The Hour of Bad Decisions Read Online Free Page A

of my upper arms, old enough to feel truly second-hand already – and old enough to know that the word “catch” won’t ever apply to me.
    I’m the kind of flotsam that’s statistically supposed to exist everywhere; you know, the “two out of every three marriages” kind, the starting again, picking up the pieces kind. The kind of guy who’s lugging around more baggage than he has hands to carry it with. The kind who provokes tight-lipped head shaking at parties he’s not even invited to any more.
    So, to put life into the same sort of shorthand: new phone number, new address, new house – smaller than the one I left, a new universe with quiet, empty, hardwood-floored rooms. But at the same time, rooms where I was comfortably alone – in every single one.
    One Sunday afternoon in July, about two weeks after I moved in, I found Mrs. Murphy in my basement, standing in front of my washer. The washer lid was open, and she was staring in at the wet clothes.
    â€œNice day,” I said.
    â€œIs it?” she answered, staring back hard.
    She’s a small woman, thin, somewhere in her sixties, only five feet tall or so, but she stands like a taut wire, leaning towards you on the balls of her feet, poised. Then, that incongruous pudding-bowl face, a face that looked as if it was meant to be suited to warmth and caring and a plate of fresh muffins, but instead came across as strict and almost bulldog-tough. Pugnacious. We stood like that for a minute or two, and then she went out the back door into the yard, a door I have never unlocked, have never opened, a door I’m pretty sure I don’t even have a key to. There were keys for the Yale lock and the deadbolt for the front door on the keychain the lawyer handed me after the sale closed, and another gold-coloured key that opened the back door onto the deck. Three keys and a worn leather tab, worn so smooth that you could see there used to be words pressed into the leather, now little more than shallow ridges.
    And once she’d closed the door, not slamming it but pulling it closed behind her with a sudden huff of wind, it was almost as if there were no door, as if its simple white rectangle sealed tight into the white-painted back wall of the basement – and as if she had never been there at all. The kind of thing that makesyou shake your head sharply, trying to clear your mind of the cobwebs of imagination.
    It was not, in the end, the magic it seemed: Mrs. Murphy had lived in the neighbourhood for as long as anyone, and she had a history of feeding the cats of vacationing neighbours, bringing in the mail – and collecting door keys – but that was something I wouldn’t find out from a chatty mailman until almost a year had passed.
    I put the wash into the dryer, thinking about Mrs. Murphy springing over the fence between our yards like a misshapen little angry sparrow. And I decided to buy a new lock for the basement door.
    Brendan was digging in his yard then, a long, narrow trench from the back right corner of his foundation. There was lumber piled next to the hole, twoby-fours and flat boards, like you’d use for concrete framing. I didn’t want to ask what he was doing. He was working with a pick and shovel, wiping sweat from his forehead with an astonishingly dirty handkerchief and leaving brown streaks behind. With a morning’s digging, the trench was already ten feet long, and close to three feet deep.
    â€œYou should stay off another person’s ground, Charley,” he said, breathing hard. “Stay off their ground, ’nless you ask ’em. That’s politeness.”
    The soil is hard clay pan back there, full of rocks, mostly dark grey shales that threw sparks from the tip of the pick. I was leaning on the fence, looking into the thicket of timothy grass, goatweed and thistles that sprouted up between cans and rusting chunks ofmetal. He had a six of