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Larry said.
    â€œWe’ll staple it with our heavy plastic sheeting,” Craig told him. “It won’t be perfect, but the seal will keep the cold out. They’re going to want to use this garage again.”
    â€œAfter your buddy dies?”
    â€œThat’s what we’ll do with the ceiling too,” Craig said, pointing above them, where there were still a lot of boxes stored on planks on the bare rafters. “We’ll do that tomorrow and then paint. Remind me to bring some solvent for this floor.” Under all the sawdust there were oil stains in the old cement. The two stepped out into the sunlight, and Larry slapped at his pant legs, freeing clouds of chalk dust.
    â€œWhen I come home years from now with all my problems,” he said, “are you going to stuff me in the garage?”
    â€œAre you coming home?”
    â€œShould I wait for an invitation?”
    Before Craig could answer, Wade pulled up in his black Nissan pickup, turning into the narrow driveway. It was a beautiful vehicle, and they could see Wendy, his girlfriend, in the passenger side.
    â€œA new truck,” Craig said.
    â€œI don’t need a truck, Dad,” Larry said. “I’ll see you later.” He got in, and the three kids were gone to football practice. Craig remembered the summer workouts, running twice a day on the rough practice field behind the school. He’d never liked to run, but he’d never quit, and he remembered sitting on their truck tailgates after practice drinking well water from glass gallon jugs and smelling of cut grass. He could see it vividly, and the feeling he’d had climbed up his chest like some heavy thing in the great afternoon shadows: they could run for two hours; they could run until the sun quit and the dark came up. They would live forever.
    He was losing the light, but he lifted the box of floor tiles and turned to see a gray Mercedes drive by on Berry Street slowly, and Craig recognized the driver: Mason Kirby. Craig walked out to the front of the house and saw the big car drift slowly three houses down and stop in front of the old Kirby place. He waited, but the man did not get out of the car. Craig took the box and went back to work.
    Craig got onto his hands and knees and laid adhesive tile squares on the floor of the tiny bathroom, cutting and fitting the pieces expertly. They were a speckled tan, and he looked into them a thousand miles. Alone like this, working carefully, Craig felt good. It was late in the day, and Mason would certainly stay a day or two. He had probably come up to sell the place. For some reason he remembered an afternoon standing with Jimmy in the Brands’ backyard, plucking the last garden tomatoes and throwing them at Frank and Mason up at his place, laughing and dodging the incoming.
Memory,
he thought,
what is that good for? I’m fifty years old, and I’m on my knees in the Brands’ garage, and I don’t have anyplace better to be.
“Oh my hell,” he said aloud, and heard the words. “You’re lonely.”
I’ll put in a garden box with two-by-twelves,
he thought.
We’ve got the space. Marci won’t want to, but I can grow some tomatoes, even if the deer eat them.
He took his time, and when he set in the last corner, it was almost dark, and the small piece of tile fit like a jewel, and he pressed it there with his hand and with the handle of his hammer until the seam disappeared.

TWO
    Home
    Mason Kirby had never been lost in his life, not even as a kid out of Oakpine in the real wilderness on backpacking trips or the like. Nor had he been lost in Europe, or in London, or in Alaska on a fishing trip, which was only business, or even drunk in college, or on one trip to South America, Caracas; and on that trip he became the go-to guy when it was time to find the small van that took the elite tour group around.
    And now he pulled his plum Mercedes off the two-lane onto the gravel