“Time is the water, Charlie. Life is just the bridge it flows under.”
2
The time passed. Mr. Bowditch continued to curse and sometimes scream during his therapy sessions, upsetting Radar so much that Melissa had to make her go outside before the day’s PT started. The flexes hurt, hurt plenty, but by May Mr. Bowditch was getting eighteen degrees of bend in his knee, and by June he was almost up to fifty. Melissa started to teach him how to crutch his way upstairs （and more importantly, how to descend without taking a disastrous tumble）， so I moved his Oxy pills up to the third floor. I stored them in a dusty old birdhouse with a carved crow on top that gave me the willies. Mr. Bowditch found it easier to get around on his crutches and began giving himself his own sponge-downs （which he called “whore’s baths”）。 I never had another occasion to wipe his bottom, because there was never another accident on the way to the jakes. We watched old movies on my laptop, everything from West Side Story to The Manchurian Candidate （which we both loved）。 Mr. Bowditch talked about getting a new TV, which seemed a sure sign to me that he was re-engaging with life, but changed his mind when I told him it meant having either cable installation or a satellite dish （so not re-engaging all that much）。 I came in at six every morning and with no baseball practice or games （Coach Harkness gave me the stinkeye every time we passed in the hall）， I got back to 1 Sycamore most afternoons by three. I did chores, mostly housecleaning, which I didn’t mind. The floors upstairs were fucking filthy, especially the third floor. When I suggested cleaning the gutters, Mr. Bowditch stared at me as if I were insane and told me to hire someone to do it. So Sentry Home Repair came, and once the gutters were cleaned to Mr. Bowditch’s satisfaction （he watched from the back porch, hunched over his crutches with his pj bottoms flapping around the fixator）， he told me to engage them to repair the roof. When Mr. Bowditch saw the estimate on that, he ordered me to dicker with them （“Play the poor old man card,” he said）。 I dickered and got them down twenty per cent. The home repair guys also put in a front porch ramp （which neither Mr. Bowditch nor Radar ever used—she was afraid of it） and offered to fix the crazily tilted paving stones leading from the gate to the porch. I refused that offer and did it myself. I also replaced the warped and splintered front and back porch steps （with the help of several DIY YouTube vids）。 That was a busy clean-up-fix-up spring and summer on top of Sycamore Street Hill. Mrs. Richland had lots to watch, and watch she did. In early July, Mr. Bowditch went back to the hospital to have the external fixator removed, weeks ahead of Melissa’s most optimistic estimates. When she told him how proud of him she was, and hugged him, the old guy was for once at a loss for words. My father came up on Sunday afternoons—at Mr. Bowditch’s invitation, unprompted by me—and we played three-man gin rummy, which Mr. Bowditch usually won. On weekdays I fixed him something to eat, went down the hill for dinner with my dad, then came back to Mr. Bowditch’s house to wash up his few dishes, walk Radar, and watch movies with him. Sometimes we had popcorn. Once the fixator was off, I no longer had to do pin care, but I had to keep the healing holes clean where the pins had gone in. I exercised his ankles with big red rubber bands and made him do leg-bends.
Those were good weeks, at least mostly. Not everything was good. There were shorter walks for Radar before she began to limp and turned for home. She had more and more trouble getting up the porch steps. Once Mr. Bowditch saw me carrying her and told me not to. “Not until she can’t do it for herself,” he said. And sometimes there were dots of blood on the rim of the toilet bowl after Mr. Bowditch urinated, which took him longer and longer to do.
“Come on, you useless thing, make some water,” I heard him once say through the closed door.
Whatever the Lynparza was supposed to do, it wasn’t doing so well. I tried to talk to him about it, asked him why he was working so hard to get on his feet if he was going to give “what was really wrong with him” （my euphemism） free rein, and he told me to mind my beeswax. In the end it wasn’t cancer that got him. It was a heart attack. Except not really.
It was the goddam shed.
3
Once—I think in June—I brought up the subject of the gold again, although obliquely. I asked Mr. Bowditch if he didn’t worry about the little German with the limp, especially after the big delivery I’d made so Mr. Bowditch could pay his hospital bill.
“He’s harmless. He does a lot of business in that back room of his, and so far as I know he’s never drawn any attention from law enforcement. Or from the IRS, which would seem to me more likely.”