Thomas and I were the two who had cut grass and worked with my dad the most, ever since we were small. Thomas had always tried to prove himself through hard work. I watched him coming down the road, and I knew it had humiliated him to ask. I remembered a day at the Cat Lady’s when we were working with my dad. She lived alone in an old Victorian with at least forty cats. My dad had looked after her garden for over fifteen years, since before I was born. She had been trying to sell the house for a long time, and a few summers ago it had finally sold, even with all the cats hanging around, lying on counters and sitting in sinks. When she was moving, she hired my father to do some work inside, pulling up carpets and taking old furniture to the dump. Marie, Thomas, and I all went to help with the job. It was late July and hot, well into the nineties. We’d peeked through her windows before to look at the cats, but had never been inside. The heat and stench were stifling. The ammonia from the cat pee burned our eyes and squeezed the air out of our lungs. It was a three-story house, and the cats had been everywhere. To make it worse, she had turned off the air-conditioning.

“The mean bitch,” Marie muttered.

We started on the third floor, where it was hottest, and tried to pull out the small carpet nails at the edges. Dad told us to go back to the truck and get gloves. The fumes were in my mouth and throat. When we rolled up the first carpet, which was damp, the floorboards were rotten underneath.

“Get out of the house and wash your hands and faces at the outside spigot. Get the soap in the truck,” Dad told us. “Thomas, you stay with me.” He said that the odor would never come out; the new owners would have to take out the floorboards. Marie and I sat outside for hours, saying very little, while Dad and Thomas finished the work alone, carrying rolled-up rotten carpets and heaving them into the back of the truck. Thomas worked intently, staggering under the weight and smell, never wanting to let my father down. He was fourteen.

I sat on the curb with Marie and looked over at the garden that my father had planted for the Cat Lady years earlier. That year’s tomatoes were ripe and red on their vines against her deck. Dad had canes supporting them with soft string so as not to damage the tender stalks. The Cat Lady had a Venus de Milo statue in the garden, a naked woman about as high as my hip with missing arms. Marie walked over and kicked her to the ground and came back and sat next to me on the curb. Her face was dirty and streaked.