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today. I swear I thought somebody was going to have a stroke in this heat.”
    “You dug foundations for six houses today?”
    He nodded. “And we’re supposed to do six tomorrow. The people are in some kind of a rush.”
    “I don’t know why,” said Connie. “They’ve been planning this for years.” She pointed to the phone. “Go ahead.”
    She watched him as he dialed. He had the sort of muscles men developed from heavy lifting, and he stood awkwardly when he stood still. She remembered that he had been one of the good athletes when she was a girl, one of the nice boys in the neighborhood who always held the door if you left the drugstore when they did. She hadn’t known him well, although she had gone out with his younger brother a few times.
    She heard him talking on the phone about dinner. “Your wife?” she said after he hung up.
    “My mother,” he said ruefully.
    “How ’bout a beer?” she said, even though it felt strange to be alone in the house with a man. A noise from above made her start; she hadn’t counted the children, or even remembered them for a moment.
    “Thanks, but I gotta finish up and get home. We’re supposed to be done here by the end of the year. Nice houses, too. Laundry chutes. Disposals. Carpet. Not like these old ones, but nice houses.”
    “An old house is a lot of work,” Connie said.
    “Yeah.” He looked down at his shoes and at the grime he was leaving on the speckled linoleum. “Oh, boy, I’m sorry. My mother would kill me if she could see this.”
    “You’re right,” said Connie, and they both laughed again. As she watched him cross the fields she remembered that his father had died in the excavation of a subway tunnel somewhere deep beneath the surface of the borough of Queens. Perhaps that was why she was surprised to find him in this line of work. Or perhaps it was that she vaguely remembered he had been smarter than that, one of the boys likely to break free of the Italian immigrant tradition of dirt beneath the fingernails. His brother had worn aftershave that smelled like peppermint. And Joey had delivered papers to earn pocket money; he had brought the News to her father every morning. It was odd what you remembered, like her remembering those bruises on Maggie’s head after all these years. It was interesting to find that one short conversation with an almost-stranger had improved her mood immeasurably.
    Hot as it was, she stretched up to get the big bowl from the top shelf of the kitchen cabinets, and humming to herself, began to make a cake.

3
    T OMMY S CANLAN STARED OUT THE WINDOW of his office in the gray-green cinderblock building that was the home of First Concrete. Below him was the lot where he and the other men parked their cars, and behind the chain-link fence was another, larger lot where they kept the cement mixers, great clanking beasts incongruously painted in red-and-white candy-cane stripes. At the moment there was a single cement mixer there, its hood up, its enormous greasy motor exposed like the entrails of a big animal, and next to the cement mixer was a black Lincoln Continental with a high-gloss shine.
    “Ah, shit,” Tommy said aloud, looking down at the big car. There was a faint tapping at his office door, and Tommy switched off the radio atop his filing cabinet. “Ah, shit,” he said again, going to open it.
    One of the mechanics, a squat, swarthy man named Gino, whose wavy hair looked like the ocean on a rough day, stood at the door in his red-and-white striped First Concrete shirt. All the men hated the shirts, but Gino was the shop steward and he never showed up at First Concrete out of uniform.
    “The old man is downstairs,” Gino said. The men never used a salutation when they addressed Tommy in the office; they weren’t sure whether to call him Mr. Scanlan or not.
    Tommy had failed to notice this particular semantic dilemma, but he appreciated the fact that they always said “the old man” and not “your old