Tiezzi’s Board

Chapter 1, Leaving the Garden

Today would be an easy day for Joe Carroll. He’d made it to the finish line of a woodworking job he’d dreaded, partly because it was going to be boring, but mostly because of a succession of warnings dropped at the grocery store, at church, in the hardware store, and at the lumberyard about Linda Howe. “Bitch” was the word most often used to describe her. But Joe needed the work and was even piqued by the challenge of winning her over. 

Joe approached the scores of hours spent in close company with Linda Howe with a belief that they would grow fond of one another. Joe and Maggie’s friends thought Linda Howe unworthy of Joe’s artistry—unworthy even of his company, but Joe knew he got along with people. And he needed the work. From the first day, Linda found opportunities to press the point that Joe was working for her, but Joe felt pretty secure in a different paradigm. He told himself that he had outsmarted the guys with straight jobs by not having to punch a time clock. As a doctor, Linda’s husband, Lou, made lots more money to be sure, but a woodcarver didn’t have to file endless paperwork with insurance companies, didn’t have to prematurely release hemorrhaging, tubed-up, barely conscious people from the hospital, just to take care of his family. Joe Carroll’s concept was simple: money for woodcarving. One third down, the balance C.O.D. for honest work that sometimes even rose to the level of art.

This job for Linda Howe was not art; it was more like good craft. Joe had agreed to remodel most of the Howes’ kitchen for the privilege of executing fifteen cupboard doors. Joe made that crystal clear when he took the job. “I’m a woodcarver, Linda, not a kitchen guy,” he’d told her. He’d make the boring boxes and the face frames for the fun of doing the pretty doors. He’d told that to Linda—it wasn’t about the money—it was for the fun of carving the doors. 

Each paneled door was decorated with a relief-carved and delicately painted herb. Linda loved herbs. She told that to Joe at their first interview about The Garden—that’s what she was already calling the new kitchen. During the weeks he labored for Lou and Linda, she had never cooked a meal at home, even though Joe had been explicitly instructed that part of the deal was that he must keep the kitchen “fully functioning for Linda” because “she loves to cook.”

Today he will hang the herbed-up doors, wipe some paste wax on the finished work, and, his job complete, schlep his tools out to the truck. He looked at the carved door in his arms, DILL, and past it through the big window over the sink to Linda’s Lexus pulling in the drive. Linda, dressed (camouflaged, was how Joe thought of it) in a celadon designer sweat suit, was back from Starbucks with her coffee. What is the point of a two hundred dollar sweat outfit, Joe wondered. He had never seen Linda do any physical labor, much less perspire. 

Joe’s mind wandered to his wife Maggie who in a burlap bag was prettier than Linda Howe. All that jewelry and makeup and hairdo and clothes marshaled to present to the world the Linda she wanted it to see. Joe thought he saw through all of it, that the anatomy courses he took twenty years ago, and the life drawing classes, and his artist sensibilities revealed Linda Howe stark naked under the celadon folds. Joe could see everyone naked, or as he liked to say, metaphorically, depending on the company, in their nakedness. 

Dave and Annie are Maggie and Joe’s oldest friends. Dave knows that his old college buddy who majored in Dissipation now goes to church and reads books on spirituality. And Joe understands that Dave is a little sad that his great friend has gone off on this spiritual thing without him. At every opportunity, Dave tells a joke from his small comedy repertoire: “Brother Joe has discovered that he has a remarkable spiritual gift; he sees people with their clothes off.” 

Sometimes Joe responds in a serious way. “Well, Dave, so does God.” Joe likes that idea a lot—counts on it really, that God knows all about the real us, warts and all. 

Joe was up on a stool holding the first door, DILL, in place over its assigned opening. With a bradawl he marked the locations in the doorframes for the brass screws that would go through hinges already attached to the doors. With a small cordless drill, he counter bored the screw holes and fastened the first door in place. Repeating the process for the ROSEMARY, he thought that it didn’t look quite level. He hopped down from the stool to look at the two companion doors from the ground. A level confirmed a downward sag in ROSEMARY. He took it down, removed the hinge, and took a sharp chisel from its denim roll. 

A canvas bag held a short board with a scrap of leather glued flat to it. Against the leather, he made several quick stropping motions with the shiny chisel, first the back, then the front—a final polishing step. Carefully, he brought the sharp edge to the back of his left hand. Just the right angle and a slow forward push and quarter-inch blond hairs gathered on the bevel edge of the tool. Razor sharp. Returning to ROSEMARY, he relieved a thin wafer of cherry wood from the hinge mortise. 

Linda Howe’s only evident work was the care and feeding of a 10-year-old male child, who was now set up with his cereal in the midst of Joe’s power tools. The kid fed out ten feet of a metal tape measure in the direction of the Howes’ very expensive and rare Abyssinian cat that was circling a shallow tray of mint green pellets. Joe was amused by the aloofness of the exquisite, sleek creature. All the same, he wonders what makes educated people introduce cat shit and cat litter into the environment where they keep their food and cook their meals.

Joe put the hinge back on, and mounted the stool for another try. Better this time.

The kid hit the tape measure’s yellow button. The steel tape whipped back at him out of control. Orange juice went flying all over the new center island.

“Do you absolutely need to eat in here today? I’m putting the finishing touches on your mom’s kitchen,” Joe asked the boy.

“Mom says the workmen can function around me,” the kid answered, deadpan.

Joe grabbed a roll of paper towels and began to wipe up the spill. 

