Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel Read online

  “I think the stuff with him will be mostly on the weekends,” he said. “But maybe some afternoons, I guess. That a problem?”

  “No. I’m just thinking that you and I aren’t the most social, and there are a lot of people over there. All the time. Just wondering if you’re up for that, or if maybe it’d be better for you if you and Lola . . .” She pointed to the dining room. “There’s a big table in there.”

  He shrugged. “I guess we could bring her work sheets and stuff over here. Ronda was heading out to buy stuff for cookies, but I can just ask her to bring them over once they’re done. I’m sure she won’t mind.”

  Markie envisioned the large cook coming across the yard with a plate of cookies, gripping it carefully in two hands as Bruce ran in front to help her, Frédéric walked behind with two glasses of milk, Patty tagged along to remind Lola to be back in time for them to head home for her secret evening plans, and Mrs. Saint brought up the rear, ready to supervise the correct placement of cookies onto plates, the wiping of milk mustaches off upper lips.

  Once the old woman was inside, she would surely amble into the living room to check on whether Markie had hung any artwork yet—which would lead to her tsking and och-ing and motioning for Frédéric to run back for his toolbox and for Patty and Bruce to fetch the art from the basement while Ronda rooted through the cupboards to see if there was something she could make them for dinner.

  “On second thought,” Markie said, scratching arms that suddenly felt like they were covered in poison ivy, “if the job Mrs. Saint offered was for you to help over there, then I guess you need to do that. Don’t want to be asking for concessions on your first day.”

  “Ooookay,” Jesse said, clearly confused by her 180-degree change but not at all interested in the cause of it. “That works, too.” He jumped up, retrieved Angel’s leash, and snapped it on. “I’ll bring her back in a bit and grab my history book,” he said. “I’ve got a quiz tomorrow. Get this: Mrs. Saint says part of my tutoring job is to do my own homework in front of Lola. I mean, I won’t get it all done, since I have so much more than she does, but I can do a bit of it, like looking over history. Cool, right? I mean, who gets paid to do their own homework?”

  “It’s very generous, that’s for sure,” Markie said.

  He reached the door, but instead of opening it, he turned back. “Oh, do we have any Hershey bars? Lola says she’ll do all her homework without complaining if I give her one.”

  “We don’t,” she said, “but you don’t want to teach her to do homework for a reward anyway. You want to get her to do it for herself, because she wants to learn, wants to get good grades—the same reason you do all of yours. That’s why Mrs. Saint’s paying you to look at your history notes over there. She wants your work ethic to rub off on Lola.”

  “Oh, yeah. That makes sense.” He smiled. “So, like, you and Mrs. Saint are totally on the same page, huh?”

  He was out the door and across the patio before Markie could form the thought, not for the first time, that having him spend his afternoons with Trevor might have been the safer choice after all.

  Chapter Twenty

  The fact that Jesse wasn’t hyperbolic about his first week with Lola—it was “okay,” she was “not a bad kid,” their walks home were “still fine,” tutoring her was “maybe a little more annoying” than expected “but not as awful as it could be”—made his report the following Sunday, about his first afternoon with Frédéric, that much more notable.

  “It was, like, amazing!” he told Markie as he collapsed on the family room floor a little before six o’clock on Sunday evening.

  He was physically exhausted but mentally amped up, so while his limbs were motionless, his mouth was the opposite. He lacked the energy to push Angel away, so as he gave Markie a rapid-fire play-by-play of his afternoon, the dog licked every inch of skin she could find. Markie was shocked into muteness at the number of words voluntarily leaving her son’s mouth, and she could only sit, openmouthed, and listen.

  “We replaced a fifth of the fence! A fifth! Just us! In only three hours! That means taking out the old part, carrying all the new wood over, measuring it all. Oh, by the way? Frédéric’s a total perfectionist, to an insane degree. We checked every measurement, like, a hundred times. Then we had to cut it all. Some we did with a handsaw right at the fence, and some stuff, the bigger posts, we carried into the garage, where he’s got this totally cool workshop set up where a second car would go.

