“All good.”
“He speaks! I should get myself down to the newsagent’s!”
Clay even gave him more, looking up from the front right hoof. “Hey, Henry—one to six.”
Henry grinned. “You bet.”
* * *
—
As for Claudia Kirkby, at lunch, Clay and I were sitting in a house, amongst the delivery of flooring. When I stood to wash my hands, my phone rang and I got Clay to answer; it was the teacher who doubled as counselor. To her surprise at Clay being home, he told her it was only temporary. As for the point of the phone call, she’d seen Henry, she said, and wondered if all was okay.
“At home?” Clay asked.
“Well…yes.”
Clay looked over and half smiled. “No, no one roughed Henry up at home. No one here would ever do anything like that.”
I had to walk across. “Give me the Goddamn phone.”
He did it.
“Ms. Kirkby?…Okay, Claudia, no, it’s all okay, he just had a small problem in the neighborhood. You know how stupid boys can be.”
“Oh, yes.”
For a few minutes, we talked, and her voice was calm—quiet but sure—and I imagined her through the phone. Was she wearing her dark skirt and cream shirt? And why did I imagine her calves? When I was about to hang up, Clay made me wait, to tell her he’d brought back the books she’d lent him.
“Does he want new ones?”
He’d heard her, and thought, then nodded.
“Which one did he like the most?”
He said, “The Battle of East Fifteenth Street.”
“That’s a good one.”
“I liked the old chess player in it.” A touch louder this time. “Billy Wintergreen.”
“Oh, he’s so good,” said Claudia Kirkby; I was standing, caught in the middle.
“Are you two quite all right?” I asked (not unlike between Henry and Rory, the night when Clay had come home), and she smiled inside the phone line.
“Come and get the books tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be here for a while, after work.” On Fridays the staff stayed for drinks.
When I hung up, he was weirdly smiling.
“Stop that stupid grin.”
“What?” he asked.
“Don’t what me—just grab that Goddamn end.”
We carried floorboards up the stairs.
* * *