in my time. Let me drop by when the work day's done."

I stepped back into the house and almost collided with Stas, who was just inside the front door.

"Leda," he said, in a tone of clear reproof. "What?"

"I don't want this guy coming over every day." "You mean Jack?"

"That's who I mean."

"Uh...okay," I said, trying to strike just the right note between amenable and bewildered, even as I fought off a secret sense of

culpability. "But, I mean...where is that coming from? Do you dislike him?"

"Well, let me put it this way. I don't ever want you to be alone with him."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "What are you worried about?" "I don't trust him."

"Trust him how? I mean, what's he going to do? We know who he is. We know where he works."

Stas was silent.

"We know his cousin," I added.

"All right," Stas said. "You don't want to listen to me? Don't listen to me then."

He left the room and I didn't go after him.

The tension lingered all afternoon: at the hardware store where we made copies of our new keys, at IKEA where we picked up a lamp for Clara's room, at Home Depot where Stas thought someone could trim the ill-fitting marble surface of our kitchen counter.

"Can't be done here, son," a man in an orange apron told him. "Well, where should we go?" I asked. "There's an alcove for the fridge cut into our kitchen wall, but right now the marble's overlapping it. We have our refrigerator out in the middle of

the kitchen floor."

"Ma'am, I don't rightly know what to tell you. You need industrial machinery for that."

"I cannot believe it is so difficult," Stas said.

"It's not as simple as you seem to think," said another em- ployee who'd stopped to listen. "You need a diamond-coated blade to get through that kind of stone, and you need a stream of water to cool the blade on its way through. It's a highly spe- cialized process. Might be easier just to replace it."

A Slavic-looking man came over. Without preamble, without

a glance at the other two men, he addressed my husband directly in Russian. The two conferred a moment in their native lan- guage and then the man wrote an address on a slip of paper.

Our destination turned out to be a low-slung, windowless building in the middle of a desolate parking lot. "Look at this place," Stas said, cutting the ignition. "It looks like a mafia warehouse."

Inside were stacks of stone, tile, and marble and dozens of Russian workers. One of them had a dramatic scar stretching from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. It was he who took the slab from Stas, set it on a nearby table, and drew a tool from his belt. The task took him less than ten minutes.

In the three years I'd known my husband, I'd never heard him say a good word about anyone or anything Russian. But as he replaced the marble on the counter and eased the refrigerator into its intended space, I heard him muttering to himself.

Highly specialized process, my ass...I spent more time talking to those fucking Americans than it took that Russian guy to get it done.

It was only after Lillian and Darren had left the next day, and Stas was at work, that I opened the book of poems. It was as if, without knowing why, I'd been waiting to be alone with it. I put Clara in the Exersaucer and, hoping that would keep her busy for ten minutes, turned to a poem called Odysseus's Secret.

At first he thought only of home, it began*. But after a few years, like anyone on his own, he couldn't separate what he'd chosen*

from what had chosen him. Calypso, the Lotus-eaters, Circe;

a man could forget where he lived.

He had a gift for getting in and out of trouble, a prodigious, human gift. To survive Cyclops and withstand the Sirens' song—

just those words survive, withstand, in his mind became a music

he moved to and lived by.

Not halfway through the poem, I became aware of the out- line of a man through the window of the front door. Jack was on the porch, a tool belt slung around his hips and a slash of dirt under his left eye. "I can take a look at that leak now, if you want," he said.

And as I rose from my chair, I felt a twinge of my previous unease. The day before, surrounded by my family and absorbed by moving in, it was easy to brush off Stas' misgiving. Today I felt the emptiness of the house at my back and the desolation of my sister's departure. Still, I couldn't think of a polite way to refuse. I showed Jack into the guest room and, to keep Clara from escaping, pulled the door shut.

"It's been a while since a girl took me into a room and closed the door," he said.

This startled me into silence for a moment. "I don't want the baby to get out," I said finally, picking her up for good measure and moving toward the window. "Not with that flight of stairs so close by. So do you see the stained part of the ceiling, above the bar? That's where the water was coming in."

He glanced at the ceiling and then back at me while Clara tugged at my shirt.

"Why are you trying to undress your mommy?" he said to her. Then to me: "Why do they do that?"

The false innocence of this question seemed to alter the air in the room. It occurred to me that Jack was between me and the door now*. Oh*, I thought. Oh. So Stas was right about him.

But at the moment—because I hadn't listened to Stas; because I was, in fact, alone with Jack—it seemed essential not to show alarm, essential to be calm and casual.

"She's probably hungry," I said. "Oh...so you're still..."

"Yes."

"It always makes me feel funny. To see a woman doing that. I mean, I know it's natural and all, but still. There was a woman once, I was working on her house, and I walked in on her just after she finished feeding her baby. The baby was done drinking but she hadn't put herself away yet."

"Anyway," I said. I set Clara back down. "There's the spot where the leak was."

Slowly Jack brought his gaze around to where the water had come in. "I'd have to break into that part of the ceiling to see what's going on," he told me. "Is that all right?"

I was glad when Clara wandered toward the door, giving me a reason to follow her. So far, I wasn't afraid as much as jittery, skittish; Jack seemed more off-putting and overbearing than truly menacing. But I didn't want to prolong his visit.

"Let me call Stas," I said, reaching for my cell phone, "to make sure he won't mind."

Just mentioning Stas was a relief. It was a way to remind Jack that I had a husband: a man whose consent was needed before anything could proceed.

"Tell him to wait until I get home," Stas said immediately. "Just tell him I want to be there to look at the pipes with him." "All right," I said gratefully. "So when do you think that might

be? Around six?"

"Stas wants to get a look too," I reported after hanging up. "He's hoping you can come back later."

Jack regarded me with an expression I couldn't read. "All right," he said finally. "I'll come back when he gets home."

On the threshold of the front door, though, he turned to face me once again. "Man, where the hell have I seen you before?" he asked. "It's driving me crazy."

I lifted a shoulder as if to say no clue, and waited until he was out of earshot to slide the metal bolt across the door.

No sooner had he disappeared than my phone rang. It was Lillian, calling from the road. "I didn't say anything yesterday," she said, "because I didn't want to get between you and Stas. But I thought he was right, actually, about the man next door. That you shouldn't be alone with him."

I moved to the front window, feeling the first pang of real foreboding. "Yeah, I'm starting to get it," I said. "But what hap- pened yesterday, to make you say that?"

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't like the way he was looking at you."

"Well," I said. "Okay, then. I'm on board with you guys now.

Don't worry."

I folded the phone and stood holding Clara in the middle of the room.

If I repeated Jack's remarks to my husband, then Stas would turn him away when he showed up, and we would have an enemy before we'd lived here a week. Jack would be next door every day while I was home alone, and who could say what he might do? For the time being, he was essentially our neighbor. But not telling Stas seemed tantamount to a kind of com- plicity with Jack. It meant keeping a secret from my husband.

How had I gotten into this position?

At last I resolved to avoid any future commerce with Jack. To say hello and goodbye in passing, if I had to. Nothing more.