  “That’s a ton of work! When he pointed out the section of fence he wanted to finish, I figured it would take us twice as long as it did. Oh, and I did the handsaw! I sucked at first, Mom, like, so bad. And you should’ve seen Frédéric, trying to pretend I was doing a decent job so he wouldn’t hurt my feelings. He had to look away a few times after I butchered a few of the little rail pieces. He had extras, though, luckily.”

  He dropped his voice here, although they were the only two in the room. “He told me he bought extras, and then he told me he thought it would be Bruce helping him, and then he shrugged. Which I’m guessing means he expected Bruce to mess up, and he planned ahead for it. But he wouldn’t come right out and say that. Just like he wouldn’t let on that I was messing up.

  “He’d say things like ‘Perhaps on the next try you will take a little more time to get the saw at the right angle before you start to cut’ or ‘I always find that checking my work as I go is helpful, rather than speeding through and finding I have gone off the line.’ He’s like, the world’s most patient teacher.”

  Markie considered this. Perhaps that was the answer to Frédéric’s almost-daily disappearance.

  “Do you think he’s a professor?” she asked Jesse.

  Earlier, she had formed an idea he might be a consultant of some sort. She hadn’t considered teaching—until now. There was a community college in town and also an extension campus of the state flagship university. Maybe he taught at one of those places? “Did he mention anything about teaching? Or where it is that he goes every afternoon?” Jesse looked at her quizzically, and she quickly explained Frédéric’s regular sojourn and how she couldn’t get a straight answer about it from the others.

  “Nuh-uh,” Jesse said. “He didn’t say anything about it. I don’t think he’s a teacher, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “He just seems too . . . I don’t know, shy or something. He seems a bit . . .” Jesse looked at the ceiling for the right word and, not finding it easily, shrugged, letting the thought dissolve.

  Sad, Markie wanted to finish for him. Defeated. Those were the words she often conjured when she thought of Frédéric. It was as though he had once held a far higher position than handyman and general foreman to a group of fellow Defectives, and he was constantly aware of that. Or was she imagining things? Had her own fall from professional, social, and financial grace made her see things in Frédéric that weren’t there?

  “Why are you so obsessed about where he goes, anyway?” Jesse asked.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m just taking an interest in our neighbor.”

  Jesse laughed. “Since when?”

  “I find him to be an intriguing person, that’s all,” she said. “But never mind. Go on with your story. What else did you do over there?”

  “Oh, right. Let’s see . . . oh yeah, we took one of the big posts to the garage for him to cut with the table saw, and I asked him if I could learn to use it sometime, and he was like, ‘I always think it is best to master the less complicated tools first.’ Can you believe that? Unreal, right? I mean, I don’t even know why I asked about it, but once it came out, I expected him to laugh at me and say, ‘Nice try!’

  “Anyway, I got a little better with the handsaw after the second hour, and by the end he was smiling at my cuts and telling me, ‘Good job.’ And then, when I was leaving just now, he told me that maybe next Sunday he’ll try me out with the big posts on the table saw! How awesome is that?”

  “That’s great,�
� Markie said. “I had no idea you’d actually like that kind of thing. Carpentry, I mean.”

  “I know! It’s way more fun than I thought it would be. Frédéric said he felt the same way. He was an engineer—did you know that? Designed landing gear and a bunch of other stuff for airplanes. Total desk job, he told me. That’s why he’s always dressed that way, I think, like he’s going to some important office job, because for so long that’s what he did. I mean, I didn’t ask him, but that’s my guess.”

  So he could be a professor after all, Markie thought. Engineering was a brainiac thing, not a comedy routine—a shy person could teach it. Given the regularity of his outings, it made total sense. A consultant’s hours would vary more, wouldn’t they?

  “Never lifted a hammer until after his career was over,” Jesse went on. “He never owned a handsaw even, let alone all the stuff he’s got set up in the garage. And he says there’s even more in the basement. I really hope he’ll show me sometime. He didn’t offer, so I didn’t ask. Anyway, it was so cool!”

