MARY AND O'NEIL by Justin Cronin Page B

always was about the people whose houses he painted, though the fact that she was pretty, and seemed to like having him around, made him more interested than usual. Yet, as the weeks went by, he learned very little about Patrice. In all the time he spent there, no one had ever come to the house; sometimes she would drive off with Henry in her car, an old Mercedes with rust on the door panels, but these errands produced nothing more than groceries. It took him two weeks before he realized that he had never even heard her phone ring. What was she doing here, in this fancy neighborhood, in a house with no furniture? What did she do for money? Who were her friends? Most of his customers paid him no attention at all, but often Patrice would appear at the base of his ladder to ask him how the work was going, or else they would talk at the end of the day while he was cleaning out his brushes and trays. O’Neil looked forward to their conversations, as he believed she did too. Standing in her driveway he told her of his progress, or stories of his adventures in Europe—hitchhiking through the hills of Tuscany and the green valleys of the Rhine, waking at dawn on a ferry from Catania to Naples to find a purser rifling through his backpack, seeing Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Prado in Madrid and weeping for an hour. O’Neil was not lonely, but when he told her these tales, he found they poured forth from him without effort, as if they were not things that had happened but living presences inside him, seeking release. But always on the drive home he would realize, with embarrassment, that he had done all the talking; she had told him nothing of herself.
    The day of the accident, O’Neil was getting ready to take a ladder up to the porch roof to paint a pair of third-story gables when Patrice emerged from the side door, carrying a tray of lemonade. It was a hot, damp afternoon, the sky the color of old ivory, and the two of them sat at a picnic table in the yard to drink the lemonade. Henry was napping—
finally
napping, she said with a wry smile, for the little boy slept rarely, and never for long—and when she had seen him outside working, she’d thought: here was a chance to bring him something cool to drink. Patrice was wearing cutoff shorts and a loose man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as she spoke she placed her glass of iced lemonade against her long neck, holding it there between sips. How do you work in this heat? she asked him. She didn’t mind the winter—she had been raised in the cold—but sometimes in the summer it was all she could do not to lose her mind entirely. O’Neil wondered about the shirt, and the person it belonged to. On her ring finger Patrice wore a plain gold wedding band, and a large diamond that sparkled against her skin. These came from somewhere, of course, but O’Neil had never seen her husband, even though he usually worked at the house till six o’clock. In all their conversations she had never mentioned him, not even in passing.
    He was about to ask her about this, deciding how he might do so without seeming to pry, when the sound of Henry’s crying reached them from his bedroom window. Patrice, sighing with irritation, left him alone at the table; it did not seem she would be back soon, so O’Neil returned to work, taking his ladder and paint up to the porch roof. This was when he made an error in judgment that was, in hindsight, completely obvious. The roof was pitched ten degrees, and the standard practice was to nail a pair of blocks into the roof joists to brace the legs of the ladder; the company training video was absolutely clear on this fact. But as O’Neil stood on the roof in the sweltering heat, his mind afloat in the image of the glass of lemonade against Patrice’s neck, this extra step seemed like a technicality.
What the hell,
he decided,
I’ll just do it fast
. Without another thought he propped the ladder between the windows, kicked its base