Pay It Forward Read Online Free PDF Page B

sideways toward the door. “Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said with his hand on the knob, and Trevor asked him, of all the damned things for a kid to say, if he needed money for the bus. The man held out a handful of change. Held it out like war medals or rubies, something a damn sight more important than quarters and dimes, that’s for sure. “I saved it, see? From my clothes money.”
    And Trevor said, “I hope you get the job.” And then after the door had closed behind him, Trevor looked up at Arlene like nothing at all had just transpired and said, “You know your mouth’s hanging open?”
    But when he saw the look on her face he hunkered down over his hot cereal and concentrated on stirring in the sugar.
    “Trevor, who the hell was that?”
    “I told you. Jerry.”
    “Who the hell is Jerry?”
    “My friend.”
    “I did not say he could come in here and take no shower.”
    “Yeah, you did. You said I should use my own judgment.”
    She had no memory of saying this, but it rang true, in that it was what she would have said if she was really just trying to stay asleep. Unless the boy was smart enough to know that’s what she would have said, and proceeded with his story from there. But it was too early in the morning to sort between things that happened and those that allegedly did, so she said only this: “If your judgment is to let a strange man into our bathroom to shower, then I do believe your judgment needs a tune-up.”
    He tried to argue again that the man was not a stranger, but rather his friend Jerry, but Arlene was not having any of it. She told him only to eat up and get on to school, and that she did not want to see Jerry in the house anymore, ever, not under any circumstances, not even if hell froze over, no way, José.
    The minute Trevor was out the door she regretted having forgotten to ask why he offered Jerry money for the bus.
    She went straight to the bathroom, which the man had left surprisingly neat, and commenced to sterilize every exposed surface.
     
    M AYBE THREE DAYS LATER, maybe four, Arlene arrived home after working at the Laser Lounge until 3 A.M. to discover someone in the driveway tinkering with a light on the wrecked truck. And the fact that she pulled up in front of her own house did not seem to dissuade him from his work.
    She had been afraid of this, being gone as much as she was. Every time someone came to see the truck and then drove away without buying something, she was half afraid they would come back in the night and take what they wanted. And now look.
    She slipped into the house and into her bedroom closet, where Ricky’s twelve-gauge shotgun sat on the shelf, right where he’dleft it. In a locked case, because boys are curious. It had always given her a good feeling, it being there, not so much because she expected to use it but because she firmly believed Ricky would have taken it were he not planning a return trip. She pulled it out from its case, wrapped in a big old towel as Ricky always kept it, and when the towel fell away, the moonlight from the window turned the black gunmetal a beautiful deep blue. It smelled of gun oil and reminded her of Ricky, of watching him cleaning it in front of the TV at night.
    She loaded the breech with three rounds of less-than-lethal bird shot, and with a big, deep breath kicked the back door open directly onto the driveway, where the man crouched, working by the light of a metal lamp clipped onto the bumper. And plugged in somewhere in her own garage. Which made her madder, somehow—that some low-life sneak thief would use her electricity to see better while robbing her blind.
    He jumped up and turned to face her in the dark, and she finally got to do it, and it felt as good as she thought it would, cocking the weapon with that big, powerful shuck-shuck sound, and the reaction of fear that sound was bound to produce.
    Talking about that sound, Ricky told her once, “You seen them cartoons where a guy runs right