  Markie laughed at his excitement. “You make me want to get out there and replace a section myself. I should call you Tom Sawyer.”

  “And it’s straight-up addictive, too,” he said. “I mean, I can’t wait to go at the next section. I never noticed before, but now I can see how old the wood is, where it sags in places, where parts are broken. I wanted to keep going until we’d gotten rid of all the old, broken stuff and put up all the new wood. I told him we could keep going—get half of it done today and finish it all off next Sunday. But he says Mrs. Saint won’t let him work past four on weekends.”

  “But it’s almost six,” Markie said. “So was she away for the day, or—”

  “Oh, we knocked off two hours ago,” he said, and she smiled at his use of what must surely have been Frédéric’s phrase. “We’ve been sitting in the garage talking all this time. Then he had to go, because Mrs. Saint wanted to be sure he ate dinner. Isn’t that funny, how she’s like that? With a quitting time and making sure he eats? And she must’ve sent Ronda out with water for him five times an hour.

  “She’d carry this big pitcher out and look at his glass, and if it wasn’t empty yet, she’d stare at it until he finally walked over and drank it. It reminds me of how Mrs. McLaren is with Mr. McLaren. Remember at Grandma and Grandpa’s club last summer? She was always handing him sunscreen or water or telling him to move his chair into the shade.”

  Markie considered the fact that in seeing this kind of doting, Jesse hadn’t been reminded of his grandparents. Or his parents. Neither Markie nor Lydia had ever been a fraction as solicitous with their husbands as Mrs. Saint was with Frédéric, and in the few months she had known him, Frédéric had proven himself to be more devoted to his employer than Markie could recall Kyle or Clayton being to their wives. And then there was the fact that the time, attention, patience, and encouragement Frédéric had given Jesse that day had been so much more than the boy had received from his own father or grandfather in at least half a year. It was plainly something Jesse had been starved for, given the animated chatter it had inspired. For that reason alone, Markie decided, she would love Frédéric forever.

  “So,” Jesse asked, “what’s for dinner? I’m starved.”

  “Frozen pizza?” she suggested. “Or we could heat up—”

  “Because Ronda made this enormous pan of lasagna.” He sat up, the thought of food having evidently restored his energy, and separated his hands to show how big the lasagna was. “I’m talking gigantic. Not sure why she made so much, ’cause she made a point of telling me they’d never get through it over there, and that if you and I wanted to take a few pieces off her hands, it would be a help more than anything.”

  He was on his feet, pointing toward Mrs. Saint’s house. “Since we were only going to have frozen pizza . . .”

  Markie shrugged her consent, and about ten minutes later, he returned with two heaping plates and three containers.

  “For lunch tomorrow,” he said, putting two of the containers in the fridge. “This one”—he nodded to the third—“is salad. I told her we’re not much for green stuff, but she said Mrs. Saint wouldn’t let her send dinner without it, so . . .” He shrugged, reached for two plates from the cabinet, and set a piece of lasagna on each. With two forks, he portioned salad out of the container onto the plates. “I thought about just tossing it, but I get this funny feeling Mrs. Saint would figure it out. Is that crazy?”

  Markie looked at him blankly, refusing to admit she didn’t think it was crazy at all.

  “Oh, and there’s this.” He reached into his back pocket and extracted a figure made of Popsicle sticks and wool, which he held up. “It’s Angel. I’m supposed to put her with the house.” He set the totem beside the little house Markie had put on the kitchen windowsill.

  Later, they Skyped her parents, and Markie was relieved to turn the entire thing over to her son as he took his grandparents through the same repair-the-fence play-by-play he had blurted out earlier. Clayton was impressed.

  “A man needs to learn to use tools sooner rather than later,” he boomed. “So I owe this Frédéric chap a thank-you. So does your father. He’s actually quite handy with tools himself, your dad, though I don’t suppose he’s taken the time to show you that.”

  Markie would have jumped in to defend Kyle, but Jesse, who either never recognized her parents’ digs at his father or never bothered to take offense to them, had moved on. After he and Frédéric were finished with the fence, he announced proudly, there was a long list of other jobs, starting with “tinkering with Mrs. Saint’s car a little, since it’s been running a little rough.” Markie was sure he had no idea what this meant, but she loved that he pretended to.

