Bob explained what it took to build a staircase, how you’ve got to cut each rise on the stringers exactly the same height, even a sixteenth-inch difference and people will stumble.

    ‘I don’t know why, but I cut a stair in the middle to six inches instead of eight, just my my brain went on the fritz. Then the old man whose house it was came by to see the job. He was going down those stairs, and wham, he fell and landed at the bottom with a broken leg. After that, a lawyer went over with a tape measure and that was it, pretty much.’

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ said Claire. ‘Only in America does somebody get rich of being too dumb to walk stairs.’

  ‘I didn’t feel real hot about it,’ said Bob. ‘That bone was sticking out pretty good.’

Claire shrugged with her face. ‘even so.’

My daughter, the very first night I was in her house, she wanted right off to put me in a state of fear. I was not even through with my soup when she came out, very excited, with a stack of photographs. She had them in a plastic Baggie so they’d be safe even in a flood. What was in those pictures she needed to be so careful about? Somebody lying dead in the street in front of Charlotte’s apartment, shot in his chest, a black man about eighteen years old.

   ‘See, Dad? Right in here? See the blood dripping out of his mouth? That’s how fresh he was when I found him.’

   ‘So what?’ I told her. ‘It’s a dead man. Do I know him? There’s not enough terrible stuff around, I have to look at this?’

But my daughter was so excited about her photos, she made me go through every single one, all the way until we hit the pictures where the police and ambulance drivers arrived and spoiled her angle with their barricades.

  ‘After here it’s no good,’ she said, pulling down her mouth. ‘You can’t see anything. They blocked me out before I could actually see rigor mortis.’”

It is nearly one o’clock, the hour when your mom comes home for lunch. You do not want to be alone in the house with your stepfather. It still angers you that he has sent you down the driveway on your sick day, your special day of rest. You take a dozen steps, and then a plan suggests itself. Very carefully, you litter the mail in a haphazard fan on the driveway gravel so that it looks as though it were dumped there suddenly. You ease yourself down into a tire rut, splaying your arms and legs in the attitude of someone stricken by a fainting spell. When your mother’s car swings into the drive, she will find you there. She may have to stand on the brakes to keep from running you over, but you are far enough up the driveway that you don’t think she could hit you by mistake. She’ll come to you crying and concerned. You’ll let her coax it out of you, the story of how your stepfather made you get the mail.