Grist Mill Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

tomatoes, sweet green peas …
    The voice inside interrupts him. Enough already! This is nothing but a doll’s house, Paddyboy. You’re thirty-eight years old. Listen to me—you need a good job, not a goddam blog.
    The air is arctic cold and Patrick’s ears begin to burn. He puts on his watch cap as he reaches his destination, pulling it down all the way to his eyebrows.
    Forty-Seventh Street, opposite the building in which he used to work, the building in which he was fired.
    Let go, Patch.
    He checks his watch, almost twelve thirty, so maybe he’s missed him. Don Trevino fails to keep especially regular hours. Patrick stamps his feet to ward off the chill and holsters his hands deep in his pockets.
    After thirty minutes of waiting, Patrick sees him through the glass, stepping out of the elevator, alone and sprightly, gray cashmere coat and Russian-style fur hat. Don Trevino’s nose is a veinous red even before it has been slapped by the cold. He pushes through the barrier, nodding jovially to security, and marches out onto the street.
    Patrick has opened his laminated tourist map, half-covering his face, but keeps his eyes on his quarry, Trevino heading right and Patrick following, fifty yards back on the opposite side of Forty-Seventh, Trevino’s head bobbing along on the yellow surf of taxi roofs.
    And Patrick begins to picture it again, bumping into Don Trevino by chance on the street only a week after Trevino had fired him. He remembers the prickle in his shoulders. Even his nose had buzzed with a sense of the moment. Hit him. Hit him. Hurt him.
    Hello, Patrick, Trevino had said, looking perfectly unfazed, as if he were doing nothing more than greeting a neighbor.
    Patrick had said nothing, his actual assault on Trevino no more than a brief snort, a look of disgust.
    Over the several weeks since, Patrick has replayed this scene in his head numerous times, picturing the details of the street, pasting them into various fantasies.
    The brass poles of an apartment building’s awning. Patrick could have grabbed Trevino beneath the chin and pushed him up against the metal before making him gasp and cough with a punch to the gut.
    The window of an Irish bar. He should have grabbed Trevino by the collar and driven his fur-hatted head through the plateglass, whereupon a neon sign would have shattered and crackled with approval.
    A blue mailbox. He imagined smashing Don Trevino’s face into the metal studs on its side. Or sometimes he pictures the mailbox open, Trevino’s head and shoulders stuck inside, his legs wheeling away, the last desperate kicks of a flipped bug.
    There are intricate variations of each scenario, some comical, some grotesque, and when lost in these thoughts, Patrick barely has to remember his actual inaction that day several weeks back—an impotent snort, his pointless disgust, another one of life’s great passive-aggressive victories.
    But maybe today is the day.
    Trevino turns right and Patrick skips over the street, through the knee-high fog of taxi fumes, around the corner. Patrick’s eyes follow Trevino’s hat above the jostle of Fifth Avenue. Trevino turns right, opens a door and disappears.
    The same door as last week, three times. And the week before, twice. Trevino will reemerge in five minutes, his leather-gloved hand holding the string handles of a white paper bag. Sandwich, soup, drink.
    But Patrick waits anyway, a little farther down Fifth Avenue, and when Trevino reappears, strolling back toward the office, Patrick follows, just in case.
    Yeah? Just in case what, Paddyboy?
    And the sky, now swollen, starts dispensing its snow.

 
    PATCH
    Without having to look, I knew Matthew was behind me. I could sense his rage in the heat, another harmonic alongside the electrical hum of the bugs.
    The summer before, challenging each other to Trail Races, I’d managed to win most of the time. I had natural pace. And because I was smaller