5.
 As months went by, Charlie was too busy working and watching to actually go over to meet the Comptons. He did begin to notice they had a lot of remodeling going on. All sorts of workmen in all sorts of trucks came and went. Windows were replaced, banisters, drywall sections, the roof was redone. Phone and electrical lines were overhauled.
Charlie noticed also: During the summer, when the framing and the cabinets were being done, Marie seemed to have a little something going on on the side with the carpenter, a brawny red-haired man in white overalls. Once Charlie saw Marie and the carpenter standing in a hidden spot between truck and house, where they must have thought they were unobserved; he was kissing her passionately, and she had both hands down his overalls. What would Steve say if he knew? Then the carpenter stopped coming. The house was silent for a few days. Finally, Marie and Steve could be seen limping painfully. His arm was bandaged, and both of her hands.
Then during the Fall, when the plumbing was being done, Marie appeared to have a fling with the plumber. Charlie saw them smooching behind a large bush near her house just after twilight. The plumber, a graying man of olive complexion, seemed about to rip her clothes off, when she took him by the hand and led him into the house...to Steve? Curioser. Again the week of silence. Again, the slow, painful emergence, the limping, the bandages; and no plumber.
The backyard pool was remodeled; it had a three foot high wall around its kidney-shaped perimeter, and some type of large, exotic fish swam around inside. The season was changeable, the sunlight fickle, so Charlie could not quite make out what was swimming in the pool, but Steve and Marie took turns evening or morning going out with a large bucket to drop things in, and then the water seethed. Else, the long dark shapes floated like pickles, shadow within shade, occasionally stirring a flipper or tentacle or whatever. And Marie, holding her bandaged hand away from the water, would reach in with her other hand to pet the long shapes.
One day, Marie knocked on the door. "Hello, Charlie," she teased. "I thought you were going to stop over and see us some time." The bandage was gone from her arm, and patches of skin shimmered almost invisibly with a faint scar tissue, which served not to turn Charlie off but to sort of arouse him with its signal of her vulnerability; it was pretty, like the faintest pink lipstick; peeling, like a week-old sunburn.
"I've been busy," Charlie stammered.
"I'll bet you have," she said. She wore tight jeans and a white blouse in which her breasts looked shadowy. "Aren't you going to invite me in?"
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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