The Last Good Day of the Year Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I mean, come
on
—the guy wears a freaking pinkie ring!”
    My mother is terrified of awkward conversations; as a result, she’s polite to the point of absurdity. She once ate a hamburger at a restaurant because the waitress got her order wrong and my mother didn’t want to embarrass her by correcting the mistake. My mother is a vegetarian.
    â€œI already hired them,” she said, referring to Landscaping by Lenny LaMana/Leisure Suit. We can’t back out now; it will be too uncomfortable. Besides,” she added, “we’d lose our deposit.”
    â€œYou gave him a
deposit
already? You think we have a money tree growing out back that you can go shake when you need some extra cash? Christ, Sharon, I was gone for less than two hours this afternoon.”
    â€œHe won’t even be doing the work. He’s a salesman. He’ll send a crew of local guys, I’m sure. They’ll probably be college kids.”
    â€œOh, that’s just great. I’m sure he hires only the best and brightest. Did you ask him if he does background checks on them? Do they get tested for drugs?”
    My mom laughed at him. “Should they? Do
you
? Listen to yourself, Paul. You sound like your father.”
    In the end, my dad gave in, like he always does with my mom. There were four men on the crew Lenny sent to our house the followingweek. Steven Handley was the oldest at twenty-three. He’d graduated from the local high school when Gretchen was barely twelve years old, but she’d still heard about him. Shelocta was a small town.
    Everybody had known and liked Steven back in his high school days. He acted in the musical every year and played drums in the concert band. He had dark brown hair, long eyelashes, red cheeks, and teeth that could have benefitted from braces but didn’t need them to accomplish his ordinary but well-scrubbed look of a country boy who had always listened when his mother told him to brush his teeth and eat his vegetables. He got decent grades and played varsity football; his dad was the team’s assistant coach. His parents owned their own business and worked hard. They were comfortable, but nowhere near rich. Under different circumstances, he might have grown up and become a successful insurance salesman who coached his kid’s Little League team on weekends, and he might have been perfectly satisfied with life.
    At Steven’s senior prom, which was held at the local Marriott that year, he did a backflip into the wrong end of the hotel swimming pool and smacked his head against the cement floor, splitting his skull open underwater. He was bleeding buckets and was unconscious for more than six minutes before the ambulance showed up. He needed one blood transfusion, eighteen hours of surgery, more than a hundred staples in his head, and three months of physical therapy to repair hairline fractures in several vertebrae, but by fall it seemed to doctors like he’d made a miraculous recovery.
    He hadn’t. The people closest to Steven—his parents and his girlfriend, Amy, who was also headed to Penn State—could tellright away that something had gone wrong during his reassembly. It was as if he’d woken up a whole different person.
    He and Amy left for college in late August as planned, but things went downhill from day one. Steven started getting high with his roommate almost immediately; Amy said he was heavily into LSD, which would have been a big deal to his friends and family. Steven and his roommate supposedly got so tripped out on Halloween night that when Amy tried to leave the room, they tied her to the bed and kept her restrained for hours. They even stuffed a sock in her mouth and put tape over it so she couldn’t scream for help. She got away at dawn when Steven decided to set off all the fire alarms in the building and run screaming up and down the halls, pounding on everybody’s door to warn them of the approaching