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chainsaw going again. About twenty minutes later I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned, expecting to see Billy again. Instead it was Brent Norton. I turned off the chainsaw.
    He didn’t look the way Norton usually looks. He looked hot and tired and unhappy and a little bewildered.
    â€œHi, Brent,” I said. Our last words had been hard ones, and I was a little unsure how to proceed. I had a funny feeling that he had been standing behind me for the last five minutes or so, clearing his throat decorously under the chainsaw’s aggressive roar. I hadn’t gotten a really good look at him this summer. He had lost weight, but it didn’t look good. It should have, because he had been carrying around an extra twenty pounds, but it didn’t. His wife had died the previous November. Cancer. Aggie Bibber told Steffy that. Aggie was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting banderillas in an old bull’s lumbering body), I would have guessed he’d be glad to have her gone. If asked, I might even have speculated that he’d show up this summer with a girl twenty years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places, leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch of him.
    â€œHi, Dave,” he said, after a long moment of awkward silence—a silence that was made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw’s racket and roar. He stopped, then blurted: “That tree. That damn tree. I’m sorry. You were right.”
    I shrugged.
    He said, “Another tree fell on my car.”
    â€œI’m sorry to h—” I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. “It wasn’t the T-Bird, was it?”
    â€œYeah. It was.”
    Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles. It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model ships or target-shooting pistols.
    â€œThat’s a bitch,” I said, and meant it.
    He shook his head slowly. “I almost didn’t bring it up. Almost brought the station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell. I drove it up and a big old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it’s all bashed in. And I thought I’d cut it up…the tree, I mean…but I can’t get my chainsaw to fire up…I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker…and…and…”
    His throat began to emit little clicking sounds. His mouth worked as if he were toothless and chewing dates. For one helpless second I thought he was going to just stand there and bawl like a kid on a sandlot. Then he got himself under some halfway kind of control, shrugged, and turned away as if to look at the chunks of wood I had cut up.
    â€œWell, we can look at your saw,” I said. “Your T-Bird insured?”
    â€œYeah,” he said, “like your boathouse.”
    I saw what he meant, and remembered again what Steff had said about insurance.
    â€œListen, Dave, I wondered if I could borrow your Saab and take a run up to town. I thought I’d get some bread and cold cuts and beer. A lot of beer.”
    â€œBilly and I are going up in the Scout,” I said. “Come with us if you want. That is, if you’ll give me a hand dragging the rest of this tree off to one side.”
    â€œHappy to.”
    He grabbed one end but couldn’t quite lift it up. I had to do most of the work. Between the two of us we