Two Time Read Online Free Page B

kid who grew up on the East End of Long Island worked in construction at least part of the time. The booms and busts would parallel the fortunes of Wall Street, though I could always get some kind of work, even in the slow times. The weather never stopped chewing up all the big wooden houses over in the estate section. And there were always a lot of rich people who were richer than everybody else, no matter what the economy was doing, and most of them had a house out here. I worked for them—or rather, I worked for the carpenters and contractors who lived off the trade.
    I liked to work for a guy named Frank Entwhistle, who’d hired me thirty-five years before. His son, Frank Junior, now ran the crews. He needed a finish carpenter and cabinetmaker. Not an easy hire, now that most of the tradesmen, and for that matter waitresses, store clerks and bartenders, came from up island.
    The only affordable housing locally was held like family heirlooms, and passed along to anyone bound to the dream of lost possibilities. I’d grown up with these people, and I recognized them around Town, going in and out of the hardware store or in the checkout line at the food market, but I didn’t know most of them anymore.
    I worked for Frank more or less when I felt like it, and occasionally helped maintain his fleet of pickups and light-duty earthmovers.
    Luckily he hadn’t asked me to set any ridge plates.
    The cottage my father built had a big screened-in porch that faced the water, a living room of sorts with an oversized woodstove, a kitchen, a bathroom and two ten-by-ten bedrooms. I lived out on the porch most of the year so I could keep an eye on the Little Peconic Bay. After five years,it was still there, so the vigilance must be paying off. I kept a round table, a few chairs and a cot out there so I could eat and sleep and entertain a select guest list. People like Jackie Swaitkowski and Joe Sullivan. Maybe an occasional Jehovah’s Witness or a neighborhood dog Eddied bring home to share water and biscuits. A little hospitality to prove to God I wasn’t completely disillusioned with His creations.
    The cottage was never the center of Oak Point social life. At least not when my father was around. People shied away, and my mother tucked herself into a corner of the living room with her knitting when she wasn’t waging a losing war on the sand and salty damp air that clung to the walls and soaked through cereal boxes and bed linens. My father wasn’t much with people, especially the ones who lived in the house he built. He ran almost entirely on momentum and the acid gas of a nearly uncontrollable fury. I never knew why he was the way he was. I never thought about it until he was gone. I do know how he died. Beaten to death in the smelly men’s room at the back of a dusky, threadbare bar in the Bronx. It was down the street from his weekday apartment. They never learned who did it. They never really tried. There were no witnesses, even though a half-dozen barflies and the bartender were there at the time. The police figured it was a pair of junior-grade wise guys passing through the neighborhood under their customary cloak of invincibility. They assumed it was provoked. They knew my father.
    While I was growing up he spent most of his time in the City working on cars and oil burners while my mother, sister and I were in Southampton at the cottage on Oak Point. In those days the peninsula was a working class neighborhood, on the whole, made up of guys from the Bronx like my father and local service people and unheated, do-it-yourself summer retreats. But it was wooded and filled with East Endlight, and under the beneficence of the Little Peconic Bay, and, most of the time, free of my father’s corrosive wrath.
    —
    After making and breaking my share of good and bad habits over the years, I decided to stick with those already established, for better or worse. One of them was running along the sandy roads that thread their way along