The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards Read Online Free PDF

hours a week.”
    AJ starts immediately, hauling trash to the curb, mowing the back lawn, raking leaves in the wet grass. He is not quite finished with the leaves when Duncan tells him that’s enough.
    “My wife and kids will be back soon. I don’t want them to see you.”
    AJ doesn’t know how to take this.
    “They don’t know how weak I am,” Duncan explains. “I don’t want them to know. Not until they have to. The children…” He loses his voice. His face changes shape. He searches the grass, as if his voice has fallen there. AJ imagines what the voice might look like. In the raked pile, a jagged red leaf turns away from his gaze. Finally Duncan says, “Once they know their father is dying, their childhood’s over, you see?”
    These words don’t just strike AJ’s ears but take to the sky, which pales and wobbles. He swallows an uncomfortable gulp of air.
    Duncan pats him on the back. “How are you at carpentry?” He describes ramps for a wheelchair. “I want to have them ready when I need them.”
    In the weeks that follow, Duncan gives him a set of keys to the station wagon. They shop together for plywood and two-by-fours, which they take to a neighbor’s garage. Duncan is a patient teacher. He brings AJ iced tea and makes him wear protective goggles. He doesn’t mind when AJ confuses measurements or makes a cut so ugly it has to be redone. AJ learns to maneuver a circular saw. He hammers nails, drives screws. He builds two ramps. They go together in sections. He paints them a brick color to match the house. When he shakes Duncan’s hand, it does not feel like a hand but a soft bag holding something lighter than bones—pretzels or Pixy Stix.
    He thinks he will finally see Greta when he installs the ramps, but Duncan is taking his family out of town.
    “Are you good with this?” he asks. “Should I hire someone to help you?”
    AJ declines the offer. The sections fit together like the plastic connecting blocks he played with as a boy. He has retrieved these blocks from his closet and built a house much like Duncan’s, adding plastic ramps to the steps.
    “Keep track of your time,” Duncan tells him.
    AJ spends the morning loading the sections into the back of the station wagon and unloading them down the street. The sections are heavy and difficult to maneuver. One set is for the front, another for the back. He has visited this house to clean the gutters, shovel snow, put up storm windows. He has never seen any of the family but Duncan, yet he feels connected to the place—the shape of the lawn, the rumpled roots of the sycamore in the backyard, the handprints in the sidewalk out front. These shapes and sites put him at ease, but the sections of the ramp fail to align. AJ drives to a pay phone to call his father. When he gets no answer, he calls Tom Stewart.
    “I’m not much of a carpenter,” he warns.
    It takes them an hour to figure out the problem. AJ confused a section meant for the back with one meant for the front. A simple problem, but he has nailed the sections together. It becomes a complicated setback. They do not finish until after dark and admire their work by flashlight.
    “These are well built,” Tom Stewart says, kneeling to knock on the lumber.
    “The guy they’re for designed them,” AJ explains. “I just followed directions, and I messed up a lot even then.”
    “That’s all right,” Tom Stewart says. “These are good ramps and you built them.”
    “I guess I did build them,” AJ says, surprised somehow by this information.
    Headlights appear on the street and pull up to the driveway.
    “They’re not supposed to see me,” AJ says.
    They climb into Tom Stewart’s truck and drive away.
    Greta and Andrew Holzman are stationed at the front door. He offers her a tired smile. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
    “I’m staying here,” she says. “But I only have the weekend, and I want to spend it with Ellen. Then I’ll be in cold, cold Illinois,