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Nothing!
He’d just about decided that he would have to take a chance and knock on the door of a random house when he saw something a block up on the right: a big red church.
Thank God!
Literally . . .
The church—he couldn’t readily tell which denomination it was—had no parking lot, and there were no spaces along the curb available, so he nosed the minivan up on a basketball court at the rear of the building.
And then he awkwardly bolted for the church door with signage reading BANQUET ROOM. He passed a few parishioners, but no one appeared to give him a second thought.
He found two restrooms in the corner just inside that door.
Thank God, he thought again.
As he was leaving thirty minutes later, he saw a small crucifix and a collection jar by the door he’d come in. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his wad of cash, then put a twenty-dollar bill in the jar and crossed himself.
Once back in the minivan, he started to sweat heavily, then felt faint.
What the hell is going on?
He turned the van to head back up Passyunk Avenue and made it as far as the Geno’s Cheesesteaks before feeling like he really was going to pass out. He found an open parking spot at the edge of a park across the street, and quickly pulled into it and shut off the engine.
He took a deep breath, inhaling the smell of cheesesteaks from Geno’s. Then he exhaled slowly and decided he should close his eyes for a second.
He awoke four hours later.
Groggy and weak, it had taken him some time to get his bearings—where he was and how the hell he’d wound up parked near Geno’s. But then it had all come back to him. As had, very curiously, he thought, his appetite.
Has to be the damned chemo.
They said it causes some really weird things to happen.
Shakily, he got out of the minivan and made his way across the street. At Geno’s, he ordered his and Wendy’s favorite—a provolone cheesesteak with extra grilled onions, a side of freedom fries, and a Coca-Cola with the crunchy pellet-size ice.
Will Curtis, having slurped the last of the drink, now chewed on the tiny ice pellets as he looked at the run-down row house on Mutter. Clearly there once had been wall-to-wall row houses all along the block. But now only one house was still standing. Some ramshackle fencing—a mix of chain link and four-foot-high rotted wooden pickets spray-painted with gang graffiti—surrounded a few of the abandoned lots. The fenced lots held nothing more than weeds and trash, everything from piles of old car tires to a couple of discarded water heaters.
Curtis thought that the lone row house, two stories plus a basement that couldn’t total fifteen hundred square feet altogether, looked like it could fall at any moment. Especially without the added support of the row houses that once had been on either side. The red brick of its front—tagged with gang graffiti—had a spiderweb of gaping cracks that ran from the sidewalk all the way up to its sagging roof.
The rusty white front door was visible through the upper half of an aluminum storm door, where the window glass was missing. The storm door was partly open and hung crookedly. To its left, the downstairs window barely held a battered air conditioner that looked as if it had been targeted for theft more than once.
Curtis thought it was odd, particularly in a neighborhood as rough as Kensington, that there were no burglar bars mounted over the windows and doors of the structure. Then he decided that the occupants likely could not afford the iron bars, and even if they could pay for them, there was probably nothing of real value inside to protect against theft.
Why bother?
There was a short flight of three marble steps from the narrow sidewalk up to the front door. The steps had been painted red long ago, and now the paint was faded and chipped. Someone had drawn on the steps with white chalk—and very recently, as there were two broken stalks of chalk lying next to the drawings.
The drawings clearly had been made by a child. They showed three stick people: a tall one, a medium-size one, and a small one that was maybe toddler size. The child had drawn the sky with a couple clouds and a disproportionately enormous sun. The sun’s rays—a heavy series of chalk lines—were shining down on the three stick people.
Despite this squalor, the poor kid seems to have some sort of “sunny” optimism.
Or maybe it’s a quiet despair, and the kid wishes those rays would shine on his family.
Well, if the chalk “family” is any indication, the good news is that someone’s in that house.
He took the top FedEx envelope from the stack on the dashboard and glanced at the name on its bill of lading: LEROI CHEATHAM.
Wonder if one of those larger stick figures is supposed to be LeRoi?
