LITMIR.BIZ

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she told me.

      “Do you and Erika come from Everett, too?”

      “No, we’re from Marysville—not that you can tell anymore where Everett leaves off and Marysville starts.”

      “You’ve got that right, Trish. Give it a few more years, and everything from Vancouver, B.C., to Portland’s going to be just one big city—a long, skinny city. What got you interested in law school, Trish? Working stiffs like your dad and mine don’t usually have much use for lawyers.”

      “Our dad sort of pushed Erika and me into what he called ‘the professions,’ “ she replied. “He didn’t want us to grow up to be waitresses or store clerks. Erika’s at least twice as smart as I am, so she was a shoo-in for a scholarship here, but after I graduated from high school, Dad finagled a job for me in a local law office. It was the senior partner there who pulled enough strings to get me a scholarship in the pre-law here.”

      “Boy, does that sound familiar,” I noted. “My dad worked at Greenleaf Sash and Door up in Everett, and after I’d taken a few courses at the community college up there, I had whole bunches of people herding me in the direction of the university. It’s almost like a slogan sometimes—‘Workers of the world unite! Send your kids to college!’ “

      “Upward mobility,” she said. “It’s all right, I suppose, but we tend to grow away from our parents, don’t we? Erika and I don’t have too much in common with our folks anymore. Erika sprinkles her conversation with medical terms, and I’m starting to talk fluent legalese. Half the time I don’t think Mom and Dad understand what we’re saying. It’s sort of sad.”

      “At least they’re still there, Trish,” I told her. “I lost my parents in a car wreck a couple years ago.”

      “Oh, Mark!” she exclaimed. “I’m so sorry.”

      “Things like that happen, Trish. We grow up thinking that everything in the world is permanent. It isn’t, though. Things change all the time.” Then I smiled faintly. “Aren’t we starting to poach on James’s territory? I’m supposed to talk about split infinitives, and you’re supposed to talk about tarts.”

      “That’s ‘torts,’ Mark,” she corrected me.

      “Ah,” I said. “What’s your preference, Trish? Do you like strawberry torts or raspberry torts?”

      She burst out laughing. “You’re a funny person, Mark.”

      “It’s probably a fault. Sometimes I think we take ourselves too seriously. A little laughter now and then’s probably good for us.”

      “We don’t laugh much in law school,” she said, “or in the law firm where I work either, for the matter.”

      “You’re still working for a living, then?”

      “I’m a law clerk in a big firm downtown—more finagling by my old boss in Marysville. My scholarship covers tuition and books, and my downtown job puts groceries on the table.”

      “Been there;” I said, taking another measurement. “Done that.”

      “I’m sure you have.”

      “Has Erika got an outside job, too?”

      “Oh, yes. She puts in a lot of hours at a medical lab—blood tests and all that. Erika’s so good with a needle that she can pull a quart or two out of you before you even know what she’s up to. It’s none of my business, but how do you make ends meet? Are you building houses on the sly, maybe?”

      I sighed. “No, Trish,” I told her. “The insurance on my folks gave me plenty of money. I can probably get by for quite a while before I have to go looking for honest work again.”

      “How many shelves do you think you’ll be able to put along that wall?” she asked, quickly changing the subject.

      “Quite a few, actually. These ten-foot ceilings give me a lot of room to play with. Of course, books come in all sizes, so there might be variations. I’ll probably have to play it by ear in each room. Your law books are fairly uniform, so your shelves should be nice and even. Mine could end up pretty higgledy-piggledy.”

      She stood up. “I’d better go get started on supper,” she said.

      “Have fun,” I told her, going back to my measurements.

       CHAPTER THREE

      As luck had it, the rain let up—briefly—on Thursday morning, so I made a quick trip to the nearest lumberyard. Working with wet boards is a real pain, so I took advantage of the break in the weather. A pickup truck would have made things a lot easier, but I didn’t have one, so I lashed the boards to the top of my car instead. It’s not the best way to transport lumber, but if you pad the top of the car, it’ll work—and it wasn’t as if the house was all that far from the lumberyard.

      When I pulled up in front of the house, there was a scruffy-looking young fellow standing on the porch ringing the bell.

      “They’re not home right now,” I called to him when I got out of my car.

      “Any idea of when they’re likely to be back?” he called.

      “It shouldn’t be too long. They were going to hit the grocery store this morning. The pantry’s running low.”

      “You live here?” he asked me, coming down off the porch.

      “Not yet, but I will be by next week. Are you looking for a room?”

      “Yeah. It’d be a long commute from Enumclaw. What’s this ‘serious’ business?” He gestured at the sign in the front window.

      “The landladies have opinions,” I told him, struggling with the knots that held the boards to the top of my car.

      “Let me give you a hand,” he offered.

      “Gladly. We’ll have to lug these boards around to the side. I’d like to get them into the basement before it starts raining again.”

      “You said something about opinions,” he said, while we were untying all my knots.

      I outlined the basic setup while he helped me off-load the lumber, ending with the no-no list: “No booze, no dope, no loud music, and no fooling around on the premises. The term they use is ‘hanky-panky.’ Their main objective is to keep the noise level down so that everybody can concentrate on study.”

      “I could probably live with that,” he told me as we carried the boards around to the outside basement door.

      “You’re a student, I take it?”

      “It wasn’t entirely my idea,” he said glumly. “I work for Boeing, and they leaned on me to go to grad school. It was too good a deal to pass up, so I’m stuck with it. They cover the tuition and pay me my regular salary to hit the books. In theory, my major’s aeronautical engineering, but I’m not supposed to talk about what I’m really working on.”

      “Top-secret stuff?”

      “Sort of, yeah—Star Wars kind of crap.”

      “I’m Mark Austin, by the way.”

      “Charlie West,” he introduced himself, and we shook hands. “Are the Erdlund girls thinking about total prohibition?” he asked then. “I usually have a few beers after work, so I probably couldn’t always pass a breathalyzer test.”

      “They don’t take it quite that far, Charlie,” I assured him. “They just don’t want us getting all lushed-up on the premises. Far as I know, we’re not talking about blue-nosed puritan morality here, just peace and quiet.”

      “I can go along with that. Do they get worked up about cooking in the rooms?”

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