George Pelecanos - The Way Home

She marched up the granite steps that led to the front door. Chris turned to the van and did the darting-tongue thing, and Ben smiled. Chris followed Mindy Kramer into the house.

Chris admired the structure and its craftsmanship as soon as he walked inside. Chair rail molding in the dining room, wide-plank hardwood floors in the center hall, plaster walls. No furniture, though. Whoever once lived here was gone.

“This way.” Mindy Kramer cut a right through open French doors.

Chris stepped in, rapping his knuckles on the door frame out of habit and curiosity. As he expected, it was solid wood, not the Masonite he saw in so much new construction. The space was about fourteen by twelve, he guessed, and would be called a library on the listing, as it held a wall of built-in bookshelves. He looked down at the worn carpet that covered the floor.

“It should be a pretty straightforward job,” said Mindy Kramer. “I went with the cable. Mr. Flynn said the loop pile would be fine for a medium-traffic space.”

“It’ll work,” said Chris, pulling his Stanley tape measure off the belt line of his Dickies where he kept it clipped. He laid down the tape and measured the length and width of the room, which was close to his estimation, and mentally noted that his father had ordered a larger roll than was needed to do the job. This meant that he hadn’t liked Mindy Kramer or that he foresaw complaints from her or multiple post-job visits. When the customer showed arrogance or attitude up front, they tended to pay extra. Chris’s father called this the “personality defect tax.”

“Is what you brought sufficient?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Chris. “It’s gonna be fine.”

“There’s a walnut floor under this carpet, but it needs sanding and refinishing. Nice hardwood is preferable to carpet when you’re selling a home, of course, especially to younger clients, but I don’t have the time or inclination to go that route. I just want to get some carpet down and bring in a few pieces of furniture here and there so I can flip the property. I bought it at auction for a song. The previous owner was a gay gentleman who had no surviving heirs… ”

Chris nodded, trying to keep eye contact with her. All she was doing was bragging on how savvy she had been and how much money she was going to make. Telling a stranger this because she was insecure. He was not impressed.

“We’ll get started,” said Chris. “It shouldn’t take us long.”

“Here’s my card,” said Mindy Kramer, handing him one. “Call me on my cell when you’re almost done and I’ll shoot back over and give it a look. Tell me your number, Chris.”

Chris gave her his cell number. She punched it into the contacts file of her phone and typed in a name.

“I’m going to call you Chris Carpet,” she said, proud of her cleverness, “so I can remember who you are when I scan through my contacts.”

Whatever, thought Chris. But he said, “That’s fine.”

Mindy Kramer hit “save” and glanced at her watch. “Any questions?”

“That’ll do ’er,” said Chris, giving her the redneck inflection that she no doubt expected.

Ben had already slipped his kneepads over his jeans and was tying a leather multipocket tool belt around his waist when Chris emerged from the house. Ben and Chris wore the same type of belts and in their pouches they kept their pro-shop razor knives. As Ben finished tying his belt off, Mindy Kramer got into her C-series and, cell phone to her ear, sped away.

Chris put his pads on, and he and Ben went around to the back of the van. They untied a red towel from the end of the out-hanging carpet and removed the roll and its sister roll of padding. They carried the carpet inside, came back and got the padding, took it up the steps, and placed it beside the roll they had stowed in the hall. It was hotter in the house than it was outside, and both of them began to perspire. They had done one job already, so it was the second time they were sweating into their polo shirts that day.

“In here,” said Chris, and Ben followed him into the library.

Ben sized up the job, liking that there was no furniture to move and that the space was virtually square. “Looks easy.”

“Can you take up the old carpet?”

“What, you too busy to help?”

“I gotta check in with my father. I’ll only be like a minute. I’m sayin, get started, is all.”

Ben commenced taking up the old carpet in the library. He started in a corner as Chris walked from the room and reached into a pocket of his Dickies for his phone. He wandered down the hall to what had been a living room and punched in his father’s number.

“Hey,” said Thomas Flynn. “Where are you?”

“Down at that job off U Street.”

“The Dream Team there, too?”

“Just Mindy. She had to bolt, but she’s coming back. We were late gettin down here. That job in Laurel set us back about an hour.”

“I’m in the warehouse. My guy says you were late getting started this morning.”

“A little.” Chris was a bit annoyed that his father was still checking up on him so closely. At the same time, he told himself that it was business, only business.

“Ben sleep in again?”

“Wasn’t Ben, Dad. We were just a little late. We did the job in Laurel quick, but the guy had a problem with the bubbles. I had to talk to him for a while. Explain why it looked that way.”

“They all belch about the bubbles, son. Did you tell him they’ll flatten out after he walks on it?”

“Yeah, I told him.”

“The bubbles go away. They do flatten.”

“I know. So that’s done, and now me and Ben are gonna knock this out.”

“And then that job in Bethesda, right?”

“Yes. We’ll get that done, too.”

“It’s money for all of us,” said Flynn.

“Right,” said Chris.

He walked down the hall, slipping the phone back into the pocket of his work pants. He could hear Ben chuckling, saying, “Chris, come in here, man,” and then, almost in wonder, “Oh, shit.” For a moment, it reminded Chris of Ben’s voice coming from his cell down the hall at Pine Ridge, how Ben had talked to himself at night, how his talking had bothered others, how it had been a comforting sound for Chris.

Chris stepped into the library. Ben was sitting on the faded, scuffed walnut-plank floor, the worn carpet and corroded padding peeled back. A piece of the floor, a cutout, had been removed and was propped up against the wall.

There was an old Adidas gym bag, the kind with the stiff handles that was popular before Chris and Ben’s time, on the floor beside Ben. It had been zipped open.

Chris could see cash. Green money in stacks, held together by bands.

“Oh, shit, ” said Ben, grinning up at Chris.

Chris felt a rush of excitement. Found money did that to a man, even a rich one.

But Chris did not smile.

Thomas Flynn warehoused his inventory at a space on Sunnyside Avenue, a long loop of road holding cinder-block and concrete structures in an industrial park in Beltsville, Maryland, north of College Park. Flynn didn’t own the space, called Top Carpet and Floor Install, but paid in-and-out charges to keep his goods there. TCFI’s main business was installation, subbed out from one of two big-box retailers serving the PG County do-it-yourself trade.

Flynn stood before a large wooden stage at the head of the warehouse. The stage had holes in it and air was blown up through the holes, a hovercraft effect that allowed one worker to handle a large piece of carpet and spin it around while he laminated or cut it.

Beside Flynn was one of Isaac’s crew, a young curly-haired man named Hector who wore a blue polo shirt displaying a breast patch company logo, the L’s in “Flynn’s Floors” depicted as vertical, slightly bent carpet rolls. Amanda had come up with the design, along with the idea that the employees wear the shirts. She said that with the shirts the installers looked as if they worked for a “real” company. Flynn agreed to it, with the childish condition that his polo shirt be red, to separate him from the others. Also, with his black hair, he felt that red looked good.