Object lessons Read Online Free PDF Page B

man.” It made Tom feel small to be reminded of his father’s power.
    “Did you tell him I was here?” Tommy asked, looking out the window.
    “Downstairs they told him they weren’t sure where you were,” Gino said. “I don’t think he’s coming up. He’s got us changing the oil in his car. Your brother’s with him.”
    Tommy could see his father standing in one of his gray suits, in the maintenance lot, looking at the disabled cement mixer. The old man turned and said something to the mechanic working on his car, and the man handed him a rag. John Scanlan wiped the striped side of the cement mixer, then shook his head. “Oh, hell,” Tommy muttered, lighting a cigarette.
    The stripes on the trucks had been Tommy’s father’s idea of free advertising; no one, John Scanlan had reasoned, would ever be able to mistake a First Concrete cement mixer for the cement mixers of Reliable, or Gatto Brothers, or Bronx River Cement. On the other hand, no one ever made fun of those other cement mixers, either. Sometimes, when Tommy handed his card to a developer, or a factory owner, or someone from the city who was looking for a couple hundred dollars in exchange for a contract to lay some sidewalks or pour the foundation for a school gymnasium, he would see a look of discovery pass over the guy’s face. No matter how often it happened, Tommy’s chest would tighten at that moment. “The ones with the stripes, right?” the customer would say. “The red-and-white stripes?” And the look of discovery would be replaced by a big grin. “Can’t miss those babies.”
    Tommy was in charge of keeping the trucks looking good, but he hated the stripes so much that he would let them go until they’d faded to pale pink and dirty gray. It wasn’t the ridicule; it was the reminder. “Look at me!” the stripes seemed to shout, just as John Scanlan always did. If Tommy had had his way, the trucks would have been gray. They would have looked like what they were: trucks that carried cement, not big pieces of peppermint candy on wheels. But Tommy never had his way. Sooner or later his father would see one of the trucks, on one of his trips around the city to have lunch in some parish rectory or another—“good booze at Queen of Peace,” he might say to Tom the next time he saw him, or “one more plate of corned beef and cabbage and I’m not going back to St. Teresa’s”—and the old man would be on the phone complaining that the trucks needed a fresh coat of paint.
    He never called Tommy directly. Buddy Phelan, who was the president of First Concrete and, not coincidentally, the godson of the monsignor who handled purchasing for the biggest suburban diocese in the metropolitan area, would come into Tommy’s office with a bemused grin on his face, and say, “Hey, Tom. Time to give the trucks a going over, whattaya say?” And Tommy would know that his father had called that morning to suggest that the man who owned one hundred percent of First Concrete, and who had the right to hire and fire those who worked there, did not like his clever subliminal advertising gimmick compromised by a failure of upkeep and a heavy layer of city grime.
    Buddy Phelan always assumed that Tommy hated him, but this was not true. In his heart of hearts Tommy hated no one, except occasionally himself, and he was pleased to be vice president of operations at First Concrete, a big title for a mundane job. If he had been the “big boss,” as the men who drove the trucks called Buddy, he would not have been able to chat with the workers so effortlessly when they came in at the end of the day, smelly and glad to talk without the roar of the mixer or the road in their ears. He would have felt constrained from going into Sal’s at lunchtime and sitting at the bar with a sandwich and a draft beer, putting in his two cents about the Yankees, the weather, or the coloreds. It would have been impossible for him to join the pick-up basketball games that