The Realm of Last Chances by Steve Yarbrough Page A

from NSTAR hovering around it, shouting instructions at one another. He backed up, wheeled into a side street and wove up the hill to Main, dodging a couple of trash cans rolling across the pavement. The center of town was dark, but when he turned onto East Border Road, he again saw lights.
    The house was humid and miserable—his mother had never installed central air, and he couldn’t afford to either—so he left the front door open while he went upstairs and pulled off his wet clothes, tossing Frankie’s awful shirt into the washer. He climbed into the tub, lifted the diverter, then grabbed hispliers and twisted the exposed stem to turn on the hot water. While showering, he kept thinking of that instant when Carla put the bloodstained Kleenex in her pocket. Turning his back to the spray, he pressed his face to the wall, nearly overcome by an urge to pound his forehead to pulp on the tile.
    When the water grew lukewarm, he turned off both faucets, stepped out and toweled dry. He had no idea how to spend the rest of the evening. He hadn’t finished the last two books he’d started reading, and he’d forgotten to put any movies in the Netflix queue. The most exciting possibility was probably the Weather Channel.
    He put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went back downstairs. He was in the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator for a beer, when someone rapped hard at the front door. The rain was still pounding down, and the only person he knew who might be nuts enough to go out in it was Frankie. He hoped to God his friend hadn’t come to fetch him. After a while it became annoying, not to mention humiliating, for someone else to remain so focused on your well-being when you had done your best to destroy it.
    Through the screen door, he saw his neighbor Kristin. Her soaked hair fell over her eyes, and her mascara had started to run, leaving squiggly lines on both cheeks. The wind had worked over her umbrella pretty good, inverting it and breaking a couple spokes.
    “Hey,” he said and unlatched the door. “Come in. Everything okay?”
    “Not exactly.”
    She told him she’d gotten home late. They’d had meetings all day, and then her bus flooded out, and after that, on the Haverhill Line, a fallen tree blocked the tracks. “To make matters worse,” she said, “my husband’s down in Providence tonight. He went to hear the Tony Rice Unit.”
    “Who?”
    “They play bluegrass,” she said, waving off further questions. “So I got home, and when I walked into the kitchen I heard running water. I checked the half bath, but it wasn’t there. So I went upstairs and looked around and everything seemed fine. I couldn’t even hear the sound anymore. And so then I—”
    To save her the trouble, he said, “It’s your basement.”
    “It’s filling up. There must be half a foot in there already. I don’t know where it’s coming from—I didn’t want to wade down into it—but it sounds like there’s a broken pipe.”
    “I doubt that.” He opened the door to the hallway closet, though he hated for her to see inside it. Whatever he lacked a hanger for, he’d thrown on the floor. He had to paw through a pile of coats and rain gear to find his winter boots.
    As he took a seat on the bottom stair and began tugging them on, she examined the hallway. “That’s a nice antique,” she said, gesturing at the grandfather clock that stood at the far end, near the kitchen door. “Where did you get it?”
    He was lacing one of the boots. “Belonged to my folks,” he said. “It’s been there as long as I remember.”
    “So your parents lived here?”
    “Yeah. This is the house I grew up in.”
    “And you moved back after …”
    “That’s right—I moved back after. You ready?”
    She nodded, so he grabbed a big umbrella and a flashlight, and they went outside. Crossing the street, he held the umbrella over their heads at an angle to prevent the wind from destroying it.
    “You never think about