Summerwork

DISLOCATION

The summer at Rigby House happened like most things happened then: someone else’s idea mixed with Leo’s own failure.


From his room where he sat in front of the computer trying—not successfully— to write a final essay on Frederick Douglass, Pickett’s Charge, and the Winslow Homer painting The Veteran in a New Field, he heard his mom sighing as his uncle brought in the last of her groceries.


“I don’t know, Wayne,” she says, her whispers twisting around the sticky creaking of the kitchen linoleum. “I can’t imagine it. He’s never been away from me for that long. Never. Not since . . .”


“Scarlet. Only you remember that time.”


“I know,” she says. More creaking; Wayne’s heavy boots going in and out, the door banging.


They’d just returned from the Costco in Dalby. No doubt his uncle had his truck full of forty-pound sacks of dog kibble alongside bags of potting soil for the flower beds she maintained for him out at what had once been their parents’ house. Wayne fixed stuff in his sister’s apartment; she kept his landscaping looking good—at least in the front yard, where the dogs couldn’t destroy it. They had always shared chores and errands like this; Leo couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t, though later he would see it as remarkable, especially for brother and sister.


“What if he needs something?” she asks.


“He needs to pay for what he damaged. He needs to work.”


“I’m not talking about money.”


“Scarlet. I’ll be a phone call away.” The fridge opens and shuts; his uncle pops open what has to be a can of Hamm’s.


“Why can’t he stay with you at Marta’s?”


“Scarlet.”


“He could ride in with you every morning.”


“You know why.”


“I know,” she says. “I guess. It’s just . . . weird.”


“This way will be better,” Wayne says. “You’ve got enough on tap right now with your own classes this summer. I’ve talked to Tim, and I’ve known Jaime for years.”


She sighs. Sighing is her main expression when it comes to Leo.


“Last thing you want is round two of what happened last year,” Uncle Wayne says. “And it’s just for the summer.”


Just for the summer.




Years later, after Leo had grown up—physically, of course, but also in his mind—that phrase would give him something like an ache. The memory of how he saw time then, when it was just Now or Never or Just This Once.

That Leo. Clearing five foot ten. Just got his license, but no wheels. Neck rashed with acne and stubble. Eyebrows meeting in the middle until his mother cornered him in the bathroom with a tweezer and said, Enough’s enough, Leo, Jesus Christ. Scar on his still-pasty-white arm from when he’d dropped his dad’s bike the summer before—round one of shit summers.


A summer. Three months. Ninety days. Twelve weeks. Words that couldn’t capture his dread at being sent away. Ninety days to give his mom space and quiet. His uncle, money, and—justice? The ghost of his dead father to rest in peace knowing his only son wouldn’t get splattered on the highway on the bike he’d left behind.

That boy couldn’t handle how long it seemed: a whole summer. Like the big stack of books that he and his friends Cap and Calvin Rothchalk saw behind the library one day when they were riding bikes.


They were encyclopedias, stacked chest high; the lady hauling them out on a cart to the dumpster said they had the whole thing in the cloud and this set had gotten moldy. A to Z plus the index and atlas, way more than he could imagine reading. Next to them, piles of old film strip canisters, their labels yellowed, the inked descriptions a faded purple. Understanding Weather and the Seasons. How Minnesota Became a State. Fire Safety Tips. Piles and piles of educational movies nobody could probably play anymore, even if they were relevant.


That pile of books and filmstrips: a summer sent away from home.


“I’ll take them,” Cap said to the librarian. “All of it. I’ll come back with my dad.”


Later, summers will slip through Leo’s fingers like water. The crocuses bloom, and a minute later, it’s Labor Day. But at age sixteen, it was a galaxy of time. An unimaginable assignment. Like separating rice from sand or making a rope of ashes. Endless as reading all those moldy books Cap had wanted to save. Had he saved them? Leo couldn’t remember.


He will never forget that summer at Rigby House. But he doesn’t know that yet.




On the first morning at the Rigby estate, Wayne hugs Leo and hands him a duffel bag, and a tall, well-dressed Black man named Malcolm walks him down the gravel driveway. The main house, emerging from the steam of the morning’s humidity, is an enormous sandstone and brick building, four stories tall, bisected by a sweep of stone steps to a massive blue door. In front there is a massive marble fountain encircled by lawn. From a table beneath an awning, Malcolm hands him a sliced onion bagel fringed with cream cheese and wrapped in wax paper and a plain glass bottle of orange juice and tells him breakfast is every morning starting at eight.


“The guys in Jaime’s crew are based around Marchant Falls, so you’ll only see them during the workday. You’ll stay in what is known as the carriage house,” Malcolm says, his voice as crisp and precise as his light blue dress shirt, as they come upon a battered wooden two- story building with giant bay garage doors and large semicircle windows on the upper level. Malcolm goes on to describe many things about the Rigby family and their estate. Leo half listens. He is trying not to look back toward his uncle.


Malcolm opens a side door into what is basically a huge garage: concrete floor, cars under tarps, rolling toolboxes. Someone is listening to classic rock on the radio, and there is a pile of furniture at the bottom of a staircase. By the open bay door, a tall tattooed man is hosing down a red sports car and talking on his phone.


“That’s Tim,” Malcolm says. “He’s working on getting these cars out of here. Repaired, restored, and sold for Ms. Rigby.” He walks across from the staircase and opens a door. “This is the shower and bathroom for you. Tim might use it when he’s working, but otherwise it’s all yours.”


Leo glimpses a bare concrete floor with a rusted drain in the center, a showerhead that looks like the one his uncle uses to give his dogs baths, and a toilet and sink. Malcolm clearly doesn’t think the setup is worth a long viewing.


