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“They didn’t fix the problem, obviously.”
“It’s been almost a year.”
“A year?”
“Something like that.”
“Did you have the roofer out?”
“What?”
“The roofer. Did you call them?”
“No…I told you we can’t afford the deductible right now.”
“That’s weird…the neighbor said he saw a repairman. In our garage.” I’m not certain he actually said in our garage. But it sounds right, so I go with it.
“What neighbor?”
“The kid next door.”
“Oh,” Greg replies. “Him? He’s not a kid.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, clearly he’s mistaken.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Theo thinks about the encounter earlier that afternoon. He thought about the look on the repairman’s face when he saw him watching. Most people that see Theo watching give him odd looks or turn away, but not this guy. Theo knows all about men like him. They were the kind of guys who knocked him to the ground in school, kicked him until he sometimes passed out. He’d awaken bloodied and having wet himself. That was always the worst of it—the humiliation. The second worst part was going without lunch when they stole his lunch money. It was never the physical pain that made Theo suffer; it was the relentless emotional scars, new ones inflicted before the old were able to heal.
Theo couldn’t wait to grow up. Until he did, and he realized it was worse. At the supermarket, customers, both men and women, often berated him as he scanned their groceries. No matter how hard he tried, he always managed to do something wrong. With people like that, the harder he tried,
the worse they treated him. It was as though they could sense his desperation, his need to please. He was an easy target. A human punching bag. Someone who couldn’t fight back.
Sometimes they said obscene things, but most were simply mean. At first it had bothered him. But then he saw those things on television, his mother’s shows, and the late-night infomercials, and he realized that he was not merely scanning people’s groceries. It was a service to the world. If he could take their anger, their wrath, their unhealed pain, then maybe the children and the animals wouldn’t have to.
The men at the hospital were the worst. Sometimes he wished he’d die, and sometimes he thought the waiting alone would kill him. It never did, though, and they never stopped sneaking into his room and asking him to do bad things.
The scariest monsters are those you can’t see. Invisible threats. That’s what the repairman felt like to Theo. Someone that stays just on the outskirts, looking in. Never quite touching the light, always hanging out on the fringe.
When he saw Theo watching, it did not surprise Theo that he set his tool bag down and walked over. It would surprise him more if he hadn’t.
“What’s your name?”
Theo didn’t answer. He memorized the man’s face and wondered what it would take to make him go away.
“What, cat got your tongue?”
“No. What’s yours?”
“Ah, so you do speak. I asked you first.”
“Robert,” Theo lied. He extended his hand, but the repairman just let it hang in the air.
“I’ve seen you around,” he said. “Always keeping an eye on things, no?”
Theo shuffled on his feet. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, only that he wanted to wrap them around the man’s neck. He wanted to walk over to the man’s tool belt, grab his hammer, and strike the man with it until he stopped talking. And so he’d never come back to the children’s house.