Even this child speaks to me this way, Joe thought. It’s not the kid’s fault that he’s an obnoxious brat. Joe knew that. He could take him home to his house—sort of a tough love summer camp—and nurture him into a sweet, polite kid. And the boy would be better off for it, and probably happier too. “What’s your name, son? You know, your given name?” Joe knew it already. 

“Zander,” and he looked back into his cereal.

“I know that’s what people call you, but what’s your real name?” No answer.

“I’ll bet that’s short for Alexander.” Zander was smart as hell and for many days had quietly observed the family dynamics with the hired kitchen guy. Zander knew that his mom had called him both names in front of the kitchen guy lots of times and he’d adopted his family’s mild contempt for this workman who was behind schedule on The Garden. 

Joe worked to quiet himself. “Alexander, that’s a good strong name. Well, Alexander, there are no workmen. There’s only me—Joe Carroll. Joe, that’s short for Joseph, and what I’m doing today is a little tricky and I really need to concentrate, you know, to not screw it up. It’s important to me that my customers are happy with my work.” Joe looked directly at Zander hoping for a faint acknowledgment of understanding. No such luck. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see me doing the cool part, Zander—the carving. I had to do back in my shop. When you get just a little taller—you’re already strong enough, but a little height gives you some leverage over the carving at the bench, I could show you how to do it. It’s not that hard. Does that interest you?”

The pudgy kid slid off his stool and hit the ON button on Joe’s radial arm saw. A loud whirr rose in the room and Joe let out a startled “Ahhhhh!” as the kid calmly opened the fridge and reached for the Tropicana. 

Linda and her ubiquitous stainless-steel travel mug were there pronto. “My God, what has Zander so worked up?”

“Actually, it was me who screamed. Alexander is remarkably calm. He turned on a highly dangerous power tool and I damn near fell off this stool,” Joe answered.

She didn’t even hear him. “I hope you’ve got insurance. Oh, the island, Joe, I’ve been thinking about where you’ve put the island. I’m afraid with it there, Lou’s going to back into it going into the fridge. Can we move it back this way—maybe a few inches—however much you think.”

“Right here’s where I think. Do you remember we blocked it all out before I started?” Joe began.

“And these three cabinets maybe could swing the other way, you know, with whatever you call the little hingey things,” Linda said. 

The herb carvings were truly beautiful. Mere craft though they were, Joe had said to Maggie and to himself, “no one in town has anything nicer in their kitchen.” Two carvings were in place now and Joe had looked forward to Linda’s reaction to the finished effect. But Zander’s stunt had co-opted the moment.

“The hinges, that would be an awful lot of work and—”

“Oh, and Joe, over here, Joe—” and he began to shut down, his defense against the disappointment that was probably inevitable. “I’m rushed this morning, Joe. This SAVORY, you’ll fix these things for us, won’t you? This savory is looking kind of sage-ish, do you know what I mean?”

He’d try to stay with her, make a joke and keep his patience. “Um, you mean not so much spicy, more wise and all-knowing.”

Linda’s extended arm and coffee mug stretched to reach one of the doors over the sink. “This leaf, and maybe this little bunch, do you think they’re right?”

“Are you serious?” Joe asked. Joe’s prized carving tools and big round mallet were laid out on their canvas roll on the island. Those are the tools of my trade, he thought to himself as Zander flopped the canvas a little further open. 

Everyone did what Linda wanted. Probably long ago she thought through the fact that it was their money and power that got everybody to snap to, but now she said, “You’ll work with us, won’t you, Joe?” with a breeziness that scarcely gave Joe a chance to respond. “I’m just concerned that these leaves—”

Joe had been cheated by customers a few times, years back. Maggie worked in a law office, so Joe, who said that he was a 19th century guy, knew something about modern business practices. “These are the leaves from the drawings you and Lou approved.” Looking past Linda, he saw that Alexander had picked up one of his gouges. “Put that down, kid!”

Linda shot Joe a stare that said, “Watch it!” and then turned to her son. “You’ve got that big collaborative history unit today, Sweetie. Are you going to be all right?” She turned back toward Joe and said, “I don’t think you need to speak to Zander like that.”

“Yeah, yeah I do, because he’s messing with the tools that I support my family with, and if he even puts a nick in one of them, it will take me two hours to get it perfect again, unless I have to grind past the hard tempered part of the steel to remove the nick, and then it’s ruined and I’ll have to drive half a day to Woburn, Massachusetts to replace it.” Joe moved toward the kid who feigned fear and dropped the gouge on the floor.

“I think he’s just confused,” Linda said.

Zander said, “I’m so confused, Mom.”

“You’re in his home and he doesn’t understand.”

“Not for much longer.” Joe picked up the gouge from the floor, examined it, and rolled it up with the other wooden-handled implements. “It’s undamaged, but yes, I can certainly see that Zander needs his space.”

Linda’s concern for Alexander shifted seamlessly back to the kitchen cupboards. “The herbs, Joe, when will you fix the herbs—and the island, Lou wants—” She’d dropped the trump card—the physician husband. Poor bastard. 

Joe said, “Lou wants—Lou and his whole a-hole family can find someone else to jerk around. I’m leaving.”
“He swore, mom. The workman, he swore. He called us a-holes,” Alexander whooped with delight. 

“Quick, phone Daddy,” Linda responded. Zander pulled from his pants pocket his own cell phone and got his dad on the phone. Linda took her son’s phone and walked onto her pretty little wisteria-bejeweled side porch. Joe squeezed past her headed for his truck and sagging under the weight of his radial arm saw. “Joe Carroll’s here, we’re in the kitchen and he’s gone crazy.”

Joe understood that this was just hyperbole employed to get Lou’s attention. But just the same—crazy—her using that word so casually to describe him, so effortlessly was she able to dismiss his response to their insults. She knows damn well that this is not mental illness. His walking out of the kitchen just does not compute in her reality. I’m crazy to mess with Lou and Linda Howe; that’s what she really means. I’m crazy to walk out on a big payday.

Joe returned from the truck for more gear and Linda said into the phone, “This is serious, Lou. I know you have patients. He’s refusing to finish the job,” she explained as Zander shouted from right behind her.

“He called Mom an a-hole.” 

  “We’ve got that party here a week from Sunday.” Joe knew that Linda had looked forward to dropping The Garden on her rich neighbors, so his loading up his tools and threatening her plans had jumped ahead of the trauma to poor Zander.

Joe had black and yellow plastic cases of drills and saws in both hands and passed her again on the porch as she said, “Lou’s getting Ari Pappas on a conference call.”

Zander said, “Tell Dad I’m missing school.”

Joe said, “I can drop him off, I’m going right by there.”

Ari Pappas was the attorney that Joe’s wife, Maggie, worked for and was the lawyer that all the smart, connected people in Lyme and Old Lyme used. Oh great, Joe thought. These guys stick together. Joe looked at his watch. He knew Ari’s routine and that he was probably just back from his fancy Monday breakfast up in Essex and would find this intrusion annoying. 

Joe had not at first thought about how his quarrel would so quickly ripple into Maggie’s workplace, and it was, at the moment, the regret foremost in his mind. Everybody loved Maggie at her work, especially the nice old secretary, Cecile, who was probably at this moment beckoning Ari to the phone. 

Joe went back to the kitchen to load some more of his stuff.

The law offices and the doctor’s office and Linda were now all hooked up on a conference call, and Linda pierced the air of her sweet porch, shouting toward the kitchen the verdict that she knew she could extract, “Our attorney says not a red cent more and we keep everything.” 

Linda followed Joe back into her kitchen, not the least bit afraid of the madman. “Our lawyers say we won’t owe you a penny.”

“Makes sense,” Joe answered. On this morning, hanging the doors decorated with the carved herbs, the last day of a long job, the anticipation of the big check—none of it excited Joe Carroll—not like it would have years back. But this skirmish with these people that he had, against his wishes, grown to dislike intensely, made him feel alive. “Is that Lou, great. Let me speak to him.” Joe took the phone from Linda and she just smirked. Joe was very calm. “You’d better come home right away, Doc.”

“I’m busy here, Joe. Hey, thanks, Ari. We’re all set. I’ll call you later,” and the lawyer clicked off. Lou continued, “What the hell’s going on? Just finish the goddamn job and get out of there.” No mention of the a-hole remark. “Is Linda there, is she alright?” 

“She’s fine, well, safe anyway, Lou. It’s the kid I’m worried about.”

“Shouldn’t he be at school? What about him?”

“He’s awful, Doc,” Joe said calmly.

“Yeah?” Lou said, and Zander was leaning hard against his mom now. They were craned in close to Joe, not wishing to be left out of the play. 

Joe went on. “Save your money on the lawyer stuff, Lou. I’m powerless to fight you, but at least I’m free to go home. I think that’s true, isn’t it, that I can choose to leave, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m leaving The Garden. I’m going home,” and Joe handed the phone to Zander.

Zander didn’t like it that his family seemed to have lost the upper hand, that the temperature had dropped, and he shouted, “Daddy, he called us a bunch of assholes.”

Chapter 2, Rich in All the Important Things

The Connecticut River rises from big lakes in northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border. From there it heads due south, separating New Hampshire from Vermont, in many places little more than a large stream. By the time the Connecticut reaches western Massachusetts it is a full-fledged river, and as it runs to Hartford, bisecting the state that shares its name, it is wide and majestic. 

Not far upstream from where the Connecticut meets Long Island Sound, there is, on the eastern side of the river, a quiet cove. Eighty years ago, this broad pool, mostly safe from the tidal eddies and currents that make some spots unsafe for swimming, had been the humble inspiration for a neighborhood of little seasonal cottages. Here Joe and Maggie were able to buy a cheap place. That was eighteen years ago. 

It was a hot afternoon in the middle of September. Dozens of small sailboats were on the river that glistened with little white-capped waves worked up by warm wind. Beyond the boats to the west, on the Saybrook side of the river, the maple trees planted by humans along the narrow village streets had begun to yellow—not because it was cold, but because they were dry and tired from living too long where pavement and sidewalk sneak up around their trunks. 

This is not the seaside of dramatic, open ocean breaking on wide sandy beaches. It is a place whose subtle and complex beauty is in the blood of the people who live there, old and wealthy year-round communities populating ocean and river and land. Joe and Maggie believed that they were blessed to live in so beautiful a place. 

Joe thought that the guys in town who worked at jobs they didn’t enjoy grew to despise these little towns along Interstate 95 between New York and Boston. And when their joy had been robbed, they spent fortunes to get their families to Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod because they had fouled their own nest. Maybe it was to reassure himself in his choices, but when he frequently told Will what a great life they had, Joe really wanted his son to know that his father was grateful to God for His blessings. 

Two days had passed since Joe walked out of Linda Howe’s kitchen without a thank you—or a compliment—or a check. At this last gasp of summer, his family, seeking normalcy in routine, was having a row and a swim within sight of their little house. Joe stood in the prow of a lovely, large rowboat in his favorite red swimming suit. His trunks were covered with lots of little sailboats. Will, content in his own world, played in the river at a distance. When Joe looked down at his mostly naked self, the person he saw from his tanned tummy down was a young Joe Carroll—strong and equipped to engage a mostly benevolent world. That view of the world—that it was essentially good—Joe thought was shaped more by one thing than by any other, that God had given him Maggie for a friend and mate. 