  “A man should be able to repair his own vehicle,” her father propounded. “And if he can’t, it’s not the right vehicle for him. So how is it that you came to be hired by this neighbor, anyway?”

  “I . . . I . . . ,” Jesse stammered. “Uh . . .”

  “We’ve just gotten to know them,” Markie said, as though that answered the question.

  She had been in many situations where lying to her parents would have been the easier thing, but she had never been able to do it, so she had gotten good at making short, true statements in a way that made them sound authoritative. If her parents ever wondered about the vagueness of some of her explanations, they were too proud to ask for elaboration.

  “Well, then,” Clayton said, and he started to ask Markie about extending the lease on the bungalow, since his grandson clearly loved his new job next door and was obviously benefiting from it. She was saved by her mother, who interrupted to ask Jesse about his schoolwork, and thus relieved, Markie took the opportunity to slip out of the camera frame.

  “I’ve got a history test tomorrow, actually,” Jesse said, “so I’d better go. I’ll see if Mom . . .” He glanced over the laptop screen to find Markie making an X with her forearms and shaking her head. “Right,” he said, “so . . . that test. I’d better get back to my books. We’ll talk to you next week, okay?”

  Not half an hour later, Markie was reviewing files at the dining room table when Jesse and Angel came thundering up the basement stairs. She asked how the studying was going, and he announced he was finished.

  “Is Lola rubbing off on you, rather than the other way around?” she asked. “You usually spend hours preparing for tests. Especially history.”

  “Yeah, but it’s World War Two.”

  “And?”

  “And Frédéric was alive during World War Two. He was a kid, but he, like, totally lived through it. I mentioned I had a test on it tomorrow, and every minute we weren’t talking about how to rebuild the fence, he was telling me about the war. Didn’t I tell you that? I thought I did. Then again, I was a little delirious when I got home. I just drank three glasses of water in the basement bathroom! Anyway, I looked over my notes from class, and there’s pretty much nothing that’ll be on the test that Frédéric and I didn’t
talk about.”

  How wonderful it would be if he were this animated every time he came back from helping Frédéric, she thought, and then quickly she told herself not to get carried away. This was Jesse she was dealing with: as much as he had obviously loved his time with the older man, he could just as easily return home livid the following week and storm down to his room, ignoring her for the rest of the evening. Today could be as good as it got.

  Seize the opportunity, she told herself. Find a way to continue what he’s started. An entire evening of talking and laughing together would be such a treat! “Hey,” she called, “you want to see if there’s something on TV?”

  Jesse said something, but she couldn’t hear, so she stood and followed him to the kitchen. He was bent over the counter, inhaling another piece of lasagna.

  “I didn’t hear what you—” she started before she noticed the cell phone bolted to his ear.

  He held up a finger. “Hold on a sec, Trev.” He looked up at her impatiently.

  “I was asking if you wanted to find a show or something,” she said.

  He smiled at her as though she were the ungainly girl with a back brace, he the quarterback, and she had just asked him to the homecoming dance, and he shook his head. As she walked back to the dining room and plunked down in her chair, dejected, she heard him say, “Sorry about that. So what were you saying?” After a few “Uh-huhs,” she heard his dishes clatter into the sink, his footsteps on the basement stairs, and his bedroom door closing.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Markie was savoring the last few sips of her fair-trade coffee. It was the only good cup she’d had in months, the eight-dollar bag of on-sale beans one of the first treats she had allowed herself since Kyle left. After months of store-brand sludge, it tasted like melted heaven, though she could imagine her old friends laughing at the use of “treat” to describe it, her bargain coffee from the endcap display. They wouldn’t have taken a second look as they headed down the aisle for their sixteen-dollar-a-pound bags. But she had allowed herself twenty dollars for “splurge” items at the grocery store, and after committing twelve of those to Jesse’s favorite deli beef jerky, it was the endcap coffee or nothing.