“The water is reliable and hot. I will leave towels and supplies for you,” he says, shutting the door as if the whole room distresses him. He opens another door, revealing a stacked washer and dryer. “You can wash your clothes here. I have soap in the house; I’ll bring it over. And out back here”—he leads Leo to a door opening out of the carriage house—“is a laundry line if you prefer it. Ms. Rigby always supports eco-friendly practices. And here’s a little patio you’re welcome to use if you feel like it. Although I need Tim to clear that junk pile.” Again, Malcolm sniffs with distress. “It’s supposed to be a fire pit. Eventually.”


Leo takes in the backyard. Patio sprinkled with wooden Popsicle sticks, two lawn chairs with shredded webbing, a T-bar washing line like the one his uncle Wayne has at his house, and another old green door that looks like it goes to a cellar.


“Is that a root cellar?”


“If you want to call it that, sure.”


“My uncle has one at his house.”


“Whatever it is, it’s full of old junk. Another thing Tim will tackle once he gets these cars sold.”


“Ms. Rigby doesn’t drive?”


“She does, but she prefers electric vehicles,” Malcolm says, his voice slightly sour. “Her father and his father were more traditional in their collecting. I’ll show you your room.” He gestures to the furniture: two wooden chairs with cushions of red velvet faded to pink, a lamp made out of a bright green bottle, a white plastic fan.


While Tim ignores them, Malcolm helps Leo carry these things up with his duffel to the second floor. The last room at the end of the hall is his. There are two half-moon windows, all cloudy with spiderwebs and dirt. A bed with a wrought-iron frame made up with a faded pink quilt. A table covered with spray paint cans. A broom and dustpan in the corner with a bucket full of cleaning supplies.

Malcolm points to a wooden cabinet in the corner and the outlets.


“Please, arrange things however you like. You’re the first person to stay here for a long while, so make yourself comfortable. And let me know if there is anything you need. This estate has nearly everything you can think of, so don’t hesitate to ask.”


Leo nods at all of this. But he says nothing, because he is thinking his uncle must be on the highway by now, and there is something about being in this room alone with this man who has only been polite and nice that is crushingly sad.


“When you get settled, come out front by the fountain, and I’ll introduce you to the crew.”


Leo thanks him and waits until Malcolm’s footsteps fade down the stairs. He stands in the room and feels like crying. Instead, he opens the juice and swigs it down. Then he gets to work. He puts the lamp on the desk, plugs it in, along with his phone and the fan. Puts the spray paint cans on the floor. Listens to the way the floorboards creak under his boots. Smells the dust rise as he moves; the place is old. The cabinet opens with a screech and has no drawers; it’s just a vertical column of space. He dumps his entire duffel inside it. He walks to the three other rooms on the floor. One has boxes of tiles and bags of grout, and a toolbox splayed open, an antique sofa with missing cushions. One is just chairs, rows and rows of wooden dining room chairs. The last one is locked.


He goes down the stairs. The man named Tim is now beneath one of the cars, just his legs sticking out. Which reminds him of the busted motorcycle—and everything he owes.


He is uneasy about the work to come. Landscaping, Wayne said. Leo can use a mower and an edge trimmer, and has spent every summer cleaning out his uncle’s dog kennels, exercising the animals, clipping their claws, bathing them in the metal trough that used to be for his grandfather’s horses. But landscaping seems more like hard prison labor. Rock hauling. Tree trimming. Earthmoving.


His terrors of fucking up and of meeting new people are roughly equal. He thinks of his friends, the whole reason he fucked up in the first place. Calvin working at the McDonald’s out in Wereford by the community college where Leo’s mother teaches, Cap lifeguarding at the kiddie pool. He will lose it if either of them complains about their jobs when he gets home.


As he approaches the fountain in the center of the drive, the big house coming into clear view—a wall of brick, scrolled ironwork, and ivy— he realizes he’s forgotten his phone.


He runs back to the carriage house. Tim is nowhere to be seen.


He grabs his phone and looks for new messages—there are none. He puts it in his pocket. And then he stops for a minute. He looks out one of the half-moon windows. There he can see the drive, the fountain, and the main attraction, the impossibly big brick big house, looking like something an English lord would stay in while he went foxhunting. That it’s in the middle of Minnesota makes no sense. He can see people gathered around the fountain, all guys, holding coffee and juice and bagels.


He wishes he could take back everything. He wishes he hadn’t been a dipshit about the motorcycle. He wishes Calvin’s mom hadn’t busted them smoking weed. He wishes he hadn’t screamed at his mother when she drove him to the ER to get stitches for the gash on his arm. He wishes his uncle wasn’t so easy to disappoint. He wishes he knew a way to make them both feel better about the damage he did to Wayne’s yard, and the motorcycle, too, the one his father was riding when he was killed. His mother has always viewed her husband’s motorcycle as cursed, while his uncle considers his best friend’s bike sacred.


He looks out the window again, and now he sees a black SUV with tinted windows rolling up to the fountain. The crowd of guys parts, moves aside under a stand of trees.


A thin man in a white dress shirt and dark pants gets out, starts pulling suitcases out of the back, one, two, three of them, all a glittery red hard plastic like a vintage motorcycle helmet. Then a backpack, a messenger bag, and two leather handbags, one brown and one black.


Finally, a door from the back seat swings open. A girl made of long dark hair bouncing all the way down to her waist, a red tube top peeking through the curls, her bare white arms and belly showing. Her face mostly sunglasses. A long black skirt dragging on the crushed white gravel.


He and the others workers watch the girl walk past the fountain, her hair witchy and magical. She goes empty-handed, all the way up the stone steps to Rigby House to the huge ebony wood door, her body stiff, her hair flying everywhere, the door opening a sliver and barely making a sound when it closes.


He doesn’t know her name yet, but Connor Rigby has arrived