His imagination had permanently captured the September morning when he saw his wife for the first time. In a boy’s white oxford cloth shirt and a denim skirt, Maggie glided across the campus where he and Maggie and Annie and Dave on long winter evenings would decide who they were and what they would do with their lives. Lots of other boys spied Maggie on those same early September days, before the darkness and cold and alcohol-assisted introspection of the school year began. They’d all noticed her. How he had ever leapt to the idea that he could spend a whole life with her, he could not remember. He didn’t really want to think about it—about how Maggie had fallen in love with his idealism and his devotion to his art. His adolescent college-boy self had let Maggie adore him. The more evolved, self-aware Joe was less comfortable with any such devotion. Joe thought that other married people must be burdened in the same way— having a wife or a husband who thinks you are better than you really are. 

On this day, the disappointment over the Howe kitchen still had a grip on him. He wound a threadbare white towel around his eyes, ready for the firing squad. Maggie leaned slightly backward in her seat at the stern. She was wet from swimming and had pulled on a shirt over a teal tank suit. When the mail order catalogues came in the spring, Joe had occasionally bludgeoned Maggie into buying herself something, but she never cared. “I have a perfectly good bathing suit,” she automatically answered, not remembering which sun-damaged, elastic-shot costume was currently at the front of the rotation in her bottom drawer. 

“No, you don’t,” Joe said because he knew that it had been three years, at least, since she’d bought her last one. But the swimsuits in the catalogue were only forty dollars and Maggie was the reason that they make these plain little suits—so that on a day like this one, Maggie Carroll could dangle her tanned wrist over a gunwale and twirl an elegant finger in the brackish Connecticut River. Joe thought that women at forty were more beautiful than girls at twenty. Maggie said that he had to think that because a tired, mature woman was what he had, and something in his psychology made him need to affirm the goodness of everything in his world. Maggie accepted with amused gratitude that her husband thought she was beautiful. It was not how she thought about herself.

Straining for balance and standing blindfolded on the forward-most thwart, Joe snuck a peak at his feet. “Go ahead, Maggie. Shoot me, for your own sake and for the good of the boy. Finish me off.”
“Come down from there. You’re going to fall and hit your head and I’m not strong enough to get you back into the boat. It’s not the end of the world. It’ll work itself out. We’ve got it made.” She liked her life. And out here on the river today in the glorious sunshine, she was able to enjoy the moment. Her friends spoke of Maggie’s grace. She won’t take any credit for it. She knew that her personality just was what it was and that she had not had to work very hard at being patient or modest or grateful. 

“I don’t think I’ve got it made. I think I live right up the street from the river and have to borrow a neighbor’s boat to take my family on a weekend row. I think I’m carving herbs on cupboards for rich ladies.”

“Not any more, actually,” Maggie said, not able to resist the cheap joke. Joe let the terry cloth blindfold fall onto his shoulders. 

“What a bargain you got—a carver of inane trivialities who doesn’t even get paid for his labors. I’m like a double loser. Shoot me and get another man. Maybe a lawyer next time.” Joe shouted, “Will,” turning his head in the direction where he last saw his son floating quietly on his back, “would you like a wealthy father who could get you a big new speedboat?” 

Will flipped onto his front and started breaststroking toward the boat. “I thought you said we were rich in all the important things,” Will replied flippantly. Joe heard himself in his son’s words and, miserable as he was, he could still enjoy Maggie’s calm and his teaching manifest in the boy. “Dad, can I swim to the point and back?” They’d done it together lots of times and it wasn’t as far as it looked.

“Sure, yell really loud if you think the current is doing anything scary and we’ll row right after you.”

Maggie understood this was male stuff she had to let Joe decide. First of all, he might say to her, nothing is going to happen to him because I’m going to watch him like a hawk and I can row over there in about a minute if he cramps up or something, and we’ve got to let him do stuff like this if he’s going to grow into a strong man. And Joe might gratuitously compare Will to some Zander Howe-type kid as an added deterrent to Maggie’s impulse to protect her only child. Maggie liked the way their parenting collaboration worked. 

Their bony and brown boy quickly was halfway to the muddy promontory. Joe was not through needing Maggie’s attention. “You’ll be free.” 

“Why don’t you come down from there?”

“I’m sorry about the money, Mags. This isn’t what I wanted for us.” Joe sat down in the boat. “I thought that I would do something important, make lovely things, things that people would admire and that would make the world more beautiful.”

“Beautiful things like that brave little man who’s swimming toward us? You have, Joe, and you can.”

Joe wasn’t so sure. He was weary. It had been nearly twenty years since they landed in this place. “Oh, come on, Mags, how am I? Anyway, the job for the Howes—you’re right, that’ll work itself out. I’ll just have to grovel a little and we’ll get the money. I can grovel.”

“We’re fine, you know,” she said. “Don’t owe anybody. Borrowed boat, yeah, but we’re okay. And as for the making great things thing, you will, if it’s what you really want; you just will. Nothing will stop you.”

Will returned, pooped from the long swim, and pulled himself up to where his chin was hooked just over the gunwale. “Aren’t you going to do it, Dad?” Joe always did it. It was his trick that told them all he was still young and athletic and fearless. He climbed back up into the stern of the boat, rewound the condemned man’s towel around his eyes, and did a high, arching backflip into the river. 

Leaving the Garden

Today would be an easy day for Joe Carroll. He’d made it to the finish line of a woodworking job he’d dreaded, partly because it was going to be boring, but mostly because of a succession of warnings dropped at the grocery store, at church, in the hardware store, and at the lumberyard about Linda Howe. “Bitch” was the word most often used to describe her. But Joe needed the work and was even piqued by the challenge of winning her over.

            Joe approached the scores of hours spent in close company with Linda Howe with a belief that they would grow fond of one another. Joe and Maggie’s friends thought Linda Howe unworthy of Joe’s artistry—unworthy even of his company, but Joe knew he got along with people. And he needed the work. From the first day, Linda found opportunities to press the point that Joe was working for her, but Joe felt pretty secure in a different paradigm. He told himself that he had outsmarted the guys with straight jobs by not having to punch a time clock. As a doctor, Linda’s husband, Lou, made lots more money to be sure, but a woodcarver didn’t have to file endless paperwork with insurance companies, didn’t have to prematurely release hemorrhaging, tubed-up, barely conscious people from the hospital, just to take care of his family. Joe Carroll’s concept was simple: money for woodcarving. One third down, the balance C.O.D. for honest work that sometimes even rose to the level of art.

            This job for Linda Howe was not art; it was more like good craft. Joe had agreed to remodel most of the Howes’ kitchen for the privilege of executing fifteen cupboard doors. Joe made that crystal clear when he took the job. “I’m a woodcarver, Linda, not a kitchen guy,” he’d told her. He’d make the boring boxes and the face frames for the fun of doing the pretty doors. He’d told that to Linda—it wasn’t about the money—it was for the fun of carving the doors.

            Each paneled door was decorated with a relief-carved and delicately painted herb. Linda loved herbs. She told that to Joe at their first interview about The Garden—that’s what she was already calling the new kitchen. During the weeks he labored for Lou and Linda, she had never cooked a meal at home, even though Joe had been explicitly instructed that part of the deal was that he must keep the kitchen “fully functioning for Linda” because “she loves to cook.”

Today he will hang the herbed-up doors, wipe some paste wax on the finished work, and, his job complete, schlep his tools out to the truck. He looked at the carved door in his arms, DILL, and past it through the big window over the sink to Linda’s Lexus pulling in the drive. Linda, dressed (camouflaged, was how Joe thought of it) in a celadon designer sweat suit, was back from Starbucks with her coffee. What is the point of a two hundred dollar sweat outfit, Joe wondered. He had never seen Linda do any physical labor, much less perspire.

            Joe’s mind wandered to his wife Maggie who in a burlap bag was prettier than Linda Howe. All that jewelry and makeup and hairdo and clothes marshaled to present to the world the Linda she wanted it to see. Joe thought he saw through all of it, that the anatomy courses he took twenty years ago, and the life drawing classes, and his artist sensibilities revealed Linda Howe stark naked under the celadon folds. Joe could see everyone naked, or as he liked to say, metaphorically, depending on the company, in their nakedness.

            Dave and Annie are Maggie and Joe’s oldest friends. Dave knows that his old college buddy who majored in Dissipation now goes to church and reads books on spirituality. And Joe understands that Dave is a little sad that his great friend has gone off on this spiritual thing without him. At every opportunity, Dave tells a joke from his small comedy repertoire: “Brother Joe has discovered that he has a remarkable spiritual gift; he sees people with their clothes off.”

            Sometimes Joe responds in a serious way. “Well, Dave, so does God.” Joe likes that idea a lot—counts on it really, that God knows all about the real us, warts and all.

            Joe was up on a stool holding the first door, DILL, in place over its assigned opening. With a bradawl he marked the locations in the doorframes for the brass screws that would go through hinges already attached to the doors. With a small cordless drill, he counter bored the screw holes and fastened the first door in place. Repeating the process for the ROSEMARY, he thought that it didn’t look quite level. He hopped down from the stool to look at the two companion doors from the ground. A level confirmed a downward sag in ROSEMARY. He took it down, removed the hinge, and took a sharp chisel from its denim roll.

            A canvas bag held a short board with a scrap of leather glued flat to it. Against the leather, he made several quick stropping motions with the shiny chisel, first the back, then the front—a final polishing step. Carefully, he brought the sharp edge to the back of his left hand. Just the right angle and a slow forward push and quarter-inch blond hairs gathered on the bevel edge of the tool. Razor sharp. Returning to ROSEMARY, he relieved a thin wafer of cherry wood from the hinge mortise.

            Linda Howe’s only evident work was the care and feeding of a 10-year-old male child, who was now set up with his cereal in the midst of Joe’s power tools. The kid fed out ten feet of a metal tape measure in the direction of the Howes’ very expensive and rare Abyssinian cat that was circling a shallow tray of mint green pellets. Joe was amused by the aloofness of the exquisite, sleek creature. All the same, he wonders what makes educated people introduce cat shit and cat litter into the environment where they keep their food and cook their meals.

            Joe put the hinge back on, and mounted the stool for another try. Better this time.

            The kid hit the tape measure’s yellow button. The steel tape whipped back at him out of control. Orange juice went flying all over the new center island.

             “Do you absolutely need to eat in here today? I’m putting the finishing touches on your mom’s kitchen,” Joe asked the boy.

            “Mom says the workmen can function around me,” the kid answered, deadpan.

Joe grabbed a roll of paper towels and began to wipe up the spill.

Even this child speaks to me this way, Joe thought. It’s not the kid’s fault that he’s an obnoxious brat. Joe knew that. He could take him home to his house—sort of a tough love summer camp—and nurture him into a sweet, polite kid. And the boy would be better off for it, and probably happier too. “What’s your name, son? You know, your given name?” Joe knew it already.

            “Zander,” and he looked back into his cereal.

            “I know that’s what people call you, but what’s your real name?” No answer.       

             “I’ll bet that’s short for Alexander.” Zander was smart as hell and for many days had quietly observed the family dynamics with the hired kitchen guy. Zander knew that his mom had called him both names in front of the kitchen guy lots of times and he’d adopted his family’s mild contempt for this workman who was behind schedule on The Garden.

Joe worked to quiet himself. “Alexander, that’s a good strong name. Well, Alexander, there are no workmen. There’s only me—Joe Carroll. Joe, that’s short for Joseph, and what I’m doing today is a little tricky and I really need to concentrate, you know, to not screw it up. It’s important to me that my customers are happy with my work.” Joe looked directly at Zander hoping for a faint acknowledgment of understanding. No such luck. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see me doing the cool part, Zander—the carving. I had to do back in my shop. When you get just a little taller—you’re already strong enough, but a little height gives you some leverage over the carving at the bench, I could show you how to do it. It’s not that hard. Does that interest you?”

            The pudgy kid slid off his stool and hit the ON button on Joe’s radial arm saw. A loud whirr rose in the room and Joe let out a startled “Ahhhhh!” as the kid calmly opened the fridge and reached for the Tropicana.

            Linda and her ubiquitous stainless-steel travel mug were there pronto. “My God, what has Zander so worked up?”

            “Actually, it was me who screamed. Alexander is remarkably calm. He turned on a highly dangerous power tool and I damn near fell off this stool,” Joe answered.

            She didn’t even hear him. “I hope you’ve got insurance. Oh, the island, Joe, I’ve been thinking about where you’ve put the island. I’m afraid with it there, Lou’s going to back into it going into the fridge. Can we move it back this way—maybe a few inches—however much you think.”

            “Right here’s where I think. Do you remember we blocked it all out before I started?” Joe began.

            “And these three cabinets maybe could swing the other way, you know, with whatever you call the little hingey things,” Linda said.

            The herb carvings were truly beautiful. Mere craft though they were, Joe had said to Maggie and to himself, “no one in town has anything nicer in their kitchen.” Two carvings were in place now and Joe had looked forward to Linda’s reaction to the finished effect. But Zander’s stunt had co-opted the moment.

            “The hinges, that would be an awful lot of work and—”

            “Oh, and Joe, over here, Joe—” and he began to shut down, his defense against the disappointment that was probably inevitable. “I’m rushed this morning, Joe. This SAVORY, you’ll fix these things for us, won’t you? This savory is looking kind of sage-ish, do you know what I mean?”

            He’d try to stay with her, make a joke and keep his patience. “Um, you mean not so much spicy, more wise and all-knowing.”

            Linda’s extended arm and coffee mug stretched to reach one of the doors over the sink. “This leaf, and maybe this little bunch, do you think they’re right?”

            “Are you serious?” Joe asked. Joe’s prized carving tools and big round mallet were laid out on their canvas roll on the island. Those are the tools of my trade, he thought to himself as Zander flopped the canvas a little further open.

            Everyone did what Linda wanted. Probably long ago she thought through the fact that it was their money and power that got everybody to snap to, but now she said, “You’ll work with us, won’t you, Joe?” with a breeziness that scarcely gave Joe a chance to respond. “I’m just concerned that these leaves—”

            Joe had been cheated by customers a few times, years back. Maggie worked in a law office, so Joe, who said that he was a 19th century guy, knew something about modern business practices. “These are the leaves from the drawings you and Lou approved.” Looking past Linda, he saw that Alexander had picked up one of his gouges. “Put that down, kid!”

            Linda shot Joe a stare that said, “Watch it!” and then turned to her son. “You’ve got that big collaborative history unit today, Sweetie. Are you going to be all right?” She turned back toward Joe and said, “I don’t think you need to speak to Zander like that.”

            “Yeah, yeah I do, because he’s messing with the tools that I support my family with, and if he even puts a nick in one of them, it will take me two hours to get it perfect again, unless I have to grind past the hard tempered part of the steel to remove the nick, and then it’s ruined and I’ll have to drive half a day to Woburn, Massachusetts to replace it.” Joe moved toward the kid who feigned fear and dropped the gouge on the floor.

            “I think he’s just confused,” Linda said.

            Zander said, “I’m so confused, Mom.”

             “You’re in his home and he doesn’t understand.”

            “Not for much longer.” Joe picked up the gouge from the floor, examined it, and rolled it up with the other wooden-handled implements. “It’s undamaged, but yes, I can certainly see that Zander needs his space.”

            Linda’s concern for Alexander shifted seamlessly back to the kitchen cupboards. “The herbs, Joe, when will you fix the herbs—and the island, Lou wants—” She’d dropped the trump card—the physician husband. Poor bastard.

            Joe said, “Lou wants—Lou and his whole a-hole family can find someone else to jerk around. I’m leaving.”
            “He swore, mom. The workman, he swore. He called us a-holes,” Alexander whooped with delight.

            “Quick, phone Daddy,” Linda responded. Zander pulled from his pants pocket his own cell phone and got his dad on the phone. Linda took her son’s phone and walked onto her pretty little wisteria-bejeweled side porch. Joe squeezed past her headed for his truck and sagging under the weight of his radial arm saw. “Joe Carroll’s here, we’re in the kitchen and he’s gone crazy.”

            Joe understood that this was just hyperbole employed to get Lou’s attention. But just the same—crazy—her using that word so casually to describe him, so effortlessly was she able to dismiss his response to their insults. She knows damn well that this is not mental illness. His walking out of the kitchen just does not compute in her reality. I’m crazy to mess with Lou and Linda Howe; that’s what she really means. I’m crazy to walk out on a big payday.

            Joe returned from the truck for more gear and Linda said into the phone, “This is serious, Lou. I know you have patients. He’s refusing to finish the job,” she explained as Zander shouted from right behind her.

            “He called Mom an a-hole.”

            “We’ve got that party here a week from Sunday.” Joe knew that Linda had looked forward to dropping The Garden on her rich neighbors, so his loading up his tools and threatening her plans had jumped ahead of the trauma to poor Zander.

            Joe had black and yellow plastic cases of drills and saws in both hands and passed her again on the porch as she said, “Lou’s getting Ari Pappas on a conference call.”

            Zander said, “Tell Dad I’m missing school.”

Joe said, “I can drop him off, I’m going right by there.”

            Ari Pappas was the attorney that Joe’s wife, Maggie, worked for and was the lawyer that all the smart, connected people in Lyme and Old Lyme used. Oh great, Joe thought. These guys stick together. Joe looked at his watch. He knew Ari’s routine and that he was probably just back from his fancy Monday breakfast up in Essex and would find this intrusion annoying.

            Joe had not at first thought about how his quarrel would so quickly ripple into Maggie’s workplace, and it was, at the moment, the regret foremost in his mind. Everybody loved Maggie at her work, especially the nice old secretary, Cecile, who was probably at this moment beckoning Ari to the phone.

            Joe went back to the kitchen to load some more of his stuff.

The law offices and the doctor’s office and Linda were now all hooked up on a conference call, and Linda pierced the air of her sweet porch, shouting toward the kitchen the verdict that she knew she could extract, “Our attorney says not a red cent more and we keep everything.”

            Linda followed Joe back into her kitchen, not the least bit afraid of the madman. “Our lawyers say we won’t owe you a penny.”

            “Makes sense,” Joe answered. On this morning, hanging the doors decorated with the carved herbs, the last day of a long job, the anticipation of the big check—none of it excited Joe Carroll—not like it would have years back. But this skirmish with these people that he had, against his wishes, grown to dislike intensely, made him feel alive. “Is that Lou, great. Let me speak to him.” Joe took the phone from Linda and she just smirked. Joe was very calm. “You’d better come home right away, Doc.”

            “I’m busy here, Joe. Hey, thanks, Ari. We’re all set. I’ll call you later,” and the lawyer clicked off. Lou continued, “What the hell’s going on? Just finish the goddamn job and get out of there.” No mention of the a-hole remark. “Is Linda there, is she alright?”

             “She’s fine, well, safe anyway, Lou. It’s the kid I’m worried about.”

            “Shouldn’t he be at school? What about him?”

            “He’s awful, Doc,” Joe said calmly.

             “Yeah?” Lou said, and Zander was leaning hard against his mom now. They were craned in close to Joe, not wishing to be left out of the play.

            Joe went on. “Save your money on the lawyer stuff, Lou. I’m powerless to fight you, but at least I’m free to go home. I think that’s true, isn’t it, that I can choose to leave, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m leaving The Garden. I’m going home,” and Joe handed the phone to Zander.

            Zander didn’t like it that his family seemed to have lost the upper hand, that the temperature had dropped, and he shouted, “Daddy, he called us a bunch of assholes.”

Chapter 2

Rich in All the Important Things

The Connecticut River rises from big lakes in northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border. From there it heads due south, separating New Hampshire from Vermont, in many places little more than a large stream. By the time the Connecticut reaches western Massachusetts it is a full-fledged river, and as it runs to Hartford, bisecting the state that shares its name, it is wide and majestic.

            Not far upstream from where the Connecticut meets Long Island Sound, there is, on the eastern side of the river, a quiet cove. Eighty years ago, this broad pool, mostly safe from the tidal eddies and currents that make some spots unsafe for swimming, had been the humble inspiration for a neighborhood of little seasonal cottages. Here Joe and Maggie were able to buy a cheap place. That was eighteen years ago.

            It was a hot afternoon in the middle of September. Dozens of small sailboats were on the river that glistened with little white-capped waves worked up by warm wind. Beyond the boats to the west, on the Saybrook side of the river, the maple trees planted by humans along the narrow village streets had begun to yellow—not because it was cold, but because they were dry and tired from living too long where pavement and sidewalk sneak up around their trunks.

            This is not the seaside of dramatic, open ocean breaking on wide sandy beaches. It is a place whose subtle and complex beauty is in the blood of the people who live there, old and wealthy year-round communities populating ocean and river and land. Joe and Maggie believed that they were blessed to live in so beautiful a place.

            Joe thought that the guys in town who worked at jobs they didn’t enjoy grew to despise these little towns along Interstate 95 between New York and Boston. And when their joy had been robbed, they spent fortunes to get their families to Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod because they had fouled their own nest. Maybe it was to reassure himself in his choices, but when he frequently told Will what a great life they had, Joe really wanted his son to know that his father was grateful to God for His blessings.

            Two days had passed since Joe walked out of Linda Howe’s kitchen without a thank you—or a compliment­—or a check. At this last gasp of summer, his family, seeking normalcy in routine, was having a row and a swim within sight of their little house. Joe stood in the prow of a lovely, large rowboat in his favorite red swimming suit. His trunks were covered with lots of little sailboats. Will, content in his own world, played in the river at a distance. When Joe looked down at his mostly naked self, the person he saw from his tanned tummy down was a young Joe Carroll—strong and equipped to engage a mostly benevolent world. That view of the world—that it was essentially good—Joe thought was shaped more by one thing than by any other, that God had given him Maggie for a friend and mate.

            His imagination had permanently captured the September morning when he saw his wife for the first time. In a boy’s white oxford cloth shirt and a denim skirt, Maggie glided across the campus where he and Maggie and Annie and Dave on long winter evenings would decide who they were and what they would do with their lives. Lots of other boys spied Maggie on those same early September days, before the darkness and cold and alcohol-assisted introspection of the school year began. They’d all noticed her. How he had ever leapt to the idea that he could spend a whole life with her, he could not remember. He didn’t really want to think about it—about how Maggie had fallen in love with his idealism and his devotion to his art. His adolescent college-boy self had let Maggie adore him. The more evolved, self-aware Joe was less comfortable with any such devotion. Joe thought that other married people must be burdened in the same way— having a wife or a husband who thinks you are better than you really are.

            On this day, the disappointment over the Howe kitchen still had a grip on him. He wound a threadbare white towel around his eyes, ready for the firing squad. Maggie leaned slightly backward in her seat at the stern. She was wet from swimming and had pulled on a shirt over a teal tank suit. When the mail order catalogues came in the spring, Joe had occasionally bludgeoned Maggie into buying herself something, but she never cared. “I have a perfectly good bathing suit,” she automatically answered, not remembering which sun-damaged, elastic-shot costume was currently at the front of the rotation in her bottom drawer.

            “No, you don’t,” Joe said because he knew that it had been three years, at least, since she’d bought her last one. But the swimsuits in the catalogue were only forty dollars and Maggie was the reason that they make these plain little suits—so that on a day like this one, Maggie Carroll could dangle her tanned wrist over a gunwale and twirl an elegant finger in the brackish Connecticut River. Joe thought that women at forty were more beautiful than girls at twenty. Maggie said that he had to think that because a tired, mature woman was what he had, and something in his psychology made him need to affirm the goodness of everything in his world. Maggie accepted with amused gratitude that her husband thought she was beautiful. It was not how she thought about herself.

            Straining for balance and standing blindfolded on the forward-most thwart, Joe snuck a peak at his feet. “Go ahead, Maggie. Shoot me, for your own sake and for the good of the boy. Finish me off.”
            “Come down from there. You’re going to fall and hit your head and I’m not strong enough to get you back into the boat. It’s not the end of the world. It’ll work itself out. We’ve got it made.” She liked her life. And out here on the river today in the glorious sunshine, she was able to enjoy the moment. Her friends spoke of Maggie’s grace. She won’t take any credit for it. She knew that her personality just was what it was and that she had not had to work very hard at being patient or modest or grateful.

             “I don’t think I’ve got it made. I think I live right up the street from the river and have to borrow a neighbor’s boat to take my family on a weekend row. I think I’m carving herbs on cupboards for rich ladies.”

             “Not any more, actually,” Maggie said, not able to resist the cheap joke. Joe let the terry cloth blindfold fall onto his shoulders.

            “What a bargain you got—a carver of inane trivialities who doesn’t even get paid for his labors. I’m like a double loser. Shoot me and get another man. Maybe a lawyer next time.” Joe shouted, “Will,” turning his head in the direction where he last saw his son floating quietly on his back, “would you like a wealthy father who could get you a big new speedboat?”

            Will flipped onto his front and started breaststroking toward the boat. “I thought you said we were rich in all the important things,” Will replied flippantly. Joe heard himself in his son’s words and, miserable as he was, he could still enjoy Maggie’s calm and his teaching manifest in the boy. “Dad, can I swim to the point and back?” They’d done it together lots of times and it wasn’t as far as it looked.

            “Sure, yell really loud if you think the current is doing anything scary and we’ll row right after you.”     

Maggie understood this was male stuff she had to let Joe decide. First of all, he might say to her, nothing is going to happen to him because I’m going to watch him like a hawk and I can row over there in about a minute if he cramps up or something, and we’ve got to let him do stuff like this if he’s going to grow into a strong man. And Joe might gratuitously compare Will to some Zander Howe-type kid as an added deterrent to Maggie’s impulse to protect her only child. Maggie liked the way their parenting collaboration worked.

            Their bony and brown boy quickly was halfway to the muddy promontory. Joe was not through needing Maggie’s attention. “You’ll be free.”

            “Why don’t you come down from there?”

            “I’m sorry about the money, Mags. This isn’t what I wanted for us.” Joe sat down in the boat. “I thought that I would do something important, make lovely things, things that people would admire and that would make the world more beautiful.”

            “Beautiful things like that brave little man who’s swimming toward us? You have, Joe, and you can.”

            Joe wasn’t so sure. He was weary. It had been nearly twenty years since they landed in this place. “Oh, come on, Mags, how am I? Anyway, the job for the Howes—you’re right, that’ll work itself out. I’ll just have to grovel a little and we’ll get the money. I can grovel.”

            “We’re fine, you know,” she said. “Don’t owe anybody. Borrowed boat, yeah, but we’re

okay. And as for the making great things thing, you will, if it’s what you really want; you just will. Nothing will stop you.”

            Will returned, pooped from the long swim, and pulled himself up to where his chin was hooked just over the gunwale. “Aren’t you going to do it, Dad?” Joe always did it. It was his trick that told them all he was still young and athletic and fearless. He climbed back up into the stern of the boat, rewound the condemned man’s towel around his eyes, and did a high, arching backflip